Tag Archives: Heroes

How Your Main Character Builds a Powerful Story

Storytelling, , ,

How Your Main Character Builds a Powerful Story. You want to write the best story you have in you. A story that has you on the edge of your seat while you write it and the reader on the edge of her seat when she reads it.

Character Motivation is Key. Motivation links your main character to your plot. What your character must do, and how intensely she is compelled to do that thing, will determine how gripping your story turns out to be. The character is driven by her motivation. Her actions create your story line. They are the fuse for the fireworks of your plot.

Your Character’s Drive to Act must be Powerful and Dramatic. Otherwise, your story will not be powerful and dramatic. Here’s how to find your way to storytelling power and drama. Take these five steps and you will be dancing the path to a page-turner story.

Step One. I have prepared a list of powerful character motivations. Motivations that can catapult your character and her story into the intensity stratosphere. Choose the motivation that will produce the most drama in your story’s situation by causing the most conflict for your character. Find that motivation list below.

Step Two. For a longer, more complex book, you might want your main character to have a secondary motivation as well. A slightly less driving force than her primary motivation, but compelling enough to create story lightning all the same. Which is How Your Main Character Builds a Powerful Story 

Step Three. Drape your author shoulders in your most grand and glorious imagination cape and brainstorm three possible examples of how exactly this primary motivation might  enter your character’s life with sufficient force to drive her passionately forward page after page. Choose the one that  conjures up maximum conflict and struggle for your character.

Step Four. Brainstorm three specific examples of how this motivation might come to life and be dramatized, as in acted out, in scenes starring your character. Scenes that will capture and command your reader’s attention with sharp dialogue and riveting action. Scenes potent enough to become  pivotal turning points in your story.

Step Five. Brainstorm the specific nature of the struggle, or more pointedly, the trouble that could befall your character in each of these pivotal scenes. Keep in mind that your goal as storyteller is to plunge your character into hot water, then turn the temperature up higher, higher, and higher still. That heat is what sets  pages turning rapidly for your reader.

The Mighty Seven Most Powerful Character Motivations.

#1 – Love – A powerful motivator that can drive a character to her best and worst behavior.

#2 – Self-Preservation – The threat of danger or death is another powerful motivator. Include the preservation others here. The impulse to save another person or persons from peril.

#3 – Self-Knowledge – Be careful about making this a primary motivation in commercial fiction. It can be a bit too subtle and inward for the popular marketplace to embrace with enthusiasm. Still, it may occur as a result of your character’s experiences in your story.

#4 – Pursuit of Adventure and Life Experience – Do not let this particular motivator make your protagonist behave recklessly unless we, as readers, can identify with and support that choice.

#5 – Honor or Duty – These motives can be difficult to make believable in many contemporary, realistic stories. But, if you are writing action-adventure or fantasy, feel free to go for it.

#6 – Greed – All motivations are not honorable or noble. This is one of those. For that reason, you might not want to choose it as fuel for your preferably admirable main character’s behavior.

#7 – Revenge – Another tricky choice. Powerful and believable for sure, but unattractive. Even a character intent upon avenging a wrongful death may be contemplating a heinous act of her own, and that is a touchy storytelling choice. Greed or Revenge work better as motivations for your villain, who must also be strongly driven.

Give your Hero Character Admirable Reasons for What she Does. A smart storytelling decision because, the nobler the motive, the more significant her struggle becomes. And, the more significant we believe your character’s struggle to be, the more we care about her and about your story. Which is How Your Main Character Builds a Powerful Story.

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

ASK ALICE Your Crucial Questions. What are you most eager to know – in your writing work and in your writer’s life? Email aliceorrbooks@gmail.com. Or add a comment question to this post.

Alice has published 16 novels, 3 novellas and a memoir so far. She wrote her nonfiction book No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript that Sells as a gift to the writers’ community. Her latest novel – A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.

A Time of Fear & Loving

Praise for A Time of Fear & Loving: “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.” “I never want an Alice Orr book to end.” “The best one yet!”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

 

Tell Your Real Life Story

Memoir Writing, ,

Tell Your Real Life Story. There are many reasons to tell your story as you have lived it. All of those reasons are legitimate, as long as they are your reasons, and you are the center of your story. Which is definitely a story that deserves to be told.

You might want to make a gift to those close to you, especially your family. A gift portrait in words, and other materials too, created by you from the moments that make up your experience on this earth. Your story is a legacy after all, to be passed on to those you love.

Or, you might want a wider, less personal audience. An audience you reach by publication. I took that road once myself, with Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness. Should I ever choose to explore another aspect of my story, I might possibly try a different route.

What are the challenges of publication as a personal storytelling goal? They have to do with the difficulty of actually reaching that wider audience. I base this opinion on my several decades in the publishing business, as book editor, literary agent, and teacher.

What does commercial success as a personal storyteller generally require? Either you are already well known in the world. Or, you possess the potential to become well known because your story is sensational. Meaning it has shock value. The more shocking the better, if you wish to capture attention in a world already bombarded by shocking stories.

I don’t discount this reason for telling and marketing your story. If you happen to have risen to fame or infamy, grab your flash of spotlight while it lasts. Grab that glory with all your might, and hold on tight.

