POV and Psychic Distance: Connecting Reader and Character

"This is art, not engineering. Storytelling is social, not mechanical" 

The bottom line I teach to all my authors is that nothing will make your next book sell better than ensuring readers read your current book to the end.

The foundation of ensuring readers want to read to the end is that readers care about your characters. This course is about making sure readers care, by ensuring that you, the author, form a connection with the reader, and ensuring that your readers connect with your characters.

In this course you will learn how to choose, combine, and apply a suite of techniques that will define your approach to creative writing - your technique and your style. You will learn how to make these choices consciously and with care.

Most of all, you will learn alternatives to Point-of-View and "Show-don't-Tell" - including the most powerful narrative technique of all, Psychic Distance

In this course you will learn:

• Narrator Grammar
• Narrator Identity
• Combining identification, empathy and sympathy
• Framing
• Filtering
• Psychic Distance
• Point of view
• How to convey character thoughts through "Free Indirect Style"
• The "Author's Core Competence"
• + half a dozen additional concepts, tools and techniques for applying these principles

This course includes a lot of practice activities. You don't have to do all of them, but you will definitely learn a lot more if you do them. Some of the lessons depend on your completing at least one assignment at least in part, to be sure that you have learned the techniques and principles being taught.

Requirements

• You need to know the basic language of storytelling - what is meant by "character," "plot," "outline," etc.
• It will help if you are already familiar other literary terminology such as POV (point-of-view), narrative voice, imagery, etc.