An Author's Guide to Playtime (Where Grace gets very dark)

Here is a guide for all authors about how they can have fun when playing with their toys. 😇

Stage One

First of all, you need to make your reader fall in love with your characters. This can be achieved by:

• The character having an awesome personality. e.g. Halt (Ranger’s Apprentice), Glory (Wings of Fire), Percy (Percy Jackson), Connor (The Land of Stories)
• Making your character relatable. e.g. Greg Heffley (Diary of a Wimpy Kid), August (Wonder)
• The character having gone through a lot so the reader can sympathize with them. e.g. Felix Salinger (Once, Then, Now, After), Newt (The Maze Runner), Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)
• A plot twist shining a new light on your character, causing the readers to fall for them. e.g. Severus Snape (Harry Potter), Evly (The Land of Stories)

Stage Two

This is the time when you wound your victim (cough, cough, I, of course, mean the character, not the reader at all...). Mwahahahaha!

Now, there are several ways to break your readers' hearts. Some are:

• Kill your characters! Be careful to kill the ones they love, avoid the annoying characters at all costs.
• Wound your characters’ hearts beyond repair!
• Bomb down your ships! The ones everyone love, of course.

One thing you should always remember, though, is that you should never go destroying too much. Even though causing havoc in book worlds is not yet illegal, you do not want to turn your readers off your book from too much grief. If that happens, you will have no victims to have fun with! So, always keep your readers on the edge of overwhelming grief and loving your book.

I do have a little secret for you… shhhh… keep very quiet… we do not want readers knowing our secret to our great success… here it is… drum roll.... You can destroy everything at the end of your book/series! What’s the point of leaving your readers with a happy ending when you can haunt them FOREVER? Or, even better, it all was not real! It was just a dream. Yes, villainous authors, we can use cliché endings to destroy hearts forever! Now go out into the world, my little friends, and write your heart breaking books.

Hope you feel inspired,
Grace