- Joined
- Jul 13, 2010
- Messages
- 541
- Reaction score
- 53
Okay, so I'm showing up more than a little fashionably late after finally figuring out (quite a while back and with the help of AWers, I might add) that I may have been a closet romance writer for quite a while now. I'm still very much in love with SFF, but I like a good, strong romantic element, too, and I was fighting it like the Dickens.
So here I am, and...
Fox's The Following has me all fired up and excited about the menage HEA I've been fussing over for so damned long! I love the Paul, Jacob, and Emma dynamic so much and it just reminded me of how much I want to see Ray, Gryph, and Evy together as a *treble.
Thus far, I've figured out what it is that needs to happen to get certain spokes of this wheel to fall for others as in Ray for Evy, Evy for Gryph, and Gryph for Ray, and they each have different hang-ups and doubts about these latter connections.
Ray, almost immediately after meeting Gryph, feels a connection with the other man, Evy's been crushing on Ray for a while before our story starts, and Gryph is absolutely enamored with Evy from the get-go, so those feelings are already there, either pre-story or very early on in the story, so it's the relationships in the paragraph before this one that need to gel within the story's time frame.
At the story's beginning, it's like a great big wheel of unrequited love and I love that for some reason.
Anyway, moving on - how do you come up with external goals for your characters? For me, that moment when one of my characters realizes they're in love with the other is the most compelling part and sometimes I focus so heavily on the dynamics of the relationship that I forget there needs to be an actual story goal, you know? Something by which to measure the story's progress.
At one time I rather rudely (and ignorantly) thought that it was some kind of shortcoming on the writer's part if they couldn't write solely about the relationship dynamics without "tacking on" a story-size external goal. I now understand the importance of having an external goal, but coming up with one is sometimes difficult. I have one for Evelyn and it could reasonably become the goal for my guys as well since they're both tangled up with her in their own way, so that may be all I need, but sometimes I have trouble coming up with external stuff, that's all.
How about y'all? Do you find it easy to figure out the dynamics of the characters involved in the HEA and to figure out just what it is that needs to happen for them to fall for one another and then flail around endlessly for an external goal to wrap all of it up together? Or does the latter come easily to you? If so, what's your secret? I beg you!
Talk to y'all later. For now, happy dance over my newfound excitement in regards to my WIP, as I've been down about it (and my life in general) for a while now. Go, Snoopy, go!!!
*Cheesy or cute? I just wanted a word like "couple" to describe them and sometimes "threesome" or "menage" seems to me to only describe the sexual acts, not to describe the relationship as a whole - what do you think? The alternative I thought of was "threebie" but I like "treble" a bit better.
So here I am, and...
Fox's The Following has me all fired up and excited about the menage HEA I've been fussing over for so damned long! I love the Paul, Jacob, and Emma dynamic so much and it just reminded me of how much I want to see Ray, Gryph, and Evy together as a *treble.
Thus far, I've figured out what it is that needs to happen to get certain spokes of this wheel to fall for others as in Ray for Evy, Evy for Gryph, and Gryph for Ray, and they each have different hang-ups and doubts about these latter connections.
Ray, almost immediately after meeting Gryph, feels a connection with the other man, Evy's been crushing on Ray for a while before our story starts, and Gryph is absolutely enamored with Evy from the get-go, so those feelings are already there, either pre-story or very early on in the story, so it's the relationships in the paragraph before this one that need to gel within the story's time frame.
At the story's beginning, it's like a great big wheel of unrequited love and I love that for some reason.
Anyway, moving on - how do you come up with external goals for your characters? For me, that moment when one of my characters realizes they're in love with the other is the most compelling part and sometimes I focus so heavily on the dynamics of the relationship that I forget there needs to be an actual story goal, you know? Something by which to measure the story's progress.
At one time I rather rudely (and ignorantly) thought that it was some kind of shortcoming on the writer's part if they couldn't write solely about the relationship dynamics without "tacking on" a story-size external goal. I now understand the importance of having an external goal, but coming up with one is sometimes difficult. I have one for Evelyn and it could reasonably become the goal for my guys as well since they're both tangled up with her in their own way, so that may be all I need, but sometimes I have trouble coming up with external stuff, that's all.
How about y'all? Do you find it easy to figure out the dynamics of the characters involved in the HEA and to figure out just what it is that needs to happen for them to fall for one another and then flail around endlessly for an external goal to wrap all of it up together? Or does the latter come easily to you? If so, what's your secret? I beg you!
Talk to y'all later. For now, happy dance over my newfound excitement in regards to my WIP, as I've been down about it (and my life in general) for a while now. Go, Snoopy, go!!!
*Cheesy or cute? I just wanted a word like "couple" to describe them and sometimes "threesome" or "menage" seems to me to only describe the sexual acts, not to describe the relationship as a whole - what do you think? The alternative I thought of was "threebie" but I like "treble" a bit better.