Robyn DeHart's Blog, page 5

Official Blog Tour: A LITTLE BIT WICKED

 

Monday, 12/24 Novel Reflections 
Friday, 12/28 Bringing the Epic 
Tuesday, 1/1 Romancing Rakes For The Love of Romance 
Thursday, 1/3 Ramblings from this Chick 
Monday, 1/7 Mochas, Mysteries and More 
Monday, 1/7 Vicky Dreiling’s blog  
Wednesday, 1/9 Manga Maniac Cafe 
Friday, 1/11 Books to Brighten your Mood 
Monday, 1/14 My Book Addiction and More 
Tuesday, 1/16 Urban Girl Reader 
Thursday, 1/17 Ex Libris  
Thursday, 1/17 Breath of Live Reviews 
Monday, 1/21 Reading Between the Wines 
Tuesday, 1/22 Fade Into Fantasy 
Wednesday, 1/23 Provocative Pages 
Thursday, 1/24 Cocktails and Books 
Friday, 1/25 WTF Are You Reading? 

A Little Bit Wicked Blog Tour

The blog tour is currently being scheduled so this post will be updated as dates become booked.

12/27 – Fresh Fiction

12/18 – Goddess Blogs

12/17 – Vanessa Kelly and Dashing Duchesses

12/14 – Get Lost in a Story

12/13 – 12 Days of Christmas

12/8 – Savvy Authors and Harlequin Junkie

12/5 – USA Today HEA

 

In addition to some great prizes you could win along my blog tour, Entangled is also hosting a whopper of a contest to celebrate the launch of the Entangled Scandalous line. You could win a NOOK! Check out the details and enter here. And don’t forget about the Entangled Under the Mistletoe holiday blog hop with tons of great prizes, you can enter mine in the blog entry below this one. 

Entangled Under the Mistletoe

Don’t forget to check out what the other authors participating in the hop are giving away!

 

This Entangled blog hop is full of prizes, new authors for you to meet and plenty of holiday treats!

My Giveaway

I’ll be giving away five (5!) copies of A LITTLE BIT WICKED!

How To Enter

I’d love it if you’d friend me on FB, follow me on Twitter, add my books on Goodreads, leave me reviews and join my newsletter…BUT the only thing you have to do to be entered to win is tell me what your favorite Christmas song is or if you have a favorite Christmas CD that you pull out and pop in your player every year. 

Also don’t forget about the Twitter Chat. Tonight, Friday, December 7th at 9pm EST, so many Entangled authors will be chatting and having a grand old time. Join us for the chat with the #EntangledUndertheMistletoe & you’ll have a chance to win 10 prizes–including ebooks, giftcards, and more! 

All about Backstory

We’ve discussed several elements to creating great characters, everything from the elements to creating believable characters to character arcs. And I suspect that many of you have read through those posts wondering why I haven’t yet mentioned backstory. Backstory is often where some of you start when it comes to creating your characters, it’s how they become real to you, and that’s great, you just need to make sure that all of that great backstory you came up with makes sense with their GMCs and character arcs. This is why I do backstory last, sometimes after the first draft of the book. Oh I’ll know a little bit, enough to get by, but mostly I just figure it out as I go along, or rather I make it up as needed.

Five myths you don’t have to believe:

MYTH 1: My characters come to me with a full history.

MYTH 2: Once my character has a backstory, it can’t change.

MYTH 3: I should know everything about my character before I start writing.

MYTH 4: The best way to learn about my character is to fill out a 16-page character interview.

MYTH 5: A character is what his backstory makes him.

I know I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, these people aren’t real. I know they often feel that way, and that is a good thing, but you also need to remind yourself that they’re fiction because it gives you permission to be more flexible with your story elements. You can change things around to fit your story and to make things stronger and better.

Okay so what is backstory, well, I believe it’s the pertinent events from your character’s past that cause, create or complicate their goals, motivations and/or conflicts.

So what does this new definition mean? It means that you, the author, and the reader only need to know the events that are relevant to the action of your story. You must change the way you see your characters and be willing to change or create what is necessary for the story you’re telling. You must be willing to sacrifice something if it is not needed or does not enhance your book.

When coming up with backstory I always consider five key questions.

QUESTION 1: What incident or incidents in your character’s past motivates or explains their external goal?

QUESTION 2: What incident or incidents in your character’s past motivates or explains their subconscious need?

QUESTION 3: What incident or incidents in your character’s have contributed or created their patterns of behavior?

QUESTION 4: What incident or incidents in your character’s past caused their error in thinking?

QUESTION 5: If your characters have a past together, what was it?

And then finally there are three things you need to remember about backstory, it needs to be relevant to the plot, it should be very specific and use the rule of three. This is a litmus test to see if you have enough to fully motivate your characters. You want enough events in your character’s past for their error in thinking to be believable. For example, if the hero was betrayed by his mother, that only may not be enough for him to believe all women are evil. He has to have met other women in his life who have reinforced this belief.

Next up you should consider the 3 F’s, fears, flaws and foundations. Think about the character you’ve built using the tools we’ve already talked about, now decide on a fear for that character. Like the heroine who doesn’t trust herself, perhaps a fear for her is that if she makes any big decisions for herself she’ll end up hurting someone else or hurting herself or she’ll make a fool of herself or maybe she’s just afraid to speak in public. Just an added element you can use in a scene or two to make her all the more real for us, afterall we all have fears that we deal with. And we writers I think have a double dose of fear than regular people otherwise we wouldn’t be so damn neurotic. Now think of a flaw or two you can give your character, this works really well too if you can make that flaw the counterside of a strength. For example if your hero is loyal, he can be loyal to a fault, that loyalty can get him into trouble when he makes a business deal with his best friend and then his best friend borrows money from the wrong people and now the hero has a bounty on his head by the local mafia. Foundations is simply beliefs and values, things your character stands for. Now again you don’t want to just randomly tack things on to them. Think of foundations in terms of clichés if that helps you, beliefs like money doesn’t grow on trees, home is where the heart is, your past can never catch up with you, things like that. If you give you heroine a foundation that she believes family is important above all things, but the book takes place in the middle of the ocean where it’s just her and the hero and a mysterious villain then that family thing probably isn’t going to matter much to the book. Unless she’s trying to get back to save her son. So make the foundation matter.

