Category Archives: Storytelling

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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Storytelling Mentor on Your Shoulder

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Storytelling Mentor on Your Shoulder. Every writer I know has endured rejection. I certainly have. In fact, on the occasion of my first major rejection, the editor implied, or maybe told me straight out, that I had no idea what I was doing.

My first big mistake that day was agreeing to a sushi lunch. I didn’t know sushi from tsunami at the time, but I did know I should appear cooperative. So, I replied, “Sushi’s good.” Had I guessed the true purpose of the lunch, I would have made a different response. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a clue, though I probably should have.

I was writing my second novel for this editor. The first hadn’t set the world on fire.  The second was supposed to correct that, but the revision phase had dragged on so long I’d almost lost track of what my story was originally about. As I took a wobbly chopstick grip on my third portion of something raw and wet wrapped in seaweed, my editor let me know she felt the same.

“This just doesn’t work for us,” the editor said. If you have ever heard or read those words, you know what happened next. I plunged into shock. On the other hand, I was back on track in one respect. I got that the revision phase was finished. Novel number two was off the table, as surely as the sushi had slipped from between my chopsticks and plummeted to my plate.

“You seem to think a bird sits on your shoulder and tells you how to write,” my editor was saying. “Like you don’t have anything to do with it.” I needed to be at the top of my mental game right then, but I was incapable of responding. Instead, I excused myself, dashed to the ladies’ room, and leaned my clammy forehead against the cool black tiles of the marble stall.

A Storytelling Mentor on Your Shoulder?  I had never been aware of anything, with or without feathers, telling me how to write a book. What I had always been aware of was my lack of power. Because of the way the publishing world works, I had no control over the destiny of my writing career. Now, I understood how perilous such a position can be.

If you have ever submitted a manuscript anywhere, you know what I mean. You labor over your work, send it out into what feels like a void. then wait for a thumbs up or down on your efforts, your ambitions, your hope. You endure this because you have no idea what else you can do. You are as clueless as I was in that ladies’ room with my forehead pressed against tile as black as I believed my future to be.

A few years later, I became an editor myself. That choice had a lot to do with power. I was determined to regain mine, and to pass it on. As an editor, then a literary agent and teacher, I would be that bird. I would sit on a writer’s shoulder and whisper in her ear the words she needed to hear to avoid her own demoralizing rejection scenes. I could do that because my years on the other side of the desk taught me a lot about how to create a marketable manuscript.

I have been sharing that knowledge ever since. Still, the dread words are out there. “This just doesn’t work for us.” Words that hit their mark hard for any writer. I wish I could guarantee they will never be heard again, but I can’t. What I can offer is my experience and expertise, and to be a bird with an empowering song you need to hear. A Storytelling Mentor on Your shoulder. Stay tuned to this blog. I have many more melodies to sing.

Meanwhile, ask your crucial questions. How does your attitude need to be adjusted? What fears do you face about your writing career? What do you most eagerly desire to know? Add a question comment to this post, or email me at aliceorrbooks@gmail.com. I will be honored to respond.

Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com

Alice Orr’s Christmas story A Vacancy at the Inn – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Series Book 3 – is available on Amazon HERE. Enjoy!

Alice Orr A Vacancy at the Inn

Praise for A Vacancy at the Inn. “Grabbed me right away and swept me up in the lives of Bethany and Luke.” “Undercurrents of suspense move the story along at an irresistible pace.” “The Miller family is rife with personality quirks, an authentic touch that demonstrates Alice Orr’s skill as a writer.”

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.

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Write Thru Crisis – Salted Wounds

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Write Thru crisis – Salted wounds. Mother’s Day was a few weeks ago. My son once said, “This is a holiday created by Hallmark Cards to sell their product.” My response to that might be, “This is a holiday created by Morton Salt to sell their product.”

I am a mother who had a mother, and a grandmother who had a grandmother. All of which does have a Hallmark card side. Idyllic resonances that could prompt sweet, four-line rhymes. Plus, a Morton Salt side, associations with wounded places, some scarred over, some still bloody, all conflicted.

Meanwhile, on a grander scale, there is the Covid-19 catastrophe. Whether you believe this to be our century’s worldwide plague or a conspiratorial hoax, we are all in the midst of a Morton’s moment magnified. This situation rubs salt into every vulnerable, sensitive corner of our psyches, the places where we most long to be left undisturbed.

Unfortunately, crisis of any kind is, by nature, disturbing. Crisis is an impertinent, belligerent, often malicious finger, rubbing the Morton’s deeper in, making certain we experience its sting to the max.

Back to Mother’s Day, which I pick on only as an example. Like the Corona Crisis, Mother’s Day is a universal phenomenon, whether you celebrate either or not. We all have some relationship with motherhood. We are all in the grips of this crisis. We all have wounded places.

Animals are a good example of what to do about the last of those. When wounded, they find a place of refuge, a crevice where they can burrow in, lick the lethal elements from their wounds and, hopefully, heal. Each of us has a similar refuge close at hand, our personal stories and the telling of them.

Here, as examples, are two of my own refuge stories. Coroneal Mom’s Day was bittersweet for me. On the lighter side, I missed my son in law’s waffles. Last year, I stuffed myself so full of them, I had to lie immobile for an hour to recover. This year, he and my daughter stood six feet from me in the street, avoiding mention of waffles or anything else we missed.

On the heavy side, my mother suffered from mental illness. Which is why I spent most childhood weekdays with my kind, loving grandma. She passed away when I was seven years and three days old. Life before then and life afterward were very different realities me and, for some reason, this Mother’s Day has brought those times close to my heart.Grandma and Alice at Two and a Half

Obviously, each of these snippets requires much more detail to become an actual story. As I said, they are only examples, starting places in search of further telling. They are also crevices I may burrow into, salve my wounds with words, and heal, or celebrate. You can do the same.

What real-life stories does Mother’s Day 2020 call forth for you? No crevice is required, only a pen, a journal, and sentences. Or draw a picture, construct a collage, compose a lyric and some music to go with it. Whatever your medium preference may be, let it wash the salt away, dull the sting, encourage healing to happen.

And don’t forget the feelings, where method and magic meet. Share your stories, if you wish, at aliceorrbooks@gmail.com, and let me know if you would like others to experience them too. Share this post also. We all have stories to tell, as we Write Thru Crisis.

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.

Look for all of Alice’s books HERE.A Time of Fear & Lovinghttps://www.facebook.com/aliceorrwriter
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