Put fear in your writing

Published on April 7, 2015April 7, 2015 by Jean M. Cogdell5 Comments

Fearmongering

To deliberately arouse fear, awe or alarm.

Think of your story as a news broadcast. A news anchor peppers each story with fearmongering. Why? To get and keep you tuned in and watching. And let’s not forget the politicians or their ads.

Look at your WIP and find places to interject fear words.

Fear is a powerful emotion used to grab your reader’s attention. Go for the jugular.

Fearmongering keeps the pace tight and moving.

Below are just a few fear words. Listen to the news tonight and see how many you count in tonight’s breaking news.

Agony, Assault, Backlash, Beating, Beware, Blood, Bomb, Catastrophe, Caution, Corpse, Crazy, Danger, dead, Devastating, Embarrass, Fail, Fired, Fool, Frantic, Hazardous, Horrific, Invasion, IRS, Jail, Lawsuit, Looming, Lurking, Meltdown, Mistake, Murder, Nightmare, Painful, Panic, Plague, Poison, Revenge, Risky, Scary, Scream, Shatter, Suck, Tailspin, Terror, Trap, Victim, Volatile, Warning, Wounded

Want them to remember your writing?

Published on April 6, 2015April 6, 2015 by Jean M. Cogdell2 Comments

Exaggeration

Want your readers to come back for more then…

Make your characters and scenes appear more. More of everything.

More common, or more important, more of what is true or usual.
Overstate the obvious, mundane, and ordinary until your words are extraordinary.

With the letter D, I explained how I to build characters, scenes and even sentences little by little.

Today I’m writing about the reverse.

Write every sentence, every paragraph with grand embellishment. Then cut the to make palatable.

Exaggerate your writing to the point of extreme and then pare it to almost the believable.

Why? Because…

The jokes you remember and retell are the most outlandish.
Hit TV shows that skirt the ridiculous.
- Saturday Night Live, The Walking Dead
We even remember terrible and the beautiful.
- Fifty Shades of Grey (I’ll let you decide).
The unbelievable, outrageous, scary movies you watched years ago, still give you the creeps.
- Can anyone say Psycho?

I still don’t like to shower unless I can see through the curtain.

Michael strutted in owning the place, six-feet of Cowboy oozing pure testosterone, his dark curls falling over to die for chocolate eyes that zeroed in on me flushed and sweating like a whore in church.

Okay, that was a long, silly sentence, but I bet you could picture Michael. A handsome, cocky Devil. Whew, getting hot in here…

thankyou note card

Best Writing Tips of the Week

Published on April 3, 2015 by Jean M. Cogdell1 Comment

Plotting can avoid a Saggy Middle

This post, By Guest Blogger Margie Lawson and Darynda Jones over at Writers in the Storm might get you to rethink plotting. Click on the link below to read more.