Tag: character reactions

Posted in Emotions

Character Reactions within a Story

Posted on by L. M. Montes

When throwing the unexpected at your characters, it’s important for those characters to react in a way that’s realistic to the situation. If you don’t, the reader is going to end up rolling their eyes or pause in their reading and scratch their head in wonder, which you don’t want. You want your readers to be into your story and to keep going with it. Worse, they could put the story down and never finish reading it.

If you aren’t sure if your characters’ reactions aren’t what they should be, have someone else, like a test/beta reader, read it first before publishing it to the world. Get their feedback. It’s important.

Examples:

Unrealistic: A couple of your characters, let’s say to John and Kevin, are out hunting Big Foot, a.k.a. Sasquatch. They are walking through the forest at night then hear the snap of twigs. They stop and look around. Sasquatch jumps out in front of them and they start laughing.

Realistic: The same characters scream, when Sasquatch jumps out at them, and they run. (Be more creative with their terror besides screaming and running. But you get the idea.)

Unrealistic: One of your characters teleports for the first time in their life and they react as though they’ve been doing it all their life. (Trust me, that’s not a realistic reaction.)

Realistic: The same character teleports for the first time in their life and feels feint afterwards. (Here again, get creative with this.)

Overall, you want your readers to enjoy and take in the story you took so much time and care to write. You want them to experience it and feel it. So don’t ruin that experience for them by causing them to roll their eyes or put the book down.

Posted in Scenes

Reaction

Posted on by L. M. Montes

You’re writing a scene with an event that should strike your main character as surprising or distressing. BUT instead your character reacts in a way that makes no sense at all. Maybe you had your character have to shoot an intruder and it was the first time they had to shoot anyone. How would a person normally react in a situation like that, if it was their first time having to shoot someone?

Make sure your character who is going through that for the first time reacts the right way. If, for example, they walked away from the above situation behaving as though it was no big deal, then there better be a logical reason for them doing so. I say this because I know I would freak out if I had to shoot someone. Or I’d panic. Maybe others would become despondent or go into shock.

If your characters’ reactions don’t match the situation, the readers will know, and they’ll get distracted from the story. You don’t want that. It could even cause them to put it down, and you definitely don’t want that.