The elements of believable characters

I’m back to Writerly Wednesdays now that my latest book has been turned in. Today I want to talk about all the elements that go into creating 3-dimensional characters – at least the way I do it. Last time I wrote about character arcs and frankly I probably should have done this one first because it leads nicely into it. But well, here you go.

Have you ever read (or even worse, written) a book that still left you feeling unsatisfied? Ever wondered why some romances have an excellent ‘sigh’ factor, but others have you betting the couple won’t make it past a year? The key to a satisfying romance is vivid characters.

Many writers—both new and seasoned—struggle to create character-driven books that deliver the powerful romance that readers crave. After all, it’s easy to get caught up in Mary Jane’s struggle to raise the money to save the ranch and Detective Jones’ quest to identify the serial killer. We forget that while the twists and turns of an external plot may keep the reader turning the pages, they might fail to deliver the satisfying emotional punch readers expect.

So often writers mistakenly believe that an interesting or complex background and childhood equals a three-dimensional character. We’re led to believe that unless we know every tiny detail of our characters’ tortured childhoods, then the reader will think them cardboard. When in fact what makes interesting and memorable characters is the way they act on the page, not who they were before the story began.

There are plenty of ways to go about creating those characters – I mean who here hasn’t heard of a character interview or questionnaire. The ones I’ve seen and tried to use have like 180 questions ranging from what is your character’s sexual history to what is their favorite ice cream. When I was first learning my writing process I worked on these things for hours and presumably they work for some people, but I just found them to be really frustrating and frankly not very applicable. I write historicals, my characters don’t eat ice cream. And knowing about my hero’s 3rd grade teaching isn’t going to help me make readers fall in love with him unless that 3rd grade experience was substantial in making him who he is in the book.

I can’t really say there is one key to creating great characters because I think there are several, but one of which is is that all really matters is who your character is within the pages of your book. Let’s be real, unless you’re writing a biography these people aren’t real. Yes, they might feel real, but they aren’t they’re just bits and pieces that we make up. So with that thought in mind I implore you to work on your characters with an open mind. Don’t get so settled on your heroine’s backstory because that’s what really happened, cause it didn’t, she’s not real. What matters is who she is on the page and in so much as it affects the story, how she became that person, that’s where your backstory comes in. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Okay so let’s get into some of the tools. Now I should give you a caveat, this is how I go about creating characters and while I can stand up here all day and tell you it’s the right way to do it, there are probably half of you in here that this won’t work at all. And that’s okay, chances are you’ll learn something and if not just smile and nod and I’ll never be the wiser. Alright so onto those tools. When I start work on a new book idea, I start with the characters and because I’m a heroine-driven writer, I start with her.

ARCHETYPES

The first thing I do is pick a name. There’s nothing magical about this process for me, sometimes the name pops into my head and sometimes I sit and look at a baby naming book until something strikes me. Once I’m satisfied with a name something interesting starts to happen, she begins to start to form into a person, or at least a shape that sort of resembles a person. So next up I jump to the archetype book. Now there are plenty of character and pop psychology books out there that you can use. This just happens to be one that I think is brilliant. I was in the workshop in Chicago many moons ago when they first presented this material and I couldn’t take notes fast enough. It just really resonates with me. Now one thing I’ve learned from using this book again and again in my own writing is that I tend to gravitate towards the same archetypes over and over. So I start with those, read through them until something grabs me.

MYERS-BRIGG

Once I’ve got my archetype down the feel of the character, her personality begins to take shape so it’s time to start digging in to see what issues she might have to be dealing with, emotionally speaking. That’s when I pull out the Myers Brigg book that I use. What I like about this book in particular is that it’s not very complicated, much of it is done in bulleted lists. And there’s a great chart at the beginning of the book that gives a quick & dirty summary of each type so you can read through them and know which ones to read more of. Another thing I like about this book is that there’s a section of things that type might need to work on, this is a great jumping off place for internal conflict issues. All of this work helps me bring my characters big emotional issue into focus for me. Cause remember they’re not real so we’re just making this stuff up, if you want a heroine who has trust issues, give her trust issues, make up a background that fits with that.

ENNEAGRAM

But for starting off points you can also use the Enneagram, which I have a book I use on occasion if the Myers Brigg isn’t working for me, it’s actually by the same author so it’s in the same easy to read format. And these are just the tools that I use, I know there are plenty of others out there. What you want is to just use these to brainstorm directions you can take your character. Because the thing to remember about characters in a book is that everything has to be properly motivated and their behavior needs to be consistent. We know that there are people all around us that don’t behave consistently, they have medications for this. Well, and clearly it’s not always a medical issue, people do crazy things because we have knee-jerk reactions to emotional stimuli. Characters can’t really do that or they come across as being false or melodramatic. So you have to be careful. That’s one of the reasons I use these pop psychology tools b/c they were designed for real people, but they have a way of outlining the usual behaviors which is where the consistency comes into play.

OTHER TOOLS

I know other writers use all kinds of other tools. There are books on birth order that are very interesting, you can use books on the astrological signs or use tarot cards. There are tons of other resources out there that might work for you, just the ones I listed are the ones that I think work particularly well.

GMC

Okay so let’s move onto to the nitty gritty stuff. Now I’m sure that most of you have heard of Deb Dixon’s GMC. That’s kind a biblical text in RWA. And if you haven’t read it, you’ve heard a workshop or your critique partner has explained it to you. And well, Deb didn’t actually make that stuff up, she just put it in easy to understand terms. Dwight Swaine has a lot of the same material in his book, Techniques of the Selling Writer – now I don’t know how many of you have tried to read that book, I can say it’s worth the time and effort, but it is very dry.

But I think the thing about GMC is is that we all get it, we understand it. If writing a book involved taking a multiple choice text or even fill in the blank on the components of GMC, we’d probably all get A’s. The thing is though, the concept is easy to grasp, but applying it into your book is a whole ‘nothing ball of wax. So here’s the way I like to explain it.

