Regardless of what genre or POV youâre writing in, allowing readers to understand whatâs going on inside your character is what makes a story immediate, direct, and vivid. If readers donât know how characters react to what happens in the story and how they process those events and interactions, your characters might as well be game pieces we simply watch progress along the board. Readers want to feel weâre part of the game.
That doesnât mean swaths of navel-gazing self-reflection or inner dialogue that risk stalling out forward momentum and stealing focus from the storyâs action. It simply means giving readers not just a front-row seat to the characterâs journey, but a backstage pass.
To do that, readers must understand the characterâs perspective: how events strike her and what she makes of them, and how they motivate her thoughts, actions, and behavior. Thatâs the heart of a satisfying character journey and the propulsive engine of its momentumâhow the author shows characters moving along their arc, conveys stakes, and moves the story forward.
In this live webinar, using plenty of published and real-world examples, weâll explore guidelines and principles for letting readers be privy to the inner workings of your charactersâ lives without bogging your story down in interiority, and bringing readers more deeply into their direct experience no matter what point of view the story is told in.
Poorly developed or conveyed inner life is a common root problem of characters who donât feel real or fully come to life on the page, and of stories that may leave readers disengaged. Tiffany Yates Martin has spent decades as an editor in the publishing industry, working on literally thousands of manuscripts, and has developed practical, concrete ways to open the window to your charactersâ inner landscape to create deep, rich characters that draw readers intimately into your story.
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Meet the instructor
Tiffany Yates Martin
Tiffany Yates Martin has spent her entire career as an editor in the publishing industry, working with major publishers and New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling and award-winning authors as well as indie and newer writers. She is the founder of FoxPrint Editorial (named one of Writerâs Digestâs Best Websites for Authors) and author of Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing and her latest, The Intuitive Author: How to Grow & Sustain a Happier Writing Career. She is a regular contributor to writersâ outlets like Writerâs Digest, Jane Friedman, and Writer Unboxed, and a frequent presenter and keynote speaker for writersâ organizations around the country. Under her pen name, Phoebe Fox, she is the author of six novels.
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