Tag Archives: Heroes

Write Thru Crisis – Precious Life

Personal Storytelling, ,

Write Thru Crisis – Precious Life. I had a dream last night. It was deep winter, though our real season now is the beginning of summer. My son and I were in Denver, at a layover of a flight from the east coast, where we now live, to Washington State, where we used to live.

The dream details were vivid, but the time wasn’t the present. My son was young, maybe ten years old, though he is in his fifties now. I wasn’t any particular age. I was simply his mother, responsible for the safety of his precious life, and my own, and our safety was in danger.

A snowstorm raged outside, and the forecast was possibly dire. For some reason, only comprehensible in a dream, we were scheduled to travel in a relatively small plane. There was an important reason for our trip, and my son was eager to reach our destination. Everyone, including the pilot, assured me we would probably be safe to fly.

I don’t know what I believe about dreams. I don’t usually remember them after I awake. I’ve had others, vivid like this one, but I haven’t written them down afterward. I definitely have not written them down and shared them on the internet, or anywhere else.

The difference now is that we’re at a choice-making time in our personal waking lives. My husband and I must decide if we’ll reopen our business. as New York City reopens amidst the Covid-19 crisis, after nearly four months of public work suspension.

What makes this a dramatic story is the high stakes that are involved. We are both well beyond the sixty-five-plus vulnerable age for Coronavirus, and I have an underlying health condition. I won’t go into specific detail, but the physical circumstances of the company we run together are risky. My husband would face this risk in person and possibly bring it home to me.

I awoke from my intense dream to a lovely morning. The sun shone bright outside. The kitchen was flooded with light and warmth, and birds chirped beyond the window. There could hardly be a more peaceful setting. Yet, conflict persisted within our personal situation.

In a truly dramatic story, opposing high-stakes forces are at work. In our story, we hadn’t planned to retire this early. It would be to our financial advantage not to, and financial advantage is crucial to us, like it is to almost everyone we know. Back in my dream, the snowstorm continued, and threatened lives that were precious to me. In real-life, the pandemic did the same.

Have you ever been in your own high-stake situation? Has your safety, and/or that of people you love been at risk? Was a critical choice required? Did a prophetic message appear, maybe a dream? Was your flashing red light simply instinctual, or in some other warning form?

I won’t keep you in suspense. In my dream, I decided we wouldn’t travel further. My son grumbled, but the kind pilot invited us to stay in her pleasant home so all was well. Similarly, my husband and I have decided to close our business and continue the precautions that have protected us so far.

Your dramatic life stories also deserve to be told. If you’ve answered yes to any of the questions I asked about your own experiences, and I suspect you have, I hope you will write them down. Maybe also consider passing them on to me, to be shared as I’ve shared my own. Either way, I hope you will Write Thru Crisis about you own Precious Life.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

Alice has spent most of her professional 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 (revised version coming soon). Her current work in progress includes Hero in the Mirror: How to Write Your Best Story of You.

Read the story of another dramatic period of Alice’s precious life in her memoir Lifted to the Light: A Story of Struggle and Kindness. Available HERE.

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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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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The Tooth of the Matter – Orr What? Wednesday (on Thursday)

Great Read, Storytelling, Writers Life,

My Feet 5-5-15I was aware all of a sudden that I was about to pass into a life-wrenching experience. Let’s refer to this experience as Extreme Dental Modification or EDM for short.

This EDM period would require mass quantities of money or a plethora of plastic accompanied by a crush of credit fees. This was the first life wrench to anticipate and it’s a big one.

The financial threat was scary but – for the sake of honesty – I must confess my true terror. In this world and maybe especially in this culture we are schooled to be vain. I never missed a single one of those classes. EDM would threaten my vanity big time.

My surgeon told me to expect a three to four month window for procedures and healing. Three to four months? That’s not a window – it’s a crater blown out of the wall of my life. Including the entire holiday season. My favorite time of year and full of socializing – face to face.

“Okay, Alice. Calm down,” I told myself. “No need to add angina to the mix.” Still I could feel the quips sprouting about liquefied turkey for Thanksgiving and cookie crumbs for Christmas. I envisioned our blender in burnout mode. I also envisioned myself in the mirror.

That was the true terror. The look of the thing. Alice as desiccated apple doll. Plus no lipstick. Lipstick would call attention. But I love lipstick. Especially in fall when I switch to scarlet. I not only wouldn’t be able to wear scarlet lipstick – I wouldn’t be able to say scarlet lipstick.

I resolved that the only visual anyone would see of me for the next four months is the accompanying one. Note the scarlet toenails. Then the dentist walked in – not the scalpel-toting surgeon – the common sense toting dentist. He said the most amazing thing.

“I think we should consider going another way.” In that instant the story changed. The future was once again bright as the star atop our Christmas tree and the sheen of my toothy grin.

Don’t you just love endings with a twist and a hero dentist and the villain EDM vanquished? Not to mention the scarlet lipstick.

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

RR

A Vacancy at the Inn  – coming soon – is the first Christmas Novella of my Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series featuring the Kalli family – and now the Miller family too – in stories of Romance and Danger. A Wrong Way Home is Book 1 of the series. A Year of Summer Shadows is Book 2. A Villain for Vanessa will be Book 3.

All of my titles are available at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B000APC22E.