Writing Craft series, volume 2
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Character Sympathy
Creating characters your readers have to root for
With a foreword by Alicia Rasley, fiction writing teacher, editor, and author of RITA-award–winning and best-selling novels!
If you’ve read my blog series on character sympathy, this offers an expanded version of the material covered there, with more topics, more examples and more help for you and your characters!
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About the book
IS YOUR CHARACTER WORTHY OF YOUR READER?
Often we think of sympathetic characters as those we love or envy or pity, but character sympathy runs deeper than simply liking or feeling sorry for a character. Sympathy in this sense is truly feeling what the character feels, worrying over the same things he worries about, and wanting him to succeed against all odds. If we can get our readers to fully sympathize and identify with our character, our readers will enjoy that journey with our character and then clamor for more.
CHARACTER SYMPATHY will help you:
- Learn what events, actions and characteristics create true sympathy for a character.
- Engineer your character’s motivations and goals to maximize their sympathy.
- Avoid clichéd methods for creating reader identification.
- Foster sympathy for heroes, antiheroes, villains and everyone in between.
- Observe and analyze master storytellers’ techniques to create character sympathy.
Character sympathy isn’t automatic or easy, but it’s necessary for readable fiction. Applying these principles can strengthen any story and any character.
Hook your readers with a character they can really root for.
Advance praise
“Jordan has a knack for developing great characters. In this book she shows how to strike the proper balance to make characters believable and multidimensional. Very helpful for all authors, from newbies to published.”
—Nina Holbrook
“Jordan McCollum’s Character Sympathy offers a clear explanation of why showing trumps telling and why your hero/ines need to work for the reader’s sympathy.”
—Morgyn Star
“From Character Sympathy I learned how to make my characters tick from the beginning.”
—Syakira Sungkar
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Product details
Publisher: Durham Crest Books
Length: 120 pages
Publication date: April 2, 2014
Genre: Writing craft nonfiction
Formats: Kindle (.mobi), ePub, PDF, Trade paperback
ISBN (trade paperback): 978-1-940096-08-7 (paperback), 978-1-940096-09-4 (e-book)
Table of Contents
- Defining character sympathy
- Why character sympathy is important
- Ineffective methods of creating character sympathy
- The “perfect” character
- The sad sack
- Characteristics
- Mystery
- Direct characterization
- Actions: save the kid
- Backstory
- Effective methods of creating character sympathy
- Examples of character sympathy
- Sympathy for other characters
- Common challenges to character sympathy
- Keeping character sympathy
- Concluding on character sympathy
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Bonus materials
Blog articles on character sympathy
- Character sympathy analysis: Elizabeth Bennet, Pride and Prejudice
- Why Character Sympathy? How the first book focused specifically on character sympathy came about!
- Is character sympathy important?
- Using humor to increase character sympathy
Also in the Writing Craft Series
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| Character Arcs: | Character Sympathy: | Out now! Character Depth: |
| Founding, forming and finishing your character’s internal journey | Creating characters your readers have to root for | Keeping readers riveted with real characters, emotion & deep POV |
Buy now | About the book | Table of Contents
Advance praise | Product details | Bonus Material | Series
