As you begin to write each scene, determining the character goals is essential, but without stakes the goals will have no impact on your reader. What are stakes? Stakes are simply what your character has to lose if they don’t reach their goal. What will or won’t happen for your character if they miss their goal. Stakes help to build the conflict in your novel and make your reader care about your character. If the reader doesn’t care, the book is set aside unfinished. How do you brainstorm stakes? Identify Goal Determine why it matters to your character. Determine why the goal should matter to your reader. Identify Goal In order to develop stakes that work in a scene you must decide what your character’s purpose is in the scene. […]
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Brainstorming Strategy #6: Highlighting Opposites
No writer wants to hear that their characters are “vanilla” or too much alike. We all want our characters to pop so our readers love them as much as we do. Trouble is, that it is easier said then done. How can brainstorming help you to deepen your story and make those characters fly off the page and into a reader’s heart? By highlighting opposites in your novel. I’m not talking about the hero or heroine always being opposites. Rather, the Hero and his sidekick or the heroine and her sidekick. When characters are too much alike, we run into the whole BORING problem. Create characters that are different in habits and personality. This causes natural tension and added interest to your characters. Let’s try this idea out to see […]
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Story Building through Scenes
I was reading a book on my way home from the Oregon Writers Conference and while the plot started out interesting, I quickly lost interest due to the slow down in scene development. This is a real struggle for writers. A struggle for me. I am tempted to stick so close to the conflict I forget to slow down and let the readers into the character’s world. When I do slow down to open up the character, I really slow down. Almost bog down, in my opinion. That’s why I love rewriting. But even on a rewrite, I can leave too much in the story. Working through a substantive edit of my next book, Once Upon A Prince, I realized I’d left too much character history and some tidbits of […]
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Brainstorm Strategy #5: Brainstorming Settings to Create Mood
Setting up the mood in a scene requires the right words, but it also requires a setting that can boost your mood impact. Think of all of the scary movies where the heroine is walking down the dark basement stairs and someone is waiting there. We are all screaming, ‘No! Don’t go down there!” Of course she doesn’t listen. Then there is the moan of old stairs. The electricity goes out. The music or noises send shivers up your spine. Is this by accident? Absolutely not. How about the moment when the hero is going to propose? The candle light, roses, and soft music. Warmth and light fill the scene with a building sense of joy. All of these tricks are used by movies every day. We should use these […]
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