If you want to immediately improve your fiction writing, inhabit your viewpoint character, breath by breath, bone by bone. The more dangerous, momentous, and dramatic the scene, the more readers need to see, hear, and feel what your character feels. Their thoughts should land directly with no filters like ‘she thought’ or ‘she wondered’ or  ‘she searched her mind.’ Internal dialogue needs to feel internal.

Act the part.

If you don’t know how your character would react amid danger or a painful recognition, then make certain you know his or her backstory. It should provide the emotional wounds that need healing, the regrets that need addressing, along with motivations, goals, and problem solving.

Backstory includes personality and ways of standing, walking, and hiding emotions and reactions.

Backstory will reveal the triggers that might set them off. The secrets they must keep.

Backstory + key personality traits are your basis for living within the characters you write. Come to know them intimately. Stalk them, sleep with them, dance with them, wipe away their tears.

And keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart