Dreams and Wishes

My son, d-i-l and I were having a discussion today about dreams. A friend of theirs is about to leave his steady, but less than satisfying job, move his family to a new state and start a new job - one that's being created with him in mind. He is following his dream. We are all excited for him and wish him the very best.

Don't you wish you could do that? Just drop everything, pack up and start over new some place? No baggage dragging you down. A clean slate to start over.

Which begs the question - would you? If you were given the opportunity of a lifetime but it meant moving hundreds of miles away to someplace you'd never been and had no ties to, would you?

As writers, we ask these kinds of questions of our characters all the time, but what of ourselves? When it comes to the tough questions, how do we deal with them? These feelings of anxiety, hope, dread, etc. These emotions? And how do we infuse these deep seated feelings into our characters to make them more real? To make our readers feel for them? When you're writing a sad scene for your character - are you crying? Or laughing with them during an upbeat time? Or quivering with fear while hiding in that closet? If you're not feeling these emotions, neither will your reader.

So ask yourself the tough questions - then remember those feelings and write them down. That is how you create good characters that people will care about.

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Birthdays: Oliver Goldsmith, Friedrich von Schiller, Vachel Lindsay, J.P. Marquand, William Butterworth

Tips and Teasers: Open any magazine to a picture and write a paragraph about what is happening or what is being advertised in the picture.

Thought for the day: "Learning to write well takes time and much effort, but it can be done." – Margaret Mead