13. Making people care

While still trying to repress our coughs and sneezes, this week we tackled one of the core challenges of writing – how do you make people care? We discuss how to make likeable, relatable protagonists, how to build emotional attachments to the story, and what keeps us reading about complicated protagonists who aren’t so likeable. We move on to talking about creating mood and tone in writing and how we use language to reflect this. Our last topic is the role of ‘secondary writing’, what are the benefits and costs of writing other things aside from your main writing project. We talk about the value of building your audience through other writing and social media and the costs of that on your writing time... although, mysteriously, we never discussed the time costs of podcasting!

Presented and produced by Cathy Clarke, Kate Mulholland and Máire Brophy.

Music by Gavin Mulhall