Tag Archives: Heroines

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.

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Honor Your Goddesses. Mom Figures, Mates and Mentors

Life Comments,

My friend and mentor Paula Scardamalia gave me some good advice recently via a tarot card reading. Paula and the Three of Cups reminded me to honor my goddesses, my designation for the three women pictured on that card which honors the heart, the emotions and our dreams.

I knew at once who those three women were in my life. They fit to overflowing Paula’s criteria for what they should have been for me. They were my supporters when I most needed them and have remained so ever since, even though they have passed on from this plain. They keep me from being overcome and undermined by the obstacles in my path, including myself.

Paula encouraged me to name these women and keep them present in my mind and heart, but most of all to honor them. I encourage you to do the same. Identify your goddesses, name them, honor them. I bestow that honor by writing about my three wonderful women here. I hope you will do the same for the three women who steadfastly urged you toward your light.

Grandma & Me at Two and a HalfFirst always among my goddesses is Grandma. Alice Jane Rowland Boudiette. She was the bright light of my first seven years and of the past twenty-seven also. I lost her, to some extent, during the forty-plus years between those early and later periods of my life. Maybe because I was bewildered by her sudden absence, hurt and even a little angry at her for leaving me in difficult circumstances with difficult people.

My mother was mentally ill. My father was overwhelmed and increasingly angry. Still, the basic principles Grandma taught me abided somehow. She was my template for how to be a good, caring person who makes the world a better place. She continues to be that model for me. I am grateful she was eventually restored to me. That’s the two of us in the garden when I was two or so.

Marilyn (Swartz) Seven was the first real friend I made after moving to New York City in 1980. I was bewildered yet again and shaken by another loss, this time of the comfortable life I had built upstate. New York was too much for me to handle, or so I thought, and I felt anything but comfortable. Then Marilyn appeared and coaxed me out of the Hell’s Kitchen apartment where I’d been cowering. “Chutzpah,” she said. “We’re going to get you some.”

She dragged me to my first MWA (Mystery Writers of America) meeting and dumped me into a conversation with Mary Higgins Clark. That was my beginner giant step into the publishing world, where I have spent my professional life ever since. We lost Marilyn too, to breast cancer. I miss her spirit and hear her enthusiastic voice in my ear to this day. Because of her, chutzpah became my thing. Thank you, Marilyn.

Artie's DeliSeli Groves called me her little sister, and I was honored by that, as I was honored to know her. Seli’s wit was always with her, lightened by gentleness and good cheer, never harsh. Her smile warmed me through and throughwhenever I was in her presence. We would meet at Artie’s Delicatessen near the corner of Broadway and 82nd Street in Manhattan. I remember sitting in the window with coleslaw and huge pickles in front of us.

Seli was forever teaching me, though never pompously, about life, about people, about writing and publishing. She taught me about Judaism too, and brought me to love its traditions. Of my own religion, she’d say, “Jesus was a good Jewish boy. He went to temple on Shabbat and took care of his mother.” I said Kaddish for her in my imperfect shiksa way every day for a year after her death. I wish I could sit with her in the deli window again and laugh and learn.

These three women, so different from one another in the way they appeared to the world, are together as one in my heart. They blessed me mightily, and I shall honor them as long as I live.

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

– R|R –

A Villain for Vanessa – Riverton Romantic Suspense Book 4 and my other books are available from Amazon HERE. A Wrong Way Home – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 is a FREE EBOOK there also.

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Nobody’s Lukewarm about Kara – Riverton Road Monday

Great Read, Kindle Bargain, Writing Tips, ,

AliceOrr_AWrongWayHome_POD[1][1]I’m not used to readers reacting ambivalently toward my heroines – much less getting upset with them. But that is precisely what’s happening with Kara – the heroine of my 13th novel A Wrong Way Home – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1.

Ordinarily I don’t think I’d have minded much. Except Kara is – now that I think about it – a lot like me. She’s headstrong and opinionated and sometimes abrupt. She doesn’t put up with crap from anybody.

In fact in her first scene with Matt the hero she hauls off and socks him in the kisser. His left cheek to be exact. She has her car keys balled up in her fist when she does it.

Plus – if he hadn’t backed off from his intimidating behavior – she was ready to apply a swift effective kick of her heavy Frye Boots to his private parts.

Maybe this is the New Yorker in me talking but all I have to say so far is this. “What’s not to like?”

Okay. In the interest of full disclosure I admit Kara is impatient. She’s taken some hard knocks in the past. Especially from Matt Kalli – or at least from his family. She is definitely on the defensive with Matt and she can react too quickly.

Some of her behavior can be attributed to her return to her damned hometown. Everything bad she’s ever had to live through – including those hard knocks I mentioned – happened in Riverton. She swore never to come back and she meant it.

She’s been lured here by the one North Country person she unconditionally loved – her Aunt Dee. Even after death she calls Kara to come home and she does.

One would think all the preceding was enough to endure. But in addition the true nemesis of her former Riverton life – Anthony Benton – has been murdered. Kara might be relieved except that people she loves are caught in the prime suspect crosshairs of some bad local police persons.

Consequently Kara has her full feisty on. Just as I would. Just as you might. Or – if you couldn’t manage that for yourself – you might want feisty Kara duking it on your behalf for sure.

Thus – it shakes out that there are Kara-in-my-corner folks who say things like “I loved the saucy independent street savvy heroine.” Versus a curse-that-Kara reader who says “Belligerent and hotheaded Kara comes within the too stupid to live category.”

Obviously we know where I stand. Kara is my kind of gal. Even – maybe especially – when love grabs her by the heart and she scraps and kicks but cannot shake it off.

Please give Kara a chance. My guess is you won’t be able to help yourself. By the end of her story you’ll love her too – almost as much as you love good old lovable me.

Besides – the eBook of A Wrong Way Home is FREE FREE FREE at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00T9RVGGC and other online retailers. As I said – “What’s not to like?”

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com.

RR

My eBook A WRONG WAY HOME – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 1 – is FREE online. My 13th novel A YEAR OF SUMMER SHADOWS – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book #2 – is available too. Find it – along with all of my other titles – at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B000APC22E. I hope you won’t be lukewarm about any of them.