Every member of your supporting cast brings a lifetime’s worth of experiences, values, quirks, and perspectives to the table, and the more you can honor that by fully developing every character, the richer your story will become.
Maybe it’s about a new perspective or using a different part of your brain. Maybe it really is just about opening yourself up to play—after all, when we take our work too seriously, we can quickly give ourselves tunnel vision.
Are there any items in your fictional world that are so charged, so laden with meaning, that they’re impacting the environment and/or the characters’ behavior?
In fiction, our most riveting stories are built on conflicts where all parties are equally convicted of their own, opposing beliefs. And each party stands in the way of the others’ objectives.
Sometimes we just need a little help from fate to see our stories all the way through. And that’s ok. But there are more effective ways to set up those coincidences than dropping them in right at the critical moment.
Given this vague advice, many writers find ourselves resorting to adjectives—lots of adjectives—to describe everything on the page in great detail. But the result is often clunky, resulting in prose that looks more like the set directions for a movie script than a moving scene in a novel.
As two teens get to know each other at the hospital that saved both their lives, they discover that, together, they may just be brave enough to reinvent their dreams.
