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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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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Brainstorming Strategy #4: Brainstorming Peripheral Plot Possibilities
There are sometimes when we just get slammed unexpectedly with something in life. Out of the blue an old flame returns to town, our car breaks down, our mother-in-law comes to stay for a month, we are offered a new job, etc. We shake our heads and say, “I never saw that one coming.” That would be the peripheral plot in a novel. Something on the edges of the story that is believable that comes in to impact what is going to happen. Brainstorming peripheral plot possibilities is a great strategy to lift the sag in the middle of your novel. It helps you to break through predictability and keep tension on the page where your reader wants to know what is going to happen next. So how do we […]
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Strategy #3: Brainstorming Secrets
As a young girl my friends and I used to pinky-swear that we wouldn’t share each other’s secrets. It became a sign of loyalty if you could keep the secrets of others, but a sign of a traitor if you could not. The adult world also has a large interest in secrets as well. Tabloids, spies, politicians, journalistic sources, countries and even pleading the Fifth Amendment in court centers around the secrets we keep. We all have secrets and usually they are something that we hold close to our heart. We keep these secrets for a variety or reasons like embarrassment or vulnerability. With our characters secrets can be a way to show their inner self and the level of trust they have built with their friends […]
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