Rachel Here: Yesterday while working on book next, “Love Begins with Elle,” I was working on a scene where I needed Elle, my heroine, to discover she could not open a new art gallery in her home town of Beaufort, SC. She’d sold her gallery months before because she thought she was moving away to do something exciting. But… I don’t want to give away the whole story. I also have the hero’s POV in this book. Feeling like Heath McCord’s point of view hadn’t been on the pages in a while, I decided to write the scene from his eyes. Here’s the scene from Heath’s point of view. By the way, he’s gorgeous, single and the father of a four-year-old girl, Haley-Love. Setting: A Sunday afternoon lunch at Elle’s […]
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Self-Therapy: Sympathy versus Compassion
Yesterday, I talked about the first secret to creating characters that make the reader cry: Compassion. It’s always a challenge to decide what element is most important to lead with in introducing a character – Sympathy (helping the reader identify with the main character) or compassion. Ideally, it should be both. But in the opening scene of my upcoming book Taming Rafe, I struggled with finding that perfect mix. In Taming Rafe, socialite and philanthropist Katherine Breckenridge just wants to make her mark on the world, her mother did. But she thinks she’s running out of time. I started with that premise in my rough draft. RD: One hour before her engagement party to the most eligible bachelor in New York Katherine Wilcox Breckenridge had the insane urge to throw […]
Read the RestSelf-Therapy: Showing Emotions
Yesterday, in Doctor’s Notes, I talked about connecting the reader to the character by showing the appropriate emotions. But what if you have a tough guy, like my Rafe Noble, who is a bull rider. He doesn’t walk around weeping, that’s for sure. Still, he’s hurting. His best friend has been killed, his life is in shambles, and worses, he’s just gotten his heart broken by beautiful Kat Breckenridge. I didn’t want to show him curling up into a ball in the cab of his truck. But I wanted the losses to pile up on him, and take him down. So, I looked for the thing that mattered the MOST to Rafe, the thing he clung to for safety. If you have taken any of my plotting classes, you know […]
Read the RestSelf Therapy: Bringing Setting to Life
Let’s talk setting. I mentioned in my notes yesterday about setting taking on a voice. It’s important for your book to have a setting that is alive, and contribures to the mood of the scene and book. But what if your setting, like Marshall University, doesn’t have a voice? What if it doesn’t need to function like a character, changing and growing. It still needs personality. In this scene from Reclaiming Nick, the Montana setting places a significant role in the story as a healer. Every character is, in some way, affected by the landscape. Maggy, one of the main characters, loves her life as a rancher. I wanted the land to act almost as an antagonist in the story, working against her. And to deepen its impact, I had […]
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