Causing your audience to have a strong emotional connection to your story, even to the point of being moved to tears, is how you make a story stick with them well after they’ve finished your book. Nobody remembers the story that they had no feelings about, it’s the stories that impacted us on an emotional level that we hold in our hearts. But how do you do it?

When you are writing your story, you might find that you get to a point where you realise it would really suit the story for one of your characters to do something that’s really convenient for your story, but completely out of character for that person. I’ll be talking about how and why we arc our characters, and the differences between arcing and breaking them.