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Tell Strong Stories – How to Write a Great Main Character

Storytelling, ,

Tell strong stories. That’s what every writer longs to do. What are strong stories anyway? To conquer 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 impact your story must have.

The key to an emotionally moving storytelling 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. If your goal is to Tell Strong Stories your main character must move the narrative forward emotionally.

Why is your main character so important? 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. Mastering the art of the narrative hook is essential to writing a successful story.

You set that hook by creating a story in which the reader cannot help but become emotionally involved. First and foremost you do this by creating a character with whom the reader cannot help but become emotionally involved.

Which means that the reader must care about what happens to your character. 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 defeats. Your character’s triumphs are the reader’s triumphs.

When you make your 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 and wanted both of them to triumph. The conclusion turned out to be more complicated than that, which hooked me deeper still. Those screenwriters knew how to Tell Strong Stories.]

Here’s how to begin creating characters as real as Rick and Ilsa.

#1. First, the character must hook you. You as author must be as emotionally 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 heroine 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 sufficiently 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 Ebenezer 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 character.

#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 crucial need my character has ever experienced? Have I effectively communicated 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?

#3. Why does my main character want this thing? Are her reasons – her motivations – admirable? Are these motivations logical in this story situation? Are her motivations believable to the extent that a reader will accept them as legitimate enough to motivate an intelligent, independent protagonist throughout the entire length of my story? Will a reader not only believe these motives but also adopt them on behalf of my character and root for her to achieve her desires?

#4. What does my main character not want? Is my character running away from something? If so, what is it and why is he on the run from it? Is my character avoiding something? If so, what is he avoiding and why? What is my character afraid of? Why is my character afraid of this thing?

[Here’s another way to Tell Strong Stories in terms of drama, intensity and power. Make sure every character fears something. Especially your main character. For example, what does Scarlett O’Hara fear in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind?]

#5. What’s at stake for my main character in this story situation? What will happen if she fails to achieve what she wants or needs? Are those consequences dreadful enough to make a reader dread them as well? Who in my story besides my main character could also be adversely affected? How in specific scenes, action and dialogue can I intensify these stakes by making the potential consequences more devastating, pervasive and far-reaching? In order to Tell Strong Stories you must raise the stakes as high as your story will allow.

Brainstorm every possible response to each of these questions. Always push yourself beyond the first, most obvious possibility toward less expected, more original ones. The farther reaches of our imaginations are the place from which we Tell Strong Stories.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com

– R|R –

Amanda Miller Bryce is the main character of the strong story that is Alice’s new novel A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Meet Amanda HERE. You can find all of Alice’s books HERE.

What readers are saying about A Time of Fear & Loving. “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “Alice Orr is the queen of ramped-up stakes and page-turning suspense.” “Warning. Don’t read before bed. You won’t want to sleep.” “The tension in this novel is through the roof.”
“A budding romance that sizzles in the background until it ignites with passion.”
“The best one yet, Alice!”

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Life Changes When You Start the Day Writing #MFRWauthor #IAN1

Writers Life

The first monsoon clouds from my terrace

On many summer weekends, Jonathan and I leave the city for our camp in the Skylands of northwest New Jersey. Two days later, unfortunately, we return from all of that relaxation with a list of city-life things to do long enough to bring stress barreling back big time.

The next day, an act of iron-bound determination will be required to make myself pick up my notebook or pop up a file in my computer and write. Too often the notebook and the word doc file lose out. The post-weekend lists seem so much more crucial to our weekday existence. They are about keeping our real-world life running on the smooth track rather than the bumpy one after all, which is crucial to the max. That is what I’ve tended to believe most of the time.

But something happened this past weekend at camp that disrupted my customary way of thinking. I started a new book, not an adaptation like my last two books have been. The first, A Vacancy at the Inn, a novella that was orphaned when I decided to leave my agent. The second, A Villain for Vanessa, a re-imagining of a previously published novel whose rights I’d reverted.