Goal – what do they want?

Motivation – why do they want it?

Conflict – why can’t they have it?

You could sum up GMC in the following sentence: Character wants (blank) because (blank) but (blank). The blanks are the three elements – the G, the M, and the C.

GMC is essential to good fiction, and I always like to start with the M, which I realize is a bit unorthodox, but bear with me. The M, the motivation is what makes your fiction readable. It’s like the secret decoder ring that comes in cereal boxes. This is the element you use in order to effectively communicate with the reader – what they’ll use in order to understand why our characters do and say the crazy things they do. If a character is properly motivated, a reader will follow them anywhere no matter how improbable their actions may be. In the GMC equation, the motivation is why the character wants their specific goal – why they want to open that bookstore or why they need to trust others and why they act the way they do throughout the story.

Take a familiar scenario of the clichéd woman in a horror movie who runs out into the darkness in her pajamas, or equally silly, goes into the basement, all because she hears a noise. And let’s not forget that she knows very well that there is a madman on the loose and he’s got an ax with her name on it. It’s a funny situation and it makes us roll our eyes or yell at the screen.

But why is the above scenario humorous? Character motivation. Or rather the lack of character motivation. Most of these movies are shot with one thing in mind, to scare the movie-goer, so they get their characters in scary situations no matter how poorly motivated said character is simply because it suits the plot. But in romance, we don’t have that luxury. We simply can’t stick our characters in Idaho because we need them to be there for chapter seven. We have to give them legitimate, believable reasons for going to Idaho in the first place or for going into the basement.

Haven’t you ever read a book that wasn’t that exciting or perhaps wasn’t that well written, yet the characters were so compelling you couldn’t put it down? More than likely motivation played a big role in why you loved those characters. Likewise the lack of proper motivation can ruin even the most well-written prose.

Let’s go back to our woman from the horror movie; investigating a noise is not enough motivation for most people to go out into the night when a crazy murderer is on the loose. What if the noise she hears is her dog that’s outside tied to the swing set? Is that believable? To serious dog lovers it probably is. Let’s try something else, suppose she hears someone cry for help, is that believable? Well, for those of us seasoned horror movie watchers, this is an old trick – scary mad-man generally CAN talk so they can be the ones crying for help. So this might not be believable either. (you know where I’m going with this and it’s a trite example, but it works.) Okay let’s say the voice she hears is not one of the crazy mad man or any other stranger, but the voice of her own 10-year old daughter. This gives her plenty of motivation to swing open those doors and run out into the night in nothing more than a robe and her bra. A mother’s urge to protect her children is a strong and universal motivation.

Here’s another example, and one not dealing with horror movies or crazy mad-men. Let’s say your heroine needs a job – that’s her goal. But why does she need the job? That’s our motivation. Well, she needs this job because there are some pink shoes in a store window downtown that she simply must own. So is wanting the pink shoes enough motivation to sustain your story? Probably not, unless this is a very short story and they are some very special shoes.

Let’s beef up the motivation. How about she wants those shoes because her grandmother owned a pair just like them and her memories of her grandmother are the only ones she has of being loved and cared for. Now we have a reason to care. Now we can cheer for our heroine to get that job so she can buy those shoes. (This example shows us something clear about goals as well, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

The bottom line is motivation gives the reader a reason to care for the characters. It is one of the greatest tools we have as writers to make our imperfect characters that we love, loveable to other people. Developing strong motivation forces you to think, to dig deep into your characters, and in the end it can be the difference between someone finishing your book, or putting it back on the shelves.

Now onto goals. Every character needs them. And in romance they generally need both internal and external goals. But asking the question, “what does your character want?” can be like asking a six year old what they want to be when they grow up – a fireman, a veterinarian, a dancer, a teacher, etc. The options are limitless especially when you’re thinking of the large scope of your entire story. There will always be exceptions to the “rules” but let’s, for argument’s sake, say that both your hero and heroine need one main external goal each. Keep in mind that external goals need to be three things: concrete, specific and they must require action in order to be obtained. Subsequently internal goals tend to be more subconscious and less concrete since they are emotional in nature. However, they too require action to obtain them, but action of a different sort. But we’ll get to more detailed explanation of the internal elements later.

One thing I’ve seen over and over again in teaching classes or judging contests is having a character’s goal be to maintain the status quo – I won’t say that this is wrong because there will always be a successful book out there to prove me wrong, but this sort of random goal isn’t concrete and doesn’t require any action. In addition, won’t it be a futile goal when our heroine learns in chapter one that the status quo is gone? This is a popular goal for heroines in historicals where she is expected to marry yet she wants to remain the rebellious girl she’s always been. Riding her horses with her hair whipping in the wind and tending her garden or writing her novels or whatever it is she wants to maintain. But wanting the status quo or to remain independent doesn’t really work, neither are tactile and for our external goal we should strive for something more concrete.

What about that garden she loves? What if she’s been working on cross-breeding roses since she was a young girl and if she marries she’ll have to leave her precious garden and resign herself to a life of parties and needlepoint? This will never do. So our heroine doesn’t just want to remain unmarried as a means to maintain the status quo, more specifically, she wants to complete her cross-breeding of her roses. This is a concrete and worthy goal.

What about our heroine from the previous example who wanted to buy those pink shoes? More than likely this heroine doesn’t consciously think, “I want those shoes because Grandma had some just like them and she loved me and if I own them then I’ll feel that love again.” That would be awkward and clunky and let’s face it, if your heroine is that in touch with her emotional needs, then she probably has no internal conflict at all. So instead she thinks she wants those shoes simply because they remind her of her grandmother and she remembers always liking them. But as readers we know that while this is a tactile goal, what our heroine really wants is for someone to love her and give her security. That’s her internal goal and she’s going about satisfying it in the wrong way – thinking that by owning the shoes, it will “fix” everything, fill that hole inside. This is a common mistake for our characters and one that usually takes an entire book to figure out, which is good news for you, the writer.

