Three Ways to Create Believable Characters with Deeann Matthews

 Welcome mystery writer Deeann Mathews.

 How to Make Your Characters Believable

 
My tag line is no joke: I write non-fiction by means of fiction.
 
Readers tell me about their desperate searches to find fictional places that I have created on maps, and about their realizations that my latest novel could fit into the 19^th, 20^th, or 21^st centuries equally well. 
 
Yet the real key to connecting to in a reader's mind is by connecting the reader to real people – characters who are believable, even though they are fictional.  There are three solid steps to achieving this character-building goal:
 
1. First get clear on your story, and that your story and the stories of those in your comfort zone are not the only real and important stories.
 
It is so easy nowadays to be isolated in our thinking except for the echo chamber of like-minded voices, and to substitute caricatures for those outside the echo chamber.  This is a terrible trap for a writer in an increasingly diversifying world of readers and competing authors.  The way to avoid the trap is to get clear on the strengths, limitations, and validity of your story while recognizing it is just the starting place of your character building.  Everyone isn't like you, and that is good: you will have a more successful writing career if you don't have always to write characters that read like you are interacting with yourself.
 
2. Immerse yourself in the stories of others from all walks of life, and in accounts of how people come together and behave in different situations.
 
Step 2 comes after step 1 because in order to do step 2 effectively, you must listen to the stories of the lives of others in the mindset of seeking understanding, not confirmation of your existing viewpoints.  It is not necessary that you agree with everything you hear and every choice that people make, but that you listen without bias so you learn the realities of of the lives, behaviors, and choices of all types of people. 
 
The most authentic way of learning a lot of true stories from real people is to find ways to introduce yourself to random people, invite them to tell their stories, and just listen.  An alternative way to find all kinds of real people doing and experiencing all kinds of real things in all kinds of real places is to go on to YouTube, read biographies and historical accounts, and to take in current events from a variety of news sources and commentaries with the mindset of listening to learn the different kinds of real people there are, how they act, how they behave, what they believe, who and what they love and hate, and why. 
 
Do deeper studies on people you feel are remarkable – good and bad – to find out what they believe, what they value, what they have experienced, things they or others around them might have said about a particular situation.  Find out what makes main characters in real life tick, and tick exactly they way they do in certain situations.  Research the lives of people with similar experiences, beliefs, and values to see if these real-life main characters are remarkable because of or in spite of those they are most similar to.
 
3. Write short stories placing real personalities you have learned about in a fictional situation, and also short stories placing fictional characters in a real situation you have learned about, for practice.
 
You know your starting place and how you would handle any situation X, but after applying yourself to the previous two steps, you will also sense that there are a variety of other ways real character Y and then fictional character Z could behave.  The key, as you learn, is to be writing every day about the people whose stories you learn – just a short story of your own to bounce real knowledge of real people through your imagination of both real and fictional events.  Over time, you will learn to create authentic characters based on this real knowledge for any situation you choose to create, authentic characters guided by the real personalities and experiences you have based them on.
 
AUTHOR

 Deeann D. Mathews is an author, musician, and fractal artist, from San Francisco, CA. She is the author of Black, White, and RED All Over, the first in a series of clean Christian mysteries, and also the author of Seasons Siblings' Timeshare Tiff, a fictional take on the famous fall weather of her hometown. She is also the creative director of Praising Pilgrims Music, a small publishing company of music and music-related materials based in San Francisco, California. Ms. Mathews is also actively creating fractal art and other creative works across a variety of disciplines on Peakd.com. 

Black, White, and RED All Over

Buy on  AMAZON
Kindle $2.99
Paper $20

Irrational Fear Cure by Teri Smith Pickens

 

The Irrational Fear Cure (in Four Miraculous Steps)

Teri Smith-Pickens
Self-help/Motivational
 

Flying Enigma Press, January 5, 2021
ISBN-13: 978-0-9761596-0-5
$14.99 paper
Order your copy here

ABOUT THE BOOK

A needed prescription for our irrational fears

The Irrational Fear Cure is a radical yet visionary book that serves as a blueprint for achieving personal and societal well-being. It is a timely resource for a world living in the age of a global pandemic.

Author Teri Smith-Pickens, a mental health practitioner, interviewed more than 200 people to help them to better understand where their fears and anxieties come from. She shares these stories throughout the book, highlighting how many people are living in survival mode stemming from trauma in childhood, and as adults, who now use obsessive compulsive behaviors to fill voids they feel on the inside.