This new book is neither of those things. It is a brand-new story, fresh out of my creative brain matter and growing word after word into scene after scene like a miracle on the page in front of me. Maybe that is why, when I work up Monday morning, I ejected the To Do lists from their previous priority position and replaced them with a long writing session. Maybe the magic had me in its thrall.

When the same thing happened on Tuesday morning, my doubts disintegrated. I was enthralled indeed. Caught up in an alternate world of story that seems somehow more truly my reality than my day-to-day down-to-earth one. And here is something else equally enthralling. After each writing session, an aura of the magic remains. My mind feels less fettered. My worries press less heavily. The To Do lists have lost a huge dollop of their tyranny.

Voila. Because I start my days writing, my life has changed for the much, much better. Alice is in Wonderland again. What do you think about that? I think things are getting curiouser and curioser.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com/

– R|R –

Book 5 of my Riverton Road Romantic Suspense series – A Time of Fear and Loving – will debut on Saturday, September 16th, our 45th wedding anniversary. A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Romantic Suspense Book 4 – and my other books are available from Amazon HERE.

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The Real Reason for Writers Conferences

Writers Life


Sunrise New Jersey imageI’m just now emerging from the sweet fog of a weekend writers’ conference.

Why a fog? Because that’s what the misty airlock feels like between conference world and my daily world. A fog of adjustment before re-entry. Why sweet? That’s a more complicated question. The sweetness of the fog is a carryover from the sweetness of the experience and the many nectars of its ingredients.

Is there a downside? Maybe the case of Crammed-Brain Syndrome many of us take with us from two or more days of workshops and panels. Or the soft brace I’m wearing on my wrist after scribbling like crazy in my notebook to capture every morsel of good information.

Otherwise I must begin my entirely personal sweetness recipe with three days and two nights in a hotel. I’ve long maintained  that room service and maid service are among the supreme triumphs of this or any culture. A twenty-four hour snack corner in the lobby runs a close third.

This particular hotel was superb by the way. The bed was just right for my Mama Bear body. The toiletries were top shelf and I did bring all leftovers home with me. Plus I awoke each morning to the glowing sunrise you see above.

The conference luncheon was great. Only a small strip of hotel chicken atop the tasty pasta salad. And the keynoter made this a standout event. Hank Phillippi Ryan is one of the most energetic and inspiring speakers I’ve heard. “You never know” she said. You never know what waits around the next corner. So keep trying. Keep hoping. Keep enjoying. Keep writing.

Of course book signings can be humiliation hell unless you’re a bestseller. I’ll never forget the time I signed next to Nora Roberts. R for Roberts. O for Orr and OMG. The P’s knew enough to stay away. But at Liberty State Fiction Writers Conference the fabulous O-P section placed me between L.G. O’Connor on one side and Caridad Pineiro on the other. Sweet indeed.

Which brings me to the delectable heart of conference world ambrosia. Writers – Writers – and More Writers. At meals. In corridors. In workshop rooms. In the bar. At informal get-togethers and more formal ones. New friends and friends in the making. All members of the writer tribe.

Writers talking. Writers laughing. Writers debating. Writers sharing. Everywhere I turned I found writers on furlough from the trenches encouraging one another to fight through and past whatever obstacles we all inevitably encounter.

So here I am post-fog. Facing the rewrite of Chapter Thirty today and the new write of Chapter Forty to come. Embraced and emboldened by the real reason I attend writers’ conferences. In order to return home afterward reminded of how blessed I am to do this author thing.

Alice Orr – https://www.aliceorrbooks.com.                http://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter.                    http://www.twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks  .

RR

A Wrong Way Home – Book 1 of my Riverton Road Romantic Suspense series – is a FREE eBook at Amazon and other online retailers. All of my books are available at my Amazon Author Page http://www.amazon.com/Alice-Orr/e/B000APC22E/.