The trick for creating strong and believable goals is to make them specific to your character and their situation. If you can plug any goal in, just so your character has a goal (cause that’s what you’ve heard is required) then you haven’t done your job.

If you’ve been in the writing business long, then you’ve probably heard things like “fiction is conflict” or “the strength of your conflict is the strength of your book” or some such statements and frankly I can’t argue with them as they’re completely true. Because when you’re writing popular fiction, without conflict you have no book. At least not one worth reading.

This is the easiest of the three elements to understand, but it seems to be the most difficult to get right. Conflict, in its simplest form, is opposition. That’s it. According to Webster it is “a clash between opposing elements or ideas”. Simple enough. But we really struggle with this and maybe it’s because most of us are women and we tend to be the peacemakers in our families – I’m not really certain why, but conflict can be a real struggle. But it doesn’t have to be. Conflict, in the GMC equation is why your character can’t have the goal they’re seeking. External conflicts can be acts of God, other characters, or the character gets in their own way. (Think of that thing your high school English teacher used to say about conflict, “there are three kinds of conflict: man vs. man; man vs. God; or man vs. himself.) This is the hero’s meddling mother, the evil other woman, the villain, the fire that destroys their house, whatever, just remember it is external. Use this test to figure out if which kind of conflict you’re dealing with…Imagine taking your characters out of the world they live in and plucking them down alone on a deserted island. If it’s just the two of them, all alone, then all the external conflict should disappear, provided they have no hurricanes and they have plenty of food and necessities to survive.

Now that we’re on the same page in terms of external GMC I should point out that oftentimes you have sort of two layers of external GMC. It’s what I call the Big GMC and the Story GMC – and here’s the way it breaks down. When I started working with GCM charts I found myself drawing a line to divide those little boxes because my characters often had a GMC that drove them before the story opened, like your heroine could want to be a world class ballerina or your hero could really want to make lead detective, that stuff still matters and has a place in your book. While I said that the only thing matters is who they are once the book opens, that’s true, but the reader should still feel like this character was living life before they turned to page 1. So you have the Big GMC and then Story GMC is the stuff that changes once the action of the plot begins. If you’re a believer in the Hero’s Journey then Story GMC starts after the call to adventure has been accepted. So we have our hero who wants to be lead detective and the story gmc starts when he gets suspicious about a new serial killer and maybe the rest of the force thinks he’s nuts b/c the MO is too different to be the same guy. But our hero knows something is going on so he does some investigating on his own, that’s the story GMC, and this GMC affects the Big GMC b/c if he’s right, he can score lead detective, but if he’s wrong, then he’ll probably lose his job all together. See how that works?

A deeper look: explaining internal GMC

Now that we’ve worked our fingers to the bone on external GMC it’s time to switch gears and look at the more difficult and frankly more important (at least for romance novels) side of GMC. The internal. On the surface they can seem quite similar, but differentiating between the two can be trickier than we think.

Internal GMC is made of the same elements as external GMC, but don’t be fooled, it is different. This is the stuff that’s subconscious, meaning your character, more than likely, isn’t aware of it. If you have your heroine so aware of the fact that she doesn’t trust men and that without doing so she’ll never have a complete life, then she really has no growth and she should probably be a secondary character, not to mention a therapist. So keep the internal stuff where it belongs, inside.

The most important thing to note about internal GMC is that it exists with or without the hero/heroine or the events of the book. Let me rephrase that for clarification. Your heroine’s internal GMC exists before she meets the hero and unless you’re writing a reunion story, doesn’t have anything to do with him. He might exacerbate the issue, but he certainly didn’t cause it.

I see this all the time in classes and when I’m judging contests. The heroine’s internal GMC, all of her internal conflict is solved simply by meeting the hero cause he’s a nice guy and he’ll love and accept her just as she is. Nope, you can’t do it. That’s cheating. It’s the easy way. Let’s use a trite example for this, let’s say you have a formally abused woman (we’ll make her verbally abused) and we’ll say she comes from a father who did the same thing. Well, if all she needs to break the cycle is to meet a man who won’t verbally abuse her, then that should be easy enough, but what does she learn? How does she change?

Learning a lesson and growing and changing is what it’s all about. That’s the whole point about internal GMC, it’s about the character arc (which we’ll get to in a moment) and growth and change are CRUCIAL to character-driven fiction. So with that abused woman, she must work out that issue before she can have her happy ending, even if the hero will never abuse her, she still needs to work on that issue and clear it up or at least begin to heal. Remember that test from yesterday on how to tell if your conflict is internal or external? This is where it really works well. Pick up that heroine out of your book and drop her on that deserted island, does she still have that distrust of men?

While the hero is not the cause of your heroine’s internal GMC he, more than likely, is the reason she’ll finally deal with it. In meeting him, she’s finally met someone that might be worth sacrificing some things for, might be worth changing for. It’s the hero and her interaction with him that challenges the heroine to deal with her “issues” and eventually grow and change to resolve her internal GMC. Again, the ONLY time this might not be the case is in reunion stories where the characters have a romantic past that might have led to said “issues.”

Let’s look at an example with the movie Twister. Now, I don’t know about y’all, but when I went to see this movie, I expected it to be about tornadoes. And it is, but it’s also a romance. Jo, our heroine, is a tough and witty scientist out to change the warning systems for tornadoes. Obviously her external GMC is wrapped up in the tornadoes themselves, but we also have conflict with the rival team led by Jonah and then we have conflict between her and her soon-to-be ex-husband, Bill.

Now we’re given a hint about her internal GMC (which is often unseen in movie format – why is that? I can hear you all answer. Because it’s INSIDE the character) from the beginning of the movie where we see a family run to the storm cellar only for the father to be ripped into the center of the twister. But it’s truly revealed to us in a scene where she and Bill have missed getting their tracking device up into the tornado. They start arguing and she blurts out that he doesn’t know what it’s like to have a tornado skip this house and that house and come after yours. She took her father’s death personally (obviously) and it has shaped her entire life and motivates all her external actions. Basically she’s afraid of losing the people she loves, exactly why she pushed Bill away to begin with. This conflict existed before Bill, it exists without him, yet it exacerbates her relationship with him. It’s not until Bill tells her to look at what’s right in front of her, meaning himself, that she’s willing to take the risks necessary to overcome this internal conflict. You see how that works?

