Brilliant

DiAnn Direct

Breathing Life into Your Characters

If I ask what was your most memorable book, what would you say? Did the story keep you awake at night and gobble up your attention? What made that book come alive and not let you go? Of course, it was the characters. You closed the door on the outside world until your beloved character found happiness or accomplished a remarkable feat.

For Writers

Writing at the Crossroads

I don’t start off intending to write issue-driven stories. By that I mean that I don’t think of a charged issue like, say, abortion, and then decide to write a story around the topic. Instead, the issues that crop up in my novels come about organically from the lives of the characters. (Kind of an artsy, overused word, but you get the picture, right?

Making A Scene

Personalizing Your Characters - Part I

In my book Getting into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors, I introduce a process of characterization I call Personalizing. I created this technique of “interviewing” your character based on the three levels of characterization named by Constantin Stanislavsky, known as the father of method acting.

Author By Night

Bungled But Blessed

I once wrote a piece about C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair (for our book Finding God in the Land of Narnia). I titled it “Bungled but Blessed.” That’s a pretty good description of my life—particularly my life as a writer.

Genre Happenings

Amish Fiction: The Quest for Simpler Lives

I’m often asked why I write Amish fiction. The questions invariably come from those who enjoy mysteries, fantasies, contemporary women’s tales—any genre but the one I write in.