Does my hero HAVE to believe in a lie? We get this question sometimes when we’re working with clients in a Book Therapy session. Clients have done so much work creating the character, trying to figure out who he is, and it just seems like another mindless question. It’s not. In fact, I build my characters on just a few key questions, the most important ones that comprise our lives. You’ve seen some of them in this process…greatest fears, greatest dreams, values, motivations. The Lie They Believe is one of the essential questions that threads throughout the entire book. Without the lie, you don’t know what the truth is you’re aiming for. Without the lie, you don’t know how he/she builds their lives, what their view on […]
Read the RestArchive | What is the Black Moment and how do I create it? RSS feed for this section
What makes a great black moment?
So, we’re almost to the end of our Heroes’ Journey! We’ve had our character change (and we touched on the Black moment in that discussion) and we’re off to storm the castle in our last battle. He’s been changed by events, and is a new man, and is trying to apply everything he learned…. But, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s go back to that Black moment and just touch on the elements that make it profound. 1. Attack their Greatest Fears – emotionally and physically. Since the beginning of the story, you know what your hero fears the most…and you’ve been slowly pushing him to this place. You know that Frodo fears succumbing to the ring, or worse, his own hobbitness. You know […]
Read the RestNo, no, it can’t end this way!
Every romance has to have that moment when we as the reader jump up from our chairs and are tempted to throw the book against the wall, furious that these two can’t be together. In other words – it has to have a BLACK MOMENT. Your black moment is where everything goes south. It’s when the hero loses the heroine, maybe he finds out some truth about her and turns his back, or maybe she finds out something about him and runs away. Maybe the external obstacles become so large that they can’t be overcome and both turn away. But you need to force these two apart, and you need to make miserable. Really despairing, so that they are in a worse place emotionally than they were before […]
Read the RestThe Greatest!
Hello from beautiful Montana! I’m skiing this week with the fam, so this will be my only post, but I’m itching to get our hero off the sofa and out on his journey, so I had to give you the last tool we’ll need to craft our story and head our hero in the right direction. I call them the GREATEST devices. Or, the Greatest Fear and the Greatest Dream. The Greatest Fear A few weeks ago we talked about the fears of our hero –things that deepen his characterization, and add texture, and opportunities for the heroine to know him and grow as a hero. But deeper than his surface fears is his Greatest Fear. It’s that soul deep dread that he would do anything to avoid. It’s this […]
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