So you do an internal GMC for your characters just the way that you do external, only I sometimes find it’s easier to work backwards and start with the conflict. There are a couple of ways you can identify your character’s conflict. You need to stop and look at your character, and ask yourself some key questions: What is she afraid of? What is her biggest fear? I’m not talking spiders or heights here, what you’re looking for is emotional fears. Chances are she might not even be aware of this fear. Remember, this is the internal stuff, her proverbial bag of junk she hauls around with her that makes her who she is and prevents her from achieving personal happiness. The hero is NOT the answer to her achieving personal happiness, she instead has to deal with her bag of junk, face her fear head on and grow and change. (sorry I keep harping on that point, but it’s an important one. ) So maybe she’s afraid of ever being accepted for who she truly is, or maybe she is afraid of never belonging or finding a true home, or having the family she’s always wanted or always being abandoned. Whatever it is, jot that down.

Now take that fear and look back at the GMC you did for your heroine. And try to figure out if she’s scared she’ll never be accepted for who she truly is, then what might her internal goal be (I often call this the internal need rather than goal since goal sort of implies awareness on the character’s part), then identify the motivation and then the conflict.

Developing a satisfying romance is contingent on having a strong internal GMC for both your hero and your heroine.

Character Arcs Demystified

Internal conflict is a jewel for better understanding your character’s arcs and the spine or theme of your book. Now most of the time words like “character arc” and “theme” strike fear into writers, but there really isn’t a reason for that fear. The bottom line is whether or not you intentionally put it there, there is a theme running through your book (see, your 10th grade English teacher was right!), knowing this theme, though, can really work to your benefit, especially with revisions. Just like GMC, character arcs and theme are all pieces to the same puzzle and when you have them all sitting before you, you are better able to create a cohesive and tightly written book.

A character’s arc is nothing more than character growth.

“Oh, right. Sure,” you may be thinking. “Character growth. That’ll be easy.”

And you’re right. It’s hard to make your characters grow. Let’s face it, no one likes to grow as a person. It’s hard work. We’re all very set in our ways. People (and characters) naturally resist change.

That means, for your character’s growth to be believable, it has to be gradual and they have to fight it a bit. But readers love to read about the struggle to grow as a person. They love seeing the character arc.

I know that for me when I was a newer writer I was trying to better understand character arcs and I must have tried every method out there – 15 step arcs, trying to apply the hero’s journey and nothing worked. I was convinced that the character arc was an unattainable thing I was just never gonna get. My characters were gonna just have to do it on their own because I wasn’t smart enough to guide them through it.

But then one day I was talking to my critique partner and things began to fall magically into place. I knew that my characters needed to start the book with one issue and by the end of the book they needed to have worked through that issue in order to achieve their HEA. Okay so move character from Point A to Point B. Got it.

Okay, I’m about to give you the key to character arcs, I really should charge for this because it’s evidently a big, bit secret. Okay we have a point A and a point B, for those of you who are good in math, that’s two steps. That’s right, I said TWO steps. Not as big of a deal as the term character arc makes you feel.

So what are these points?

Point A – Error in thinking – The error in thinking is something the character believes about themselves or their world that is both wrong and preventing them from resolving their internal GMC and thus happiness (love). Our characters can’t be really happy (or in a healthy relationship) until they give up their error in thinking.

Now, keep in mind, this error in thinking isn’t completely illogical. The character must have a good reason (motivation) for believing that their error in thinking is actually true. Something (or preferably many things) in their past have lead them to this firmly held belief.

Point B – The Lesson – This is what your character must learn before they can overcome the crisis in the big black moment. And, yep, the lesson is often related to the character’s error in thinking. It’s also worth noting that often in romances the hero and heroine’s lessons (and therefore their character arcs) are mirror images of each other. For example, if your heroine needs to learn that it’s okay to lighten up a bit and lose control every once in a while, then your hero’s lesson might be that he can still enjoy life even if he’s a bit more responsible. Or maybe she needs to learn to trust herself more and he needs to learn to trust others.

So you identify your heroine’s error in thinking – she believes that she has to change herself in order to be accepted by others. Then you use the correlation for her lesson – she needs to learn that she’s lovable just as she is. Point A to Point B. Character arc. See how easy that is?

All that stuff in the middle is your plot which repeated makes her deal with the error in thinking, confirming it, questioning it, requiring her to change so she can learn. That’s the job of your story, to push your characters and make them earn their HEA. On your handout I have some more information you can use to help guide key scenes to achieving the character arcs.

Initially we state the error in thinking early on in the book when the reader is getting to know the character. This isn’t usually one of those “Gentle Reader…” moments, typically you want to be a tad sly with how you slip this info in. But this isn’t like the internal conflict in the way that the character isn’t aware of it, they know the error in thinking they don’t know it’s an error, but they know it, they believe it with everything in their little imaginary bodies. So get it out there on the page early on so the reader knows ah-ha here we have a character with trust issues.

Then you move to an internal call to adventure which is often the same as the external call, afterall the external plot should be challenging their internal issues. Then we have refusal to change, external events make status quo impossible so this is when the fun stuff starts to happen, our characters, much like ourselves try to cheat. Think of it in terms of dieting, how many of us have tried every get thin quick plan out there? That’s cheating, it doesn’t work long term, it doesn’t fix anything inside that is probably what’s causing the weight issue anyways. Think about the Biggest Loser, any of you watch that? Every season we get to see one or more of those people’s errors in thinking brought to life and challenged and we see them try to cheat and cheat until finally they have to just recognize they’re gonna have to change to get what they want. Character arc!

