No Pain, No Gain by Victoria Chatham

 AVAILABLE HERE

    When authors start creating characters, they often build the character’s backstory – where they came from, what their family was like, the school they went to and what might have happened there. What career did they enter, and how hard was it for them to climb the corporate ladder if that was their chosen path? Did they come from a happy family? Maybe there were tensions there. Perhaps the mom favoured one child over another, and that second child felt left out or ignored. Were they bullied at school or on social media? A careless comment heard in passing might affect a character at a vulnerable point in their life. Rather than let it go, it becomes ingrained in them, negatively colouring their thoughts and feelings.

    The negative side of any of these situations can form what authors refer to as an emotional wound. However, much like an alcoholic who cannot recover until they recognize their condition and makes the personal choice to overcome it, our characters are unlikely to recover from an emotional wound unless they look into themselves and choose to make changes. As their creators, authors dig deep into a character’s background because the more profound the physical or psychological damage, the more complex the character.

    Fear is a huge motivator, so discovering a character’s greatest fear is one way of determining why they do what they do. In overcoming that fear, the character begins to change. What if a character is afraid of water but dives in to save a drowning child? What if a character is scared of the dark but ventures into an unlit alley because they hear a cry for help? Overcoming those fears, and making a bold decision to act, can be the start of the change in that character to make them unforgettable in a reader’s mind.

    In my Berkeley Square Regency romance series, one of my characters was overshadowed and controlled by her mother until she absconded, leaving Lady Olivia with no one but the family cook. Lady Olivia’s first step toward overcoming her fear of being left alone was stepping outside her front door. Perhaps a character has a physical flaw they have been teased about or otherwise made aware of. Whatever it is, it might make them not value themselves, making them think they have less to offer than the next person. They might think it makes them unlovable when what they want most in life is to love and be loved. Another of my characters dealt with her father’s murder by tracking down the murderer. The villain in my short story, Neat and Clean and Tidy, suffered abuse as a child, leading to him being an abuser and ultimately committing murder.

    The emotional wounds authors create for their characters are an extensive and complex subject, and I have given only brief examples here. I write historical and contemporary romance, so love mostly resolves my characters’ wounds. Idealistic, maybe, but the romance genre is known for its happy-ever-after endings, which keep many a reader coming back for more and, as an author, that makes me happy.

​Victoria Chatham

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Too much information? by Priscilla Brown

She's lover shopping, but her new boss could never be the goods on her wish list.

For more information on Gina's story, and purchase details, visit

https://bookswelove.net/brown-priscilla/

The brief response in regard to our daily lives, although of course individual, is possibly yes, too much information, what with the 24-hour news cycle, immediate internet including social media, and daily newspapers.

In fiction, how much information is enough? Characters have a life before they meet their fellow characters on the page; they have experiences, values, attitudes, beliefs to bring to their part in the plot. As author, the challenge is to establish these elements as adequate and appropriate for the characters' current life situations, without long explanations and descriptions,without unloading chunks of too much information. We need to show how these factors are relevant to what our characters do and to what they say, so the reader can understand where they are coming from.

I write contemporary romance, and before I start a draft, I have ideas in my head about the main characters. I imagine their pre-story life, their history which helps to delineate the persons they are when the story opens. I always know far more of this "backstory" than goes into the final narrative, and have to discipline myself to avoid this information dump. Years ago, in my first attempt at full-length romantic fiction, I thought I had to include everything in my head, which resulted in a huge scrapheap of "stuff". The lead female character had had a colourful love life in various countries with a string of different partners, nothing of which had anything to do with the job for which she applied and achieved although she had few qualifications for it. So unappealing, and a ludicrous characterisation. Whatever was I thinking?

The story in hard copy lurked in a drawer for years. When I re-read it, I was appalled. All this entirely superfluous information not only did not move the story on but slowed it down. With about a third of the original plot skeleton remaining, several major re-writes resulted in a name change and appropriate professional and personal backstory for this woman, for the lead male character a more credible personal history, and the deletion of redundant secondary characters. There was more to go: at one stage I wrote a 300-word prologue,which I ditched on the advice of a critique partner, and incorporated the necessary information (some was irrelevant) via dialogue in the first chapter.

I learnt a lot (still learning!). The final word count shrank by half, and eventually this story became Class Act. 

Enjoy your reading. Priscilla.

https://bwlpublishing.ca

https://priscillabrownauthor.com