Want to win
editorial feedback
and take your story
from good to great?

Writing about your character’s fear can be tricky because it rarely sits out in the open where everyone can see it. Instead, fear is hidden, rationalized, or the character puts on a mask and pretends it isn’t there at all. Yet when fear is shown well, it becomes an obvious force driving a character’s decisions, behavior, and actions.

Because fear plays such a c...

When a character suffers emotional pain, the brain’s response is to stop the discomfort, and often this results in a coping mechanism being deployed. Whether it’s an automatic response or a learned go-to...

Much as we may have things in common as writers, our brains are wired differently. How one writer creates a story is likely to be quite different from how another one does it. That doesn’t mean that one is wrong—it just means our processes differ.

Figuring out how your writing brain operates and how to work with it instead of against it is often the key to brea...

It’s hard to overstate the importance a character’s greatest fear plays in their life. As a key motivator, it informs decision-making, spawns new habits and tendencies, and pushes them to pursue certain goals. It’s the thing that will hinder them most in the story, and they’ll have to face and subdue it if they want to achieve their goal. As such, their response to this ...