She outlines what happens to a mind already filled with irrational fears and chronic anxiety when it encounters the rational fear of a pandemic. By unmasking the truth behind these addictions, she gives a deeper understanding of the fears we all face and how to cure them. 

Teri makes it clear that it is not part of God’s plan for us to live in our childhood primal brains and remain in bondage to our fears. Instead, He wants us to put on our spiritual anchor and break free from all fears and anxiety. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teri Smith-Pickens is an award-winning and best-selling author and speaker, in addition to her work as a mental health practitioner and coach. She has inspired and transformed many lives through her coaching, speaking and media appearances. In 2007, Teri had a supernatural revelation that changed the course of her life, giving her unerring courage to confront important, controversial mental health issues in children’s lives and the society at large, giving birth to her book, The Fear Cure in Four Miraculous Steps.

Author’s Website: www.thefearcure.com 
Author’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/teri-pickens-b9387a13/
Author’s Instagram: www.instagram.com/fushia18/ 
Author’s Twitter: www.twitter.com/TeriPickens 
Author’s Facebook: www.facebook.com/centerforeducationandhealing/
Author’s Pinterest: www.pinterest.com/teri_pickens/
Author’s YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCp1eKtZdi37ZfFDjZsK9drQ
 
BOOKING INFO: Nicole Ballengee, nicole@prbythebook.com

Author Q&A

The Irrational Fear Cure in Four Miraculous Steps

By Teri Smith-Pickens

1. Your book is titled The Irrational Fear Cure in Four Miraculous Steps. With so many people suffering from various anxieties today, is it truly possible to cure our fears?

Absolutely! It is the same concept used in psychotherapy when a client has anxiety which is debilitating and disrupts their functioning. It is a signal of something they fear, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is used to change the person’s mindset to new and better thinking.

2. You interviewed 200 people to demonstrate fears and anxiety for your book. What primary insight did you take away from talking with those people?

That we all suffer from different levels of anxiety, which is a signal of something feared, usually a threat to survival, which impacts our mental health. People refuse to acknowledge being mentally ill, or to admit to symptoms that are debilitating to their functioning.

3. How do you think the COVID-19 pandemic is worsening peoples’ anxieties?

We ‘all’ live in Survival Mode, caused by childhood fears gone awry, which causes our thinking to be fear-based and irrational. Now, when you superimpose a rational event like (Covid 19) onto this mental state, it causes an exponentially increased level of anxiety.

4. What is your number one piece of advice for people suffering from irrational fears?

Talk to someone about the negative thoughts in your head, otherwise you will continue to feed the fear and trigger the irrational parts of your brain which causes your decisions to be impulsive and not well thought out; when you talk to someone you name and arrest the fear so it stops growing and is less frightening.

5. You make it clear in your book that most irrational fear stems from something that occurred in childhood. Do you have special advice for parents to help their children avoid internalizing a fear that will cause anxiety as an adult?

Absolutely, be vigilant & aggressively protect your young child from all fears until they have developed the ability to reason. Don’t trust their care to others during this primal period. Avoid unsupervised or inadvertent exposure to stuff their minds can’t process, and which ends up in their “implicit” memory, setting their Fight/Flight/Freeze response on autopilot, where it later becomes irrational.

6. Your book also discusses the importance of three-fold development for well-being – the body, mind and spirit, with the spirit being the most important factor. Why do you think so many people today leave out the spiritual aspect, and what impact does that have?

They are missing their Spiritual anchor which anchors them to something bigger than them. In childhood our anchor is our parents/guardians which later gives way to a belief in God, but when fear is experienced before reasoning comes, it shuts off trust and we go to Survival Mode by depending only on ourselves. This is the psychological mask we wear to cover our authentic self which suffered pain/hurt. If we couldn’t trust our parent/guardians to protect us from our fears, we are not going to trust a God we can’t see.

7. Does someone have to follow a spiritual life / faith life to benefit from your book?

This is a tough question because the answer to getting rid of Fear is Faith, which is spiritual. They can use the tools to lessen their fears without God, for example, using psychotherapy, but they will not have “the cure”; they will simply continue exchanging one obsessive compulsive behavior for another, to feel like they can stay in their own skin. Only Faith gives the permanent anchor, which is Spiritual.

