Strong Relationships Blaze Your Story Pages. “What is wrong with this relationship?” A central human issue in real life. An equally central issue in writing fiction.
Relationships are the Bottom Line of the Fiction Market. Readers want answers to these life questions. How do you find a relationship? How do you sustain a relationship once it has begun? How do your regain a relationship that seems irretrievably lost? How do you correct the flaws that undermined the relationship in the first place?
These Mysteries Haunt the Heart of Every Relationship Story. Which is why interpersonal entanglements are prime reader interest territory, and not only for women’s fiction. Any story that involves adults interacting has the potential for a relationship entanglement. That conflict – particularly if it is a romantic struggle – increases your story’s sales potential by leaps and bounds in the publishing marketplace.
Your Goals are to be Published – to Attract Readers – to Become a Beloved Author. Dramatic conflict between your characters supercharges your potential to reach each of these goals. Relationship storytelling is a very savvy choice for any career-minded author. Strong Relationships Blaze Your Story Pages.
Women’s Fiction and Book Sales Potential. Approximately eighty to eighty-five percent of U.S. readers. are women. The majority of this female audience reads women’s fiction in some form. Literary stories, mainstream commercial novels, category romance. An immense market where agents, editors and, most crucially, readers search for enthralling author voices.
You and Your Stories Can be Among those Voices. The key to sought-after-author status in women’s fiction is a heartfelt, convincing relationship that comes to fiery life on your pages. Such relationships are the backbone of this flourishing segment of the book market.
Your Story’s Primary Relationships Focus on Your Main Character. But it takes two to tangle. Your protagonist needs characters to relate with, romantically and otherwise. Reader engrossing plots, and subplots, can arise from any troubled relationship. A friendship. A parent and child. Your hero confronting her rival or her captor or her tormentor. Possible combinations of colliding characters are as varied as your imagination.
Still – the Most Popular Story Relationships are Between Lovers and Potential Lovers. Readers seek roadmaps for navigating this problematic area of human interaction. They are also drawn to the story tension inherent in a tale of two people attempting to love one another in the face of mounting obstacles and formidable odds.
Here Lies Storytelling Paydirt. Your two central characters collide. They struggle intensely, dramatically, powerfully. They make turbulence of their lives and excite your reader’s interest. They do so most credibly when their struggle reflects the turbulence and excitement of real human experience. Which could be based on your own experience.
Your Personal History is Fertile Research Ground for your Stories. Mine the conflicts and struggles that lie beneath that ground. Disguise them in whatever fictional form you choose, but keep the emotions real and true. Do this, and you will create stories that kindle into life, because Strong Relationships Blaze Your Story Pages.
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, a memoir, many articles and several blogs 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 Suspense Series Book 5 – is available HERE.
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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