Tag Archives: spiral

What Are You Afraid of? Regain Your Life

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By Books Author Denise Turney

To regain your life, face what scares you. Fear or love, that is all there is to choose from. What if the only choices that you ever had, that we all have, are between fear and love? Nothing else.

Life seems much more complicated. But is it?

Think back to your childhood. How old were you when you first felt fear, when you first felt afraid?

Light from candle to regain your life
Lit Candle Wix – Wikimedia Commons – Picture by Edukeralam, Navaneeth Krishnan S

I remember this golden, brown German Shepherd across the street from where my family lived in Ohio. Back then, I was eight years old. As usual, when I was outside playing – riding a bike, enjoying a game of hopscotch or jumping rope – I was with my siblings and friends.

Fear Offers No Comfort

There certainly was comfort in numbers. Yet, regardless of how many people were outside, when that German Shepherd (his name was “King”) showed up, people darted. I’m talking teenagers and kids. Folks broke out and headed for cover.

All of this fear over a German Shepherd who had broken his backyard chain again. The more intense the fear I was experiencing became, the more angry and helpless I felt. I also wanted the dog to just disappear, making it easy for the entire scene to be over.

Oh, but, when dogs break loose, they don’t go right back from whence they came. Instead, they explore, peeing on bushes and tree trunks. They also like to kick up dirt with their hind feet, as if to let every other dog in the neighborhood know how big and bad they are. And even if they don’t intend to, they scare a lot of kids. (See these tips on how you could face fear and regain your life.)

Ever Changing Fear

My fear of “King” disappeared after my family moved to a different neighborhood. But that wasn’t the end of fear for me. After “King”, there were bullies, spooky movies, the nightly news, and a few bad grades that I was very concerned about showing my dad.

Fast forward to my adult years, and “King” was far at the back of my memory, certainly no longer something that pulled up fear in me. The 12 year old girl I’d been afraid of, the girl I let bully me in elementary school, didn’t even pop into my mind. She was long gone as it relates to fear, totally in the past.

But don’t go thinking that I stopped choosing fear over love. In fact, in place of big neighborhood dogs, school bullies and a bad report card, there were bills, fear of the unknown, fear of love, challenging work assignments and growing numbers of people I knew who were exiting their bodies or transitioning.

Yeah. The things that I chose to allow fear to use to bind me have changed. But that type of change doesn’t mean anything unless I’m choosing love instead of fear.

Regain Your Life – Choose Love Instead of Fear

The good news. It’s a choice that I’m paying attention to, practicing awareness so I can choose love. Thing is, fear, as you can see, takes on a myriad of forms. Its content remains unchanged. But the forms that fear uses seem always in motion.

Oddly, with love, it’s the content that I have long, perhaps always, focused on. Safe, warm feelings, a sense of belonging and conviction that I’m cared for are part of love’s content for me. Doesn’t matter if that content comes through my pet turtle, a friend, relative, engaging in my passion (writing) or listening to the smoothest song. If the content is there, I feel it. I appreciate it.

And the content never changes. It’s one of the things that I absolutely love about love. Perhaps it’s time that we all focused more on love’s content and less on fear and its myriad forms.

Toward this effort, I wrote a book about what fear did to a town in Memphis, Tennessee. The title of that book is Spiral. Read the book and you may be amazed at how far reaching, twisting, blinding and binding fear can get to be. It’s worse than any virus. Once fear takes root, look out. Or better yet, choose love.

Developing Believable Characters

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By Denise Turney

creating believable fiction book characters

It’s long been said that if we readers don’t care about characters in a novel, we won’t continue reading a story. As a passionate book reader and author of six novels, I agree with the saying. To get into the heart of a novel, to tap into, explore and savor the richest flow out of a story, readers must really care about what is going to happen to the main characters in a book.

Create Believable Book Characters

Admittedly, I’ve read novels where one or more minor characters upstaged main characters. I’m not exactly sure how this happens. Perhaps this occurs when authors relax and become freer while developing minor characters, people they presume will have less impact on the story’s outcome.

When this occurs, minor characters can, unbeknownst to authors, become the story’s main characters. Signs that this has occurred may be when readers tell authors how much they love minor characters or when readers ask authors to create a sequel about minor characters. Those characters, the ones readers want more of, are the foundation of a good story.

So, how do novelists create believable characters?

As a book author, an easy way is to achieve this is to consider people in your waking life who stand out to you, demanding your and other people’s attention. Shape powerful components of these people’s personalities into your book’s characters. For example, you could take your aunt’s strong opinions, blend them with a cousin’s quick temper and add a spice of a friend’s stylish fashion sense to create a book character. This worked wonderfully for me while creating my novels Portia, Spiral and Love Pour Over Me.

More Ways to Develop Believable Novel Characters

You can also design a sketch of your characters. When doing this, add enough background data (e.g. birthplace, age, family background, interests, physical experience goals, career) to characters to bring them alive for readers, to make the characters feel real to book readers. After you fill in the background information for characters, start working on characters’ personality traits, habits, quirks, etc.

To get a feel for characters, especially major characters, consider having characters keep a journal or write a letter (or email) to a friend. This can help reveal hidden details about characters, making it easier for you to flesh the characters out. Although I didn’t use this technique while developing Love Pour Over Me, I did use it to further shape Tammy Tilson while creating my mystery novel, Spiral.

Finally, after you start writing your novel make sure you develop believable dialogue for your book’s characters. It’s important that you do this for both major and minor characters. Dialogue helps with story pacing. It also reveals details about book characters. As a tip, allow characters in novels to speak with accents and perhaps use slang that’s relevant for the time period your story is set in. This is an element I had to pay particular attention to in my novel, Love Pour Over Me, especially while developing Raymond Clarke’s roommate Patrick, a man with a gregarious personality who hails from Mexico.

Thank you for reading my blog. To learn what happens to Raymond, Brenda and the other characters in Love Pour Over Me, hop over to Amazon.com, B&N.com, Ebookit.com and get your copy of Love Pour Over Me today. And again I say – Thank You!