8. Ultimately, what do you hope readers take away from your book?

As a species, we must understand the imperative of protecting children from their        fears to avoid living in fear-based Survival Mode, and to decrease the annual incidence of suicide for those who just can’t negotiate this “dark night of the soul”.

9. How and where can readers purchase The Irrational Fear Cure?

The book is available at regular bookstores like, Amazon, Barnes and Nobel, etc. and on my website, www.thefearcure.com

10. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about the book?

Don’t use human reasoning when reading this book, look to your own symptoms that will tell you that something is wrong – look at what you have tried so far and see if it worked.

My Review

Smith-Pickens revitalizes her 2009 book with updates for a new decade. With new statistics and polls and university studies to back her up, the author shares the definitions of fear, its causes and our reactions, and steps to reclaim our lives from Survival Mode.

I began reading this manuscript after a church service in which our pastor shared a message of hope, hope for tomorrow, and why Christians have an advantage of claiming and living in hope. The juxtaposition of reading that most people experience times of Survival Mode, described as a “leprosy of the mind,” is intriguing. Smith-Pickens defines real fears and imaginary, or irrational, fears, but that our brains still treat them the same way, causing physical reactions with the release of chemicals or muscle preparation, readying us to survive the sense of threat.

In twelve chapters, the author shares methods for dealing with our fears, stemming often from childhood, or from current events. People of faith, she explains, shouldn’t put our hopes and expectations of dealing with our fears in inanimate objects, for that is submitting to idolatry. Case in point: trusting masks to prevent being infected with Covid-19. Spending time in God’s Word is one way to stop building up our irrational fears. Fears developed in childhood often manifest in other diagnosed conditions. Putting our trust in the right place can be a way to combat these behaviors.

Filled with current stories of events to illustrate her points, Smith-Pickens offers readers simple practices to guide us out of existing in Survival Mode to healing and living an authentic life that resists isolation, poor health, and broken relationships. A few general resources and a more specific reference lists are included.

Write Now Literary Tour with Jess Lederman and Hearts Set Free

 

Write Now Literary is pleased to be organizing a two-week book tour and giveaway for Hearts Set Free by Jess Lederman. The book tour will run January 18-29, 2021.

 

Book Title: Hearts Set Free

Genre: Literary Fiction/ Historical/Christian

 

ISBN-10 : 1098511093

ISBN-13 : 978-1098511098

A graduate with a degree in music from Columbia University, Jess Lederman is an author of Christian-themed fiction who lives with his wife and two young sons in the Pacific Northwest.

He is currently at work on a novel that begins in the last days of the Wild West and ends in Las Vegas in 1955. When Jess is not writing or chasing his young sons around, he can usually be found at the piano playing Chopin nocturnes for his wife, Ling.

Seven Lives Inexorably Intertwined. Over Eighty-Six Years. That Will Bring a Revelation Beyond What Any of Them Could Imagine.

 

The Alaska Territory, 1925. When Yura Noongwook’s husband abandons her and her thirteen-year-old son, she vows to win him back and destroy the woman who stole his heart. They embark on an epic cross-country quest that leads them to the Nevada desert, where they meet a man who has turned into the last thing anyone expected him to become …

 

David Gold. Reno, 1930. A Bible-school dropout known as the Pummelin’ Preacher. His boxing career is fading, just like his faith. But then a former call girl shows up, tells him about the rag-tag congregation she’s part of; how their pastor was murdered. And that the Spirit is moving and David’s destiny is to lead their tiny flock.

 

Las Vegas, 2011. Cable TV star Tim Faber is an atheist bent on proving God is only alive in people’s imaginations. But Joan Reed, his producer, is trying to recapture the faith of her youth. And both of them are driven to unravel a mystery surrounding the Big Bang theory, never dreaming the answer will forever change their lives.

 

To do that, they have to meet with the now 99-year-old Luke Noongwook and David Gold’s grandson, Daniel.

 

The veil is being pulled back, but none of them are prepared for what they’ll find on the other 

side.

Read my review here.

Join Jess's Mailing List 

 

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https://www.jesslederman.com/special-offers

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Chapter One

Luke and Yura: The Alaska Territory, 1925

 

My father deserted my mother and me when I was thirteen years

old. He had become famous that winter on the Great Race of Mercy, one

of the Athabascan mushers who brought diphtheria serum to Nome

and saved ten thousand lives. He’d done the impossible, a blind run in

the howling darkness, crossing the open ice of the Norton Sound, the

temperature falling to sixty below, the sun a distant dream. He was our

hero, our North Star.

