Marketing for Romance Writers Magazine August, 2018 Volume # 1, Issue 8 * | Page 15

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 15 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.) 8