So where does theme come in to all of this? When you’re dealing with romance, you really need to look at both your hero and your heroine’s character arcs in order to identify your theme. Let’s backtrack just a bit and define theme to make sure we’re all on the same page here. Theme is the basic emotional conflict of your book. Almost always it can be boiled down to one word. So you could say “this book is about TRUST,” or “this book is about REDEMPTION,” or even “this book is about RESPONSIBILITY.” If you find yourself trying to explain it, “this book is about a woman who…” then that’s not your theme, that’s a synopsis.

The other thing to keep in mind while dealing with theme is that you probably won’t, no matter how long you write, deal with more than a handful of different themes. Like I mentioned earlier about only using a handful of archetypes, all of this stems from your voice. Our own individual writer’s toolbox is unique to us and we’ll find that you can often put new things in the box, but sometimes there are just some permanent fixtures in there you’ll have to learn to work with.

So theme, you’ll revisit the same ones over and over again. No, it’s not about writing the same book over and over again, but theme is deeply connected to an author’s voice. Writing is intensely personal, so it stands to reason that our themes are going to be our own personal hot buttons. Take a look at books you’ve written or even books on your keeper shelf – they all have themes and chances are the themes are similar. Once you’re aware of these hot button themes, it makes defining the themes in your own books easier since you’ll tend to gravitate to the same things each time you go to write. I tend to gravitate towards themes of “self-acceptance” and “responsibility” and “trust”. So while I’m working on character development and GMC I begin to see the theme emerge because I know what to look for. Although as life continues, perhaps I’ll trade in some of those for some new ones. The point being, while there is an endless number of themes out there, most of us have a group of personal themes that we’ll use.

This might sound like a bad thing and I’m sure some of you are disagreeing with me (which is totally fine), but in actuality, having author’s themes is a good thing. It’s scary at first because it can make you feel as if you are limited or that you’re writing the same book over and over again, but this simply isn’t the case. Embrace your themes, being familiar with them can really help you when you sit down to work on your book because you’ll have a narrower list in which to look at to determine what the book is about.

Okay, so now we’re on the same page with our definition of theme, let’s see how we can identify it. Now when I’m doing character development, I tend to start with one character and do all the GMC and character arcs and whatnot on them before I begin the other. For me I nearly always start with the heroine because I’m such a heroine-driven writer. Once I have her figured out, I can start working on the hero and thinking about what kind of man will be both her knight in shining armor and her worst nightmare (only in that he makes her deal with that internal bag of junk she’s been hauling around).

So if I create a heroine who thrives on her own independence, then chances are she’ll be paired with a man who threatens this. He’ll probably have a few children, and his internal conflict might deal with him not understanding the need for independence. If he’s been a single dad for a while, then he’s the primary care giver and might not have time for anything on his own, so he probably thinks the heroine is selfish, and she might think he’s self-righteous. They both need to find balance. But are you seeing a common thread within their character arcs? Independence. He might not have any and she might crave too much, so they’re different, but at the end of the day, it’s the same emotional issue. See, cohesion, that’s the beauty of theme. It ties everything up with a nice, tidy bow.

How badly do you want it?

One of the most challenging aspects of becoming a writer is actually writing. It seems like it should be natural. We WANT to write, but actually writing is a whole ‘nother ball of string. Making writing a priority is a must because no matter how many classes you take and how many how-to books you read you can’t learn how to write unless you plant your butt in the chair and put your fingers to keyboard. That’s the big secret, by the way, the secret handshake that new writers want from published writers – you get to be published by writing.

It’s really that simple.

But lets consider that it’s often way more fun to talk about writing than it is to actually write. So in order to get to that writing habit, we have to trick ourselves. Offer incentives, set the stage, get yourself primed and ready, bribe yourself if you have to.

How many of you didn’t set writing goals this year? And how many of you set goals, but had forgotten about them by the second week of February?

I think the problem with most goal-setting scenarios is that we’re too kind with ourselves. I mean let’s say you set a goal and then you don’t achieve it. What happens to you? Um…nothing. I mean you probably aren’t even that embarrassed because no one knows you set the goal. What would happen if you proclaimed to everyone you knew and saw on a daily basis that you were on a diet and you were going to exercise everyday and lose 50 pounds by the end of the year? I’ll tell you what, those people would be pestering you and eyeing you while you pop that donut in your mouth.

With writing, there really isn’t a lot of accountability when it comes to setting goals. We waffle a lot, we set airy-fairy goals that don’t really mean much of anything and we’re too forgiving of ourselves when we do fail to meet any goal we might have set. There are RWA members across this country who have been members for years and are still struggling to finish their first book – I know several of them. They’re bright, intelligent, gifted women, but they just haven’t been able to make that commitment.

Once you’ve written a few pages, you quickly realize that writing isn’t easy. For whatever reason we tend to expect it to be easy because we’re excited and because the idea is bursting in our imaginations. But when it comes to putting it on paper, it becomes painful and frankly not fun at all. And we do anything and everything to avoid writing. For me it was studying craft. I used that excuse for a long time…well, I can’t write yet because I haven’t mastered scene and sequel yet. Okay…well, here’s a tip from me, you can read every book written on the craft of writing, but until you actually write you’ll never master any of it.

Another reason…well, fear is a big one for a lot of us. Fear of success. Fear of failure. Fear of exposing too much of our true selves to the general public. Writers are a neurotic bunch and we’re afraid of a lot.

I could go on and list a few more and I’m sure some of you could make suggestions, but whatever your reason is, whatever excuse you have slinking through your mind that you think makes you special or excuses you, get over it. Are you ready for some tough love? How many of you want to make it in this business?

Now I’m not talking money I’m just talking about walking into your local bookstore and seeing your book on the shelf? Anybody want that? Okay, now I don’t say this to be pious because it wasn’t too long ago I sat where you are right now and I haven’t forgotten where I came from. I also didn’t get here overnight (in fact it too me seven years and five manuscripts before I sold). But I didn’t get here making excuses either. It’s time to let the excuses die. It’s time to put your big-girl panties on and quit your whining.

What are you willing to do to make this dream happen? What are you willing to sacrifice? There will be some things you can do without (TV) and stuff you aren’t willing to part with (time with your kids) and that’s all okay, just know it now. Writing is a journey of self discovery and now’s the time to get really acquainted with yourself, to find out what you are and aren’t willing to do to see your dream of publication come to fruition. So I ask you now…how badly do you want it?

