1) Build the Family

When you’re writing a story about a family, it’s important to create a detailed picture of that family. Is it the stereotypical Mom, Dad, son, and daughter picture? Is it a little boy being raised by his aunt and grandma? Is it twins who live with their adoptive parents, but are close with their adoptive aunt and uncle and visit them frequently? Everyone’s family looks different, think about how your protagonist’s family looks, who they consider their immediate vs. extended family, and why.

2) Personalities

After you’ve figured out what their family looks like, you’ll need to dive into each character’s personality. Does their Mom smother them with love or is she somewhat distant? Is their Dad a workaholic or does he have any strange hobbies like building ships in bottles? Is their sibling the type to shut themselves in their rooms or the type that is nosy, needing to know everyone’s business? Give each member of the family their own unique personality, idiosyncrasies, mannerisms, and interests.

3) Relationships

Once you have an idea of each family member’s personality, it’s time to delve into each relationship on an individual level. Let’s take a family that has a mother, father, daughter, and son living at home. Perhaps the son and daughter don’t get along well and are constantly fighting one another for the bathroom or at the dinner table. Though they don’t get along with each other, maybe the son gets along well and confides in his mom and the daughter to her dad. And perhaps these confidences cause a strain in the relationship between the mom and dad as they disagree with who is at fault in arguments when they’re both getting different sides of the story. A lot of different relationship dynamics can be at play within a single household, as well as with extended family.

4) Conflict

Conflict is at the heart of storytelling, it’s how the plot will continue to progress. After you’ve got the basics of the relationship dynamics down, it’s time for you to create more specific situations with higher stakes. For example, let’s say the sister steals the brother’s donut so, to retaliate, the brother prank calls her crush. This is something that could affect her life at school, so the stakes are higher for her if he does some damage. And they aren’t simply high because he could embarrass her, but him doing this could further damage their relationship.

And conflict doesn’t always have to be so direct. It could be something like a husband using the bathroom and the wife asking if she can have it because she’s in a hurry. He says he’s almost done and she says OK and walks away. You can feel the tension here and you can feel her frustration, but it doesn’t lead to an outright fight it’s indirect.

5) Settings

Conflict will continue to build among family members in your story, until either information comes out or there is a setting for the conflict to boil over into a fight. This setting could be at a familial gathering such as thanksgiving, but it could also be at mom’s work party, cousin’s wedding, on vacation, etc. It should be a setting where it simultaneously makes sense for information or conflict to arise, while also being an incredibly inopportune time for it to do so.

The post Show Don’t Tell: Family appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Whose story is it?

A short story is all about creating a satisfying and believable character arc within a finite number of pages. So the last thing you want to do is go back and forth between two POV’s or try to give two characters an arc (trust us, it’s hard enough to do one). Even if you want two characters to be within the central action of the story–even if you want the events of the story to change multiple people in some way–the story should only belong to one character. And that should be the character who is going to be most drastically affected by the events that unfold. Ultimately, if a reader reads your story and can’t answer the question, “Whose story is this?” by the end, you’re doing something wrong.

Why now? Why today?

As we said before, the biggest challenge of a short story is that you basically have to do what a book does in terms of character arc within a short number of pages. Because of this, it’s crucial that you ask yourself- why is this story happening today? When attempting to write a short story, a lot of writers make the mistake of focusing solely on forming an interesting and engaging character and failing to focus on why this day specifically is important to the character’s life as a whole. Character drives plot so of course, it’s important to have an engaging character to carry the story, but the story needs to be happening on an extremely important day in their life.

When reading about this, a lot of writers then make the mistake of thinking that means that a huge event needs to happen in this character’s life. They’ll assume their parents have to get divorced or they need to be involved in a school shooting for the story to be purposeful enough. However, it doesn’t have to be a huge monumental event on the grand scale of things, it simply needs to be a huge monumental event to this specific character.

For example, perhaps the story starts with a character in his fifties and his wife tells him the doctor called to set up a checkup. A reader may assume its something dire, but perhaps this man just has refused to go to the doctor’s for the last thirty years, insisting that they’re wackjobs while secretly just being afraid of finding out something is wrong. Perhaps this is a fight he and his wife have been having annually all of this time. And, by the end of the story, he decides to finally go. To most people an annual check-up with a doctor isn’t life or death- but if it is to the character, then you have a good story.

What does the protagonist want? What is keeping him/her from getting it?

Another core aspect of a short story is character desire. While in a book-length manuscript we say that character drives the plot, in a short story it’s more specifically character desire that drives it. It needs to be made clear right from the beginning what the protagonist of the story wants and they need to want it badly. It’s not engaging to write a wishy-washy character that sort of wants something or might want it, because then the story has nothing at stake. The character has nothing to gain or lose over the course of the events that take place. And to be clear, they can have a negative desire as well. For example, in the above scenario, our main character desperately wants to avoid the doctor–that’s his core desire that drives the plot. In addition, the conflict comes in through whatever forces are keeping the protagonist from getting what they want. For example, in the above scenario, the conflicting force is obvious–the conflict is his wife insisting he go to the doctors.

