An empathic connection needs to be made for a reader to care about a fictional character. When the character hurts, the reader needs to feel the pain. And yet, how can I, the writer, expect the reader to cry if I don’t cry, laugh if I don’t laugh, or be afraid if I don’t feel the fear first? For the last twenty-five years, with all my various attempts at writing, all the starts and stops, I finally concluded that whenever I came up to an emotion, I froze, or worse, turned away from it. With A Wounded World, my goal, from word one, was to “turn into the emotion” and take the emotion to its limit. A Wounded World is that emotional journey. This made those characters so real to me that I still call them my children.

My advice is to find that empathic connection, don’t be afraid to feel what your character’s feel. If you aren’t seeing what your characters sees, feels what they feel, fear what they fear, then did deeper. Dig deeper within yourself and find that vision, that feeling, that fear. Once you do that, then your reader will see, feel and fear it all.

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