But you say, writing is hard. Well guess what, it’s hard for all of us. Get on Twitter or Facebook and follow your favorite authors and you’ll eventually see them mention a struggle or two with their current manuscript. If anyone tells you writing is easy for them, they’re either lying or they’re not working hard enough. How badly do you want it?

You’re busy, you say. Well, you’re not the only person who’s tried to balance writing with a full-time day job or a house full of kids or a sick parent or whatever if is that competes for your time. How badly do you want it?

You can’t write unless you have it all plotted out/unless you have a 5-hour block of time/or unless its raining outside and approximately 56.7 degrees. Well, you need to either be writing literary fiction that affords you 5 years in between books or you need some yoga classes to teach you a little flexibility. How badly do you want it?

Okay so y’all get the picture. This is the year. No more excuses. Tack that up above your computer. I don’t care what your excuse is, if you want to write, if you want to make a go at this, you’ll get it done. You’ll make the time, you’ll learn your craft, you’ll do what it takes to succeed.

Alright now that I’ve yelled at you ☺, I’ll give you some quick tips on how to get it done. First of all you need to set big goals and then break them down into bite-sized pieces. Let’s say you want to write a brand-new single-title this year. That’s between 360-400 pages of writing, not including any prewriting or revision time. And let’s say you have a full-time job and two kids at home. So you can really only get 15-20 new pages done a week (that’s an average of 2-4 pages a day depending on if you write 5 or 7 days a week) that comes out to about 24-26 weeks to get your first draft done. Then if you revise 2-3 chapters a week you can be done revising in 6-10 weeks. That’s a total of 36 weeks on the long end of things to write a 400 page book. That leaves you with 16 weeks left over to do whatever you want with.

So you see how that works? You find your big goal and you figure out what you need to do in pieces to get there. Just like a book is made up of chapters and chapters are made of scenes and scenes are made up of paragraphs and paragraphs are made up of words, goals work just that way. Start big and work down.

Okay you have your goals, write them down and then share them with someone. Designate someone to be your goals keeper, preferably someone mean and scary who will give you that look if you lag behind.

All right so here are some tools that I’ve found particularly helpful over the years.

Find a writing zone: not everyone can have an actual home office for our own writing so you might have to get creative. If you don’t have an established desk for your work, then perhaps you can get yourself a nice new lapdesk for your laptop. Or if you have a desktop, then you can get yourself a special mouse pad and pen holder, anything that can anchor your area and remind you that it’s your writing area.

Or maybe you write away from home, during lunch at your day job or at your local Starbucks. One of the things that I do when I’m writing, that I started out of necessity from writing at coffee shops, is wearing earbuds and listening to instrumental movie soundtracks. Putting those earbuds in puts me right in the “mood” for writing, I know what I’m supposed to be doing. Even when I’m at home now writing, I still put them in my ears, even if alone where I could play the music out loud, the earbuds go in and I can hit my stride.

Make a date: If finding a writing time is challenging for you, then put it on your schedule. Just like you would a lunch date with a friend or a doctor’s appointment, put down your writing time. You’ll be far more likely to keep it if it’s already established. And your family will be more understanding too. Remember your family and friends will take your writing only as serious as you do – they’ll use your attitude as a guide.

100 words/100 days: Way back before I had sold my first book when I was struggling to make writing a daily habit, I joined an on-line challenge. The goal was to write 100 words for 100 consecutive days. I learned several things about myself but primarily I learned that I could write anywhere. Before the challenge I had firmly believed that I could *only* write when I had large chunks of time or at a certain time of day or when it was completely quiet. But none of that was true. Sure those might be prime conditions for writing, but who has that all of the time. Not me. Some days all I did was write exactly 100 words, but more often than not I wrote more. The story would take hold of me and I’d rock along and get 1000 words or 2000 words and before I knew it that book was done. The other thing I learned was that because I was writing consistently the book wrote better. I won’t say easier because I don’t think writing is ever easy. But the writing flowed more because I was in the story, in the characters and it just seemed to work. And you know what? That’s the book of mine that sold, that went on to become Courting Claudia. Author James Scott Bell has a great blog with several other tips and tricks you can use to help with this.

Setting deadlines: If you want to be a published author you might as well learn now what it’s like to work to a deadline. Set one for yourself. Figure out how many words you need to write to finish the book/story, then break it into smaller pieces. Now set a deadline for that ultimate goal and work daily to meet your smaller goals so you can achieve it. A writer should always know how quickly they can write. When you get those contracts, you pick your own deadlines so you need ot know what you’re capable of.

NaNoWriMo is coming!

For those of you who might not know November has long since been home to NaNoWriMo – or National Novel Writing Month. I love the tagline for this: 30 days and nights of literary abandon. The basic principle is that you dedicate an entire month to writing a 50,000 word novel. This would more than likely be a rough draft, one that would require much revision, but think about it, in just 30 days, you could have a book done. It’s kind of an overwhelming thought, but it’s really a lot of fun.

By the time I’d tried NaNo the first time I was already a published author which several books under my belt. I knew my writing process and I knew I could get a book finished. I joined partly for the challenge – most of my rough drafts come in below 50k so I wanted to push my word count, also I was really keen on joining in on the camaraderie. Several other writers in my local RWA chapter participated and we all cheered each other on. It was so fun watching everyone’s daily word count rise.

Many times my deadlines are such that I can’t participate, but this year I can. In fact, I need to in order to meet a deadline. It’s crucial that I get the rough draft done in November so that I can have the revised manuscript turned into my editor by May. And I have to write another book in between that. So like I said, it’s a must that this book get done in November.

In a perfect world I’d spend the month of October plotting that book so come Nov 1st I could hit the ground running. But I’m currently on deadline so I’m trying to finish up the current book all the while hoping my subconscious is working on my NaNo book. Not so sure that’s working. More than likely I’ll have to spend some time getting the first few scenes sketched out so I can jump right in and then plot as I go.