On the other hand, many of us might seek a more intimate center stage. The family and friends focus is one of those venues. But even this personal circle audience may not reach as deeply into your heart as you can travel when you Tell Your Real Life Story.

Some of us are determined to tell our stories, first of all, for ourselves. We seek to define ourselves, and to represent ourselves, on our own terms. You want to tell your life story as you perceive yourself to have lived that story.

We have all heard ourselves defined by others in various ways. From glowing to despicable. Reality generally lies somewhere between those poles. Plus, the reality that truly matters to your story is your own. What you perceive, believe, and struggle to tell about yourself, as long as you struggle for truth.

You aim to tell your real life story from the center of yourself. Not the versions of your story told by the voices of other people. Though the most insistent critical voice in our heads is often our own.

Your challenge is to excavate your story below its surface. To Tell Your Real Life Story as it really happened, beyond the derisive voices, including your own. To undertake a personal archaeology that will discover, uncover, and recover the story of your life that is most true for you.

This is an expedition worth undertaking. Unearth the story in which you are the main character, the hero of the drama you have personally experienced. Yours is a story definitely deserving to be told. Have no doubt of that. I, personally, can’t wait to hear you Tell Your Real Life Story.

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

Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness is Alice’s moving memoir of her battle against life or death odds and the good people who helped her triumph. Find Lifted to the Light HERE.

What Readers Say: “Couldn’t put it down.” “Juicy and truthful, straight from the heart.” “Too good to miss.” “Beautifully written.” “Funny and consoling.” “Alice Orr is an amazing author.”

All of Alice’s books are available HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/

Write Thru Crisis – Muffled Cries

Personal Storytelling, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Muffled Cries. My son was three when this first scene occurred. I had entrusted him to the care of another mother, while I went to the laundry room. We lived in a suburban apartment complex at the time, and I anticipated no danger.

When I returned, my son was nowhere in sight. My friend had turned away – for a single moment – to tend to her own child. I saw my son then, past the wide green grass of the play area, across the asphalt sidewalk and a border of more green grass. He was rocking back and forth on a curbstone at the edge of a busy highway.

I dropped my laundry basket and ran. I didn’t stop to wonder how his small-boy legs had carried him so quickly into peril. I didn’t stop to ask anyone if they had seen him take that perilous path. And, I did not cry out. If I startled him, he might topple into traffic, so I muffled the cries that terror had catapulted into my throat.

He was almost twenty when he caused me to do that again. He was back from college and staying with us for the summer. He’d gone out with friends into a formidable city and, though it was hours past midnight, had not yet returned home. I couldn’t run after him this time, and cell phones were years short of invention.

I sat on the couch, muffling my cries once more. I didn’t turn on the lamp. A lone streetlight outside the window illuminated my fears. Nightmare scenarios raced through my mind, though I didn’t once envision my son being locked into a cell, or a police club bashing him. Years later, female offspring would take my imagination to that horror show.

First, it was my granddaughter, in another large, possibly ominous city. She was there to march and shout in protest against the injustice of poverty and oppression. My son, of age by then to be her father, was near enough to find her at the precinct, if arrests should occur. Still, on that bright fall afternoon, I muffled my urge to cry out my worry and fear.

Not long ago, my daughter brought me similar alarm. She was demonstrating in support of her own strong beliefs, as she often does. On this occasion, armed police and members of the military lurked what I considered uncomfortably closeby. My daughter and her compatriots were herded into a roped-off area, but I guessed accurately that she would press close to the barrier and shout to be heard, while I muffled my cries.

Such stories grip the heart. Mike Nichols, an expert on how to create that gripping effect, once said, “We only care about the humanity.” That is because our own humanity resonates with the tale. Almost all of us have suffered through terror in our own lives, especially when we fear for someone we love. We know how it feels to clap our hands over our faces to shut out fearsome visions, and shut in muffled cries. I hope you will write about your muffled-cry moments, too.

My last story happened decades ago, during my own street activist days. I was in the midst of an angry crowd with a friend, when a policeman on a large horse reached down from his high perch and sprayed mace in the face of my friend’s young son. I didn’t clap my hands over my mouth that day. Instead – for a single moment – shock and disbelief muffled my cries.

Each of these stories deserves an ending. I reached my toddler son before he could fall into traffic. Years later, he came home at dawn and was soundly scolded. Phone calls, followed by profound relief, assured me my granddaughter and daughter in turn were safe and unharmed.

The ending of the mounty-and-the-mace story is hardly as satisfying. That afternoon ended my years of street activism. I walked away, into the safety of my whiteness.  Because of their blackness, neither my friend, nor George Floyd’s mother, had that choice. I am haunted by their cries, too soul deep and wracked with grief for muffling.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her post-activist work life in publishing, as book editor, literary agent, workshop leader, and author. She’s published 16 novels, 3 novellas, a memoir, and No More Rejections: 50 Secrets to Writing a Manuscript That Sells. Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You. Find her books HERE.

https://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
http://twitter.com/AliceOrrBooks/
http://goodreads.com/aliceorr/
http://pinterest.com/aliceorrwriter/