Plot Archives - The Character Comma

Romance Roadmap: How to Pace an Enticing Romantic Side Plot

April 27, 2018 EV Scarlet Comments 0 Comment

Who else is a sucker for slow-burn romances? I don’t necessarily mean just in romance novels. Any fiction story with a love interest can benefit from an enticing, tension-filled romance. Just like any sub plot, cultivating a romantic side plot adds depth and emotional appeal to your story. …that is, as long as you do it correctly! Unless you’re writing some kind of soulmate story, you shouldn’t have your characters be strangers one page and madly in love the next….

3 Easy Ways to Torture your Characters (And your Readers)

March 23, 2018 EV Scarlet Comments 0 Comment

To be honest, a lot of readers want to be tortured. They want you to tear their still-beating hearts from their chests and stomp them on the ground. You need to give them some happiness too, and it boils down to the same point: they want you to evoke an emotional response in them. The best novels are emotionally manipulative. They can convince you to like a character, then laugh as that character betrays you. They want you to absolutely…

19 Questions for Creating a New Plot-Relevant Character

October 2, 2016 EV Scarlet Comments 1 comment

To be honest, in the past I’d never given much thought to how to create a new character. They just kind of happened, based on what my story needed at that time. For the sake of this blog post, I actually made an effort to track the steps as I created character. My findings: It boiled down to asking a lot of questions. Questions about who they are, what they want, how they fit into everything that’s going on. First…

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