But, you say, 50,000 words in a month is a lot, too much, really. Well, possibly, but you’ll only know if you try. And let’s break that down into more manageable bites, that averages out to about 1,666 words a day, which is really only about 8 pages. Break that down into 2 page increments, so you write 2 pages 4 times a day, you can do that!

So how do you know if NaNoWriMo is right for you? Here’s my list, see if any of these describe you and if so, give NaNo a try!

1. you’ve never finished a book, but really want to. (great way to dedicate yourself to finishing b/c you make a public commitment and people can cheer you on)

2. you normally write romantic suspense, but have a great idea for a Regency historical that won’t leave you alone. (great way to try out a new genre b/c it’s only 1 month of your life!)

3. you write really, really slowly because you get bogged down revising the first half of your book 100 times. (you are struggling with turning off that internal editor OR you’re allowing “perfectionism” to be your excuse)

4. you want to “hang out” with cool writers like me (seriously you’ll get great pep talks from successful writers and see how others are progressing, it’s very motivating & if you have a competitive side, even better!)

5. you have a deadline you’re worried about meeting (let’s face it, by the time December rolls around, it becomes very difficult to write b/c we’re doing holiday stuff, so use November to get that book done!)

So how about it? Are y’all in? Want to join me for some intense writing in November? Think about December first and being able to say you just finished a 50k word book!

A good reminder & release schedule

So I’ve just wrapped up revisions on A LITTLE BIT WICKED and I’m back to work on A LITTLE BIT SINFUL and I have to admit I’ve been struggling some with these books. But I’ve finally figured out why and that is a good thing. For the last several years I’ve been working on my Legend Hunters books and then I wrote THE SECRETS OF MIA DANVERS and all of those books are big and full of adventure and suspense and mystery in addition to the romance. And then I started the Forbidden Love trilogy for Entangled Scandalous and admittedly I forgot that just because I’m not writing a suspense-heavy historical doesn’t mean my characters don’t still need GMC. It’s kind of an embarrassing lesson, to be honest, because well, I’m fairly well-known for teaching classes on that very issue. About how the GMC should be where the action of your book comes from. I know that. And yet, I still tried to cheat and get away with not doing it and now I’m having to back and fix it – in the first book in revisions and in this current one, post first draft. So let this be a lesson to any of you, no matter where you are in your career, what kind of book you’re writing and how short it is, you still need a solid GMC for your characters to propel your plot!

Also I want to share my tentative release schedule for the next twelve months because I’m so damn excited about it!

A LITTLE BIT WICKED – December 2012

A LITTLE BIT SINFUL – March 2013

THE SECRETS OF MIA DANVERS – June 2013

A LITTLE BIT SCANDALOUS – July 2013

THE AFFAIR OF ANNA JACOBS – Oct 2013

Okay kids, that’s 5 releases over the next year. I’m so very happy to be able to share so many wonderful characters and stories with all of you.

*this a tentative schedule and includes some tentative titles*

Easy Plot Points

I had a discussion recently with a writer friend of mine when she heard me mention my use of plotboards. I don’t use them for every book I write, but they are a great hands-on, visual tool for those times when I need to get in the book, so to speak. But even if I don’t use a plotboard for a book there are key scenes, plot points, that I look for before I start any book. I don’t always know what’s going to happen in these scenes, but I know the book will have them somewhere.

Some of these are pretty standard, and some are just things that I came up with because they make sense to the types of stories I tend to write. Oh, and they don’t necessarily end up going in this order so it’s not really a progression kind of thing. What I like about these is that they have stops on the relationship progression but also the external plot stuff so you can kind of braid it all together or at least begin to. So without further ado, here are my standard plot points.

Inciting incident – this is really just my first meet scene, how do they meet, what’s the circumstances, etc.

Let’s work together – since my characters end up doing something together: solving a case, running from a bad guy, etc. this is that scene where it becomes apparent they’ll be in this together, apparent to the reader, they might not be committed to the “partnership” at this point. But this is one of those key factors for me, I have to figure out what situation can I put them in that will require them to be on the page together. Often.

first kiss – this is self explanatory, and sometimes I plot it out at the beginning because I already know how it’s going to happen, other times like in the book I’m currently working on (A LITTLE BIT SINFUL) I knew that I wanted her to instigate the first kiss, but I wasn’t quite sure how until I got further into the 1st draft.

first love scene – again self explanatory and again I don’t always plot this unless I know specifically where it will happen and why.

midpoint – kind of generic, but really just to remind me that I need something major to happen in the middle of the book, a twist or something. Since I tend to write books with suspense or mystery or adventure subplots, then this usually is a shift with that. It generally has emotional repercussions, but for the most part, this plot point is about the external plot and where its going.

I think I love you – this usually is two separate scenes because both the hero and heroine get one. it’s just that emotional break-through when they realize that this is different, that they’re not just in trouble, the damage has been done, they’re all in. They’re in for a heart-break unless they’re willing to change to get their HEA.

plot point – again generic, but just a reminder to keep things moving. This is often something that leads the characters directly into the BBM. They’ve tried to cheat to get out of having to change, to resist having to deal with their internal garbage and this one last cheat should mark their fate and the reader will know that something big and ugly is about to happen.

BBM – The big black moment – ug! I don’t always know what I’m doing with the big black moment, but I sometimes have a general idea. Like with my upcoming book with Entangled, A LITTLE BIT WICKED, I knew, pretty early on, how I wanted to hang my character out to dry, so to speak, but I couldn’t really figure out the logistics. It actually took me a long time to figure out how to do it, but I made notes and just left it there until I had a clear picture of how to do it. What you want for this scene is to have your heroine/hero’s worst fears realized, you want the external plot to force them to deal with their internal junk.

HEA – happily ever after, won’t really know for sure how to wrap it all up nicely until after I’ve figured out that BBM.

So that’s it. I mean that’s not all there is to my books, but those are the highlights. It’s also worth noting that these are also excellent plot points to use in crafting your synopses because they keep the focus on the main elements of the book and how the external and internal push each other along.