Skip to content

Posts tagged ‘high stakes’

Frustrate your characters to keep readers turning pages

As writers, our job is to frustrate our characters. This job can be hard on us because we usually like our protagonist, maybe even feel she is a part of us. But when we write, we are forced to act more like her antagonist than best friend. That’s because, in order to keep our reader turning pages, we need to create conflict for our characters.

Even in fiction that doesn’t feature car crashes, bombs, or airplanes falling from the sky, we need to have some amount of conflict or tension. We need to create frustrated characters. So how do we keep the stakes high even in a cozy romance or literary novel? Read more