Choice

Ultimately, the climax of a short story should always be a choice that the protagonist faces. In books, a climax can be a long battle scene or something with a lot of action, but in a short story when the conflict comes to a boiling point it must lead to the character making a choice. And the events of the story up until that point should make it clear what the cost of the choice will be.

The choice can’t be black and white, right or wrong kind of choice, either. It should present two options or paths to the protagonist and we should see that they will gain and lose something no matter what they choose. So let’s take our previous example for instance. Let’s say the story leads to the couple fighting and the wife making it clear that their marriage hangs on the balance of whether he goes to the doctor. In this choice, our protagonist either loses his wife or loses his sense of safety. And he either gains another year of peaceful denial or he gains a wife who feels happy in her marriage.

The post Genre Spotlight: Short Story appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.

Make your story different

This is a good rule of thumb for any novel, but especially with the romance genre. There are a lot of stereotypical tropes embedded in this genre. There’s the ‘bad boy’ who is broody and snarky, but really has a heart of gold. There’s the ‘unique’ or ‘quirky’ protagonist, where a novel constantly reiterates how special she/he is. There’s the plain girl who transforms into a beauty, suddenly gaining the attention of suitors. When you’re writing a romance novel, do your research and figure out what overused devices there are in the genre. Otherwise, you risk repeating what hundreds of authors have already done before you. Don’t get us wrong, avid romance readers won’t necessarily hate this. But, if you’re not (at the very least) taking a new spin on an old trope, your book won’t necessarily be cemented into the genre or gain very much attention.

So, if you’re writing a book with a love triangle between the broody bad boy and the sweet dorky guy- make sure to try to take a different spin on it in some way or another. Maybe the broody boy is just shy (like a Mr. Darcy type)? Or maybe the sweet dorky boy turns out to be a master manipulator?

Avoid Insta-Love

This is one of the most common tropes of romance novels. Insta-love is exactly what it sounds like- love at first sight. We’re not saying your character can’t immediately experience butterflies or have his or her attention drawn to their eventual partner. You can have infatuation at first sight, just not love. The sensation of falling in love in a fiction novel should feel as real as possible. Therefore, it should parallel the sensation of falling in real love as much as possible. And in real love, there is build up- different things your person says or the way they treat others or the way they make you laugh causes feelings to grow over time. If you start a relationship at the pinnacle of passion, then there’s nowhere to go but down. Readers want to feel the build-up and the pay-off of a love story and they won’t be able to if every moment is written with an equal amount of strength and feeling. Start in a reasonable place, where the characters are merely attracted to and flirtatious with one another, and then work your way toward love. It’s a big word and shouldn’t be taken lightly- even within the context of fiction.

Write imperfect characters

As previously stated, you want your story to feel as much like a real love story as possible. And guess what doesn’t exist in the real world? A perfect person. There’s nothing that will take your readers out of the story more than if your protagonist and his/her love interest are seemingly flawless.

There must be internal and external conflicts in every good story. It won’t be interesting for your reader if they’re just two perfect people that outside forces are trying to keep apart. They need to have their own issues and baggage because everyone does. Maybe they have a bad relationship with their parents, maybe they have had bad relationships in the past, maybe they were bullied and lack self-confidence. Either way, they need their own obstacles to overcome within the confines of the relationship. This leads to a better payoff when they, eventually, end up happy.

Follow the formula

The genre lends itself to creativity, but it also follows a very broad guideline that romance novel readers have come to expect. The key elements are a) A protagonist and romantic interest they’ll love and root for b) a believable conflict and c) a happily ever after. The first point is fairly self-explanatory, but a believable conflict is harder to understand. This is, essentially, a conflict that readers can sympathize with. It means that if you’re writing about your characters getting into a fight over a dumb misunderstanding that could be cleared up in five seconds if they just talk to each other…you’re doing it wrong.

In regards to your ending, romance readers tend to expect and want a happily ever after in some capacity. Tragic endings work best when the book is primarily another genre (like fantasy or sci-fi) with a romantic element on the side. Feel free to break their hearts if you want, but not every romance novel reader will be happy about it. And this doesn’t mean you need to have the stereotypical happy ending. Take The Notebook, for example. The ending is very bittersweet (spoilers). Noah and Ally end up together but, eventually, Ally gets Alzheimer’s and they pass away together in their sleep. So their end is fairly tragic, but they do get a long life together of love and happiness- which is their own unique version of a happily ever after.

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The post Genre Spotlight: Romance appeared first on Dorrance Publishing Company.