Triggers

What is a trigger?  Good question.  Glad you asked.  A trigger is a inciting moment.  An intense beat in a character's life that forces them to begin a journey.  It's a catalyst.  Often times, it's a seriously icky moment cause it breaks an old wounds and makes you have to reset it so it can heal properly.

I am not a fan of triggers.  They seem to come at the most inopertune moments.  And they hurt like hell.  But they are necessary.  Like Epicac for the soul.

Every character has a trigger.  My challenge to you is to uncover what yours' is.  When in the story did your character decide they had to take action.  Pushed against the wall, they had to do something or die.  Life or death stakes - literally or figuratively.  And is he going quietly into that good night or is he fighting it all the way?

Me?  I fight those damn triggers.  I bury my head; I shake my fist at the unfairness of it all; I run away.  Eventually, though I accept.  If only I could receive the trigger as a gift sooner, wouldn't my life be so much less painful?

Does Dialogue Matter

Aside from how wonderful this video is, it's also a great lesson in the often overuse of dialogue.  Not a word is spoken between these two and yet we get everything that's being said.

What would happen if you took all that dialogue in your book or scene or script and replaced it with gibberish, would you need so much character chatter?  Step back - reread.  Can you show what your character's going through by their reaction or their body language?

And once again all this makes me aware of how often I speak when I should have listened - when silence would have said so much more than words - when action was what was needed.