Increasing your plot's intensity

When my back hurts from cleaning my house, I often read one of my Writer's Digest Books. The one I'm currently reading is Creating Plot by J. Madison Davis. Click here for the link.

To increase the plot's intensity, the scenes move to more important and dangerous level as the story moves forward, while the protagonist is caught in tighter situation with the possibilities for action decreasing with each scene.

As I've plotted my time travel novel, this sentence hit me like a brick (but without the migraine :). My antagonist, Sam, wants to make a name for himself and please his father. As he plots the best course of action, he receives disturbing news and makes poor choices that lead to his becoming evil.

Once my character profiles were developed, the event that led to Sam's dark path flashed in my mind. It takes a good bit of time for me to improve my writing skills, so these great aha moments helps me write better fiction.

What are your thoughts? Do you have any great tips for increasing your novel's intensity that you care to share?

My plot thickens....

After a long break, I've returned to my young adult novel, Time Control: Deception. After much thinking and talking to my husband/co-author Jim, my antagonist, Sam, has solid, believable reasons to form his dark plans.

It's fun to write about characters who travel down a dark path when greed and lust for power takes control over them. I have always been interested in 'why' people behave the way that they do, so giving Sam a complicated past helped me understand what motivates his choices.

Do you enjoy getting to know your antagonist and understanding what makes them behave the way he/she does?

Write Great Dialogue: Part One

 I've been studying my writing books as I edit The Enchanted Locket and wanted to share some essentials to writing great dialogue from the book, Revision & Self-Editing by James Scott Bell.

Dialogue is another form of character action in fictional stories. It must be essential to the story with three goals in mind: advance the plot, reveal the characters, and reflect the theme of your story.

To advance the plot, dialogue reveals important information for the story, such as background, exposition, or help us understand what's happening in a scene. An example of this is:

"Bill," Sheila said. "What are you doing here? I thought you were going to be in Baltimore."
"We have some unfinished business, sweetheart."

We know from this exchange that as far as Sheila was concerned, Bill was supposed to be in Baltimore, and he has something on his mind that he wants to discuss that may be terrible for her.

Dialogue reveals both character and character relationships by the way people talk. One character may talk in casual and short, clipped sentences, while another character speaks in a refined, formal manner.

Dialogue illuminates theme such as the simple life of the hobbits made them much less tempted to use the evil ring and man's desire for power in the epic tale, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. All of the nine men who took Sauron's rings desired power and were the easiest to to seduce and corrupt to the evil of the ring.

It comes from one character to another character
gives a good example of what not to write:

Ted stood there.

 "Oh hello, Ted, our family doctor from Baltimore," Mary said. "Please come in."

 Ted walked through the door.

 "Mary," Ted said, "I'm so glad you were home here on Mockingbird Lane."

 "I am too, Ted. I am comforted that you're here. Having a doctor who is six feet, four inches and in good shape, but even better knows what he's talking about, is a wonderful thing for a forty-year-old woman in crisis to have visit her."

 The author is attempting to slip information to the readers by hitting them over the head with it. It's so bad you can't help but snicker at it. While dialogue is an excellent way to impart information, it must be written from one the view point of one character to another. (We'll come back to this in Friday's post).

Friday's post will discuss conflict and other essentials to writing believable dialogue. Which books have you been moved with dialogue? Do you have any favorites you wish to share?