All Write - Fiction Advice

Fear is described as an emotion, but really, fear is a primal, negative reaction to something or someone.   More often than not it is driven by the unknown, since humans fear what they don’t understand.    The sense of fear is something writers can evoke in their writing, especially in horror or psychological stories, but creating and exploiting fear isn’t solely for the horror or psychological/crime genres.   Fear is something all characters will feel, whatever the genre of story, because it’s a real, tangible emotion that the reader will completely understand – it’s the one emotion that affects all of us. Writers use fear in different ways to provoke their characters, create tension and atmosphere and underpin different moods. Not only that, but a sense of fear can make your descriptions more vivid and realistic. There are two ways you can create fear. You can do it through your characters and you can create the sense of fear through narrative and descri...

Often we read stories that reflect our own lives in different ways. Whether it’s through characters that feel very real to us or certain incidents and events we might have experienced for ourselves, or we may have felt something similar, we find we can relate somehow. That sense of familiarity creates a connection and enables us as readers to get close to the characters.   For writers, creating something that’s relatable to the reader is a vital step towards helping them become part of the story and establishing a sense of immediacy.   Making a story and its characters relatable brings the story into the hearts and minds of readers. Every author wants to achieve that, but the realism of life is often overlooked by writers, or they fail to realise how immediacy works. Instead they choose ridiculous, convoluted plots that drown in cliché and stereotypes, populated with unbelievable heroes with superhuman powers and skills, with caricature type villains more suited to ...