 

And then he was gone.

 

He left us, of course, for a woman. A blizzard had hit him at

Unalakleet, a storm so powerful that it travelled four thousand miles,

till at last it reached New York and froze the Hudson River. The woman

lived in just that far-away land, on the wild island of Manhattan, and

her name was Kathleen Byrne. The Hearst papers had been giving the

Great Race front-page headlines; Kathleen was a reporter, lean and

hungry, she’d go to the ends of the earth for a good story, and one day

she got her chance.

 

No one in my hometown of Nenana had seen anything like her,

a slender redhead with emerald eyes, smoking Lucky Strikes and

exhaling expertly through her nostrils, this coolly confident young

woman with fiery hair.

 

She wanted details that would bring the story to life, so Father

brought her to our home to show off his sled dogs. At least, the ones

who’d survived, for three he had raised since they were pups had died

on the trail. Somewhere in the madness of that journey he’d forgotten

to cover their groins with rabbit skins, and they’d perished of frostbite

in the unfathomable cold.

 

I gaped at her stupidly.

 

“Excuse my son,” said my mother. “He has no manners.”

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Sign up for a free monthly craft summit from WWA

 

Serving all writers since 1948 WWA...Announcement What You need to Know from the Wisconsin Writers Association Have a plot knot you just can't untie? Does your protagonist feel more like a caricature than a character?  Yeah, writing is hard, but you no longer have to face these challenges alone! The Wisconsin Writers Association is pleased to announce its  Craft Solutions Summit with Ryan R. Campbell! This monthly event offers participants the opportunity to troubleshoot their story woes with other writers in our community--with help from the WWA Craft Development Chair and International Book Awards finalist, Ryan (R.R.) Campbell. How does it work? The first five people to sign up for the summit each month will be invited to join the call and 1) share one writerly bit of pride, 2) one writing-related woe they're facing, and 3) their goal for the next month. We'll then, as a group, talk out each other's challenges in order to encourage, inspire, and urge each other back to the page with solutions at the tips of our fingers! Sounds great, but what if I'm not among the first five to sign up? Never fear! If you're not among the first five to sign up for the summit, you can still watch the discussion live with other WWA members. During the event, you'll be able to learn from others while sharing your own insight via the Zoom text chat.  And then, hey: you can try to sign up again next month! When and where will these be held? The Craft Solutions Summit with Ryan R. Campbell will be held via Zoom on the third Thursday of every month from 7 - 8:15 p.m. Register Join us on February 4th at 7PM for an Open Mic and Craft Chat with Thomas Wayne King and Debbi King. Tom and Debbi will host the evening and present a short craft talk called Your GPS for Writing Success: Polishing Your Work.  Want to read at the open mic? Email Julia at jnusbaum11@gmail.com. We have 10 spots open. First come first serve.  Register Become a Member     If you no longer wish to receive these emails you can unsubscribe at any time.

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Write Now tour with Bre's Heavenly Adventures prize drawing

 

Write Now Literary is pleased to be organizing a two-week book tour and Amazon gift card giveaway for Bre's Heavenly Adventures with Jesus by Breanna Brown. The book tour will run Jan 11-22, 2021.

ASIN: B08R6M41Q1

Genre: Christian Children's Book

Bre Brown currently serves as the Youth Minister of Watchman Ministries, alongside her Husband Eric Smith, located in Fredericksburg, VA. She’s been regarded, as the "prophetic voice for the next generation." She received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Louisville and currently possesses her qualified mental health professional registration in the state of Virginia. She is currently pursuing her graduate certificate in non-profit studies. She is the CEO and founder of Child Enrichment Solutions LLC. Which is a full-service coaching and consulting firm that helps youth to identify negative thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that inhibit them from achieving personal achievement utilize constructive coping strategies to lead happy, empowered, and successful lives.

 

Bre gets angry when her father breaks his promise and refuses to play with her. But Bre's mom tells her that she another father named Jesus-and he is the best father ever. He is always there, always ready to listen, and he will never stop loving her-even when she has made a mistake! So Bre goes to heaven to meet him...and this book will tell you what happened there!

"As the tears began streaming down her face. Her mama stopped to ask, "will you be ok?" Why doesn't he love me? Bre asked. He always does this! Do you think he's mad?"

 

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