tips on writing Archives - Reese Ryan Romance

Today I’m the visiting professor over at one of my favorite blogs, Romance University. We’re discussing a topic essential to any story–your characters. My stories are character-driven. However, even in a plot-driven story, the main characters shoulder most of the load. If the character doesn’t feel real, the reader will quickly lose interest.

A character that isn’t fully formed is akin to a flat paper doll as opposed to a three-dimensional one that feels real to the touch and mimics the activities of an actual baby. Which one would the average little girl prefer?

Readers also prefer characters reminiscent of living, breathing human beings. The kind that will make them wonder what those characters are doing, long after the final page of the book has been shut.

So how do we take a faint idea, a general personality and a few physical traits and turn them into a well-developed character? I’m sharing a few of my tips for making the character feel more fully-formed in today’s Romance University post, Make Your Story Richer with In-depth Knowledge of Your Characters.

Come on over as I discuss a few techniques that enable you to breathe life into your characters and amp up your understanding (and the reader’s) of your character’s motivation. Then share your experiences and tips in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

A note on Romance University: If you’re a romance writer, this tuition-free instructional zone is a wealth of information you can’t afford to miss. But don’t think it only has something to offer to romance writers. The information on creating characters, choosing setting, craft advice, author brand and marketing, industry news and how to accurately write about firearms can be useful no matter what genre you write. So don’t miss out on the great information available there.

Photo provided courtesy of merwing little dear. Some rights reserved.

As writers, we get so absorbed with the storyline and characters, writing, and a myriad of creative reasons not to write that we forget about the business side of being a writer.

We lose sight of the fact that once we’re done with writing, editing, revising (rinse and repeat), we’ll need to talk about the book. In a way that’s interesting, intelligent and concise.

Cue the deer in the headlights footage.

It’s embarrassing when someone asks, “What’s your book about?” and you stand there staring at them like a deer caught in the headlights. It can be absolutely disastrous if it happens when you’re on the elevator at a writing conference and your dream agent is the one asking.

I’ve been there before.

Not on the elevator with my dream agent. But let’s just say my deer-in-the-headlights face has gotten pretty damned good thanks to some hard core practice.

What I have since discovered is that writing the premise of your story first is the key to never having this happen to you again. Today I’m over at Contemporary Romance Writers–the blog for my RWA online Contemporary Romance Writers Chapter enumerating the this and two other reasons why it pays to write the premise before you write your book.

Listen to the little diddy above (because it will seriously make you happy for at least the next three hours) then I’d love it if you popped over to the Contemporary Romance Writers blog to chat about whether you write your premise first and when your last deer-in-the-headlights experience occurred.