It’s one thing to endow imaginary characters with hopes and dreams and Dark Moments and Wounds, Lies and Fears. It’s something else all together to go mucking around in my oh-so real hopes and dreams … and hurts.
If we want to write real characters who make our readers laugh out loud or cry as they turn the pages of our books, they we have to delve into our hearts and remember the events and the people who made us laugh out loud and cry behind closed doors — or in public.
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At the beginning of a novel, a character starts out in his identity – who he thinks he is. By the end of the story, if you’ve developed the story correctly, he ends up in his essence – who he really is.
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Every story starts with an Inciting Incident catapulting the hero and heroine into a journey. They’re either scrambling to get their lives back to normal or hoping to settle into their new life after some amazing “I never knew this could happen to me” experience. Each scene you write is either an Action or re-Action scene. Your characters are doing something or responding to what happened. But the challenge is to write more than just he-said-she-said or he-did-she-did scenes. You want to layer in emotional depth – and one way to do that is to know your character’s Noble Cause. What: The Noble Cause answers the question why? It’s the motivation that moves your character from chapter 1 to “The End.” Think of your protagonist saying something like this: BeCAUSE […]
Read the RestIn every romance the key is making your characters fall in love, right? We’ve talked about HOW we fall in love…how we connect to each other’s core values, and how we complement each other and make each other into stronger people. However, how do you actually write that journey, step by step? How do you woo your reader into falling in love with your characters, too? You have to date your reader. Okay, let’s just analyze this for a moment. Remember the last time you fell in love? You saw him or her across the room, and something about their physical appearance intrigued you. It told you something about them—perhaps they were brave, or strong, or creative, or disheveled, or rough-edged. You probably noticed their […]
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