AUGUST, 2018
TELLING STRONG STORIES: HOW TO CREATE
THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN YOUR PLOT
By: Alice Orr
Tell strong stories.
That‟s what every
writer longs to do.
What are strong sto-
ries anyway? To con-
quer an audience and
make it your own you
must tell a story that
moves them. A story that moves them
emotionally. Emotional Power is the im-
pact your story must have.
The key to an emotionally moving
story is Character. The success of your
story hangs on the strength of the main
character you create and the way you
employ that character as a storyteller.
Your main character must move your
story forward emotionally.
Why is your main character so im-
portant? Because your protagonist‟s story
is what connects you with the reader.
You draw the reader in and make her
care. That‟s how you hook a reader. Mas-
tering the art of the story hook is essen-
tial to writing a successful novel. You set
that hook by creating a story in which the
reader cannot help but become emotion-
ally involved.
Which means that the reader must
care about what happens to your charac-
ter. The reader must begin to behave as if
the Protagonist of your story were a real-
life person they know personally. Your
character‟s defeats are the reader‟s de-
feats. Your character‟s triumphs are the
reader‟s triumphs. When you make your
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readers feel this connection you have
them hooked. And they will stay hooked
from beginning to end.
For example, I was hooked by both
Rick and Ilsa in the film Casablanca (the
example I‟ve been loving to use in these
columns) and wanted both of them to
triumph. The conclusion turned out to be
more complicated than that. Which
hooked me deeper still. Those screen-
writers knew how to Tell Strong Stories.
Here‟s how to begin creating charac-
ters as real as Rick and Ilsa.
1. First the character must hook you.
You as author must be as emotion-
ally involved with your character as
you want the reader to be.
2. Which requires that you as author
must know your character intimately.
You must know your characters—
especially your main character hero-
ine or hero—from the Inside Out.
Which means you must understand
as deeply as you possibly can what
it‟s like to be your protagonist.
Why do you need to know so much
about your protagonist? In practical
terms you must know enough to keep
your readers reading. You need to know
a lot about a character to make her suffi-
ciently complex to carry the weight of
your story from the beginning to the end
of a book.
You must know enough about this
character to bring him to life on the page
and make the reader care about him. For
example, Charles Dickens brought Ebe-
nezer Scrooge to life on the page in A
Christmas Carol, and made us care what
happened to him as well. Dickens knew
Scrooge from the Inside Out.
Here‟s an exercise for getting to
know your character from the Inside
Out. Project yourself into your main
character. Become your main character in
your imagination. Then ask yourself the
following five questions about that char-
acter.
1. What does my main character want
in this story? Is this desire significant
enough to make a reader also want
this thing for my character? Is this
desire significant enough to make a
reader want it for my character all
the way through the length of an
entire book? Or at some point does
this desire pale into “Who cares?”
territory for the reader?
2. How much does my main character
want this thing? Is this the most cru-
cial need my character has ever ex-
perienced? Have I effectively com-
municated my character‟s sense of
urgency? How in specific scenes,
action and dialogue can I turn up the
story heat on the intensity of my
main character‟s desire?
(Continued on page 16.)
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