Character Development

New Contributor – Stella Price on World Building

Stella Price 1 Response »

Aug 252011

This month we introduce our newest contributor to WriteSEX – Ste lla Price. Stella is half the duo of Stella and Audra Price, award winning romance authors who construct characters, worlds and more that draw the reader in. She’ll be joining us at DragonCON 2011 on Friday Night as we host the WriteSEX Pane l. Her first article on world building follows.

World Building. Most think it’s just for epic fantasy, or even dark fantasy. As a paranormal romance author, world building is, as they say, 9/10 of the law. Without it, characters are not believable, nor is the story in general. In my coming posts we will talk about suspension of disbelief, character development, and building a world from the ground up, but for now I want to talk about the necessity of world building, in any story setting.

Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Historical, contemporary, BDSM… Name a genre and it’s quite possibly the most important element because this is what sets your stage, and what hooks your reader. Without a believable situation and background, it really isn’t a story.

In work, even if you’re working from a contemporary setting, it’s the details that matter in making your book believable and unique. You cannot write a story without details right? Well details are a major element of world building.

World building, when done correctly, and not half assed, makes your story richer, full of depth and allows the reader to be immersed in the story you created. As an author, you strive to engage your reader on a level deeper than a letter to penthouse, right? Without the connection you can be damn sure that next story you put out won’t be on the reader’s auto buy list.

There are levels to world building. Light world building, where the author uses already accepted places, subjects and morae’s to make the reader feel at ease, and just adds details to enrich the experience. Then there are those that do it with a more heavy hand, where they take ideas already in play and twist them into other things, be it alternate history or alternate universes, and then there is the extreme of building the world from roots to the sky. None of these are wrong, and all have their pros and cons.

Light world building is what you see a lot of in Para romance. They use the contemporary setting, and then focus on the characters and their societies to build up the mythology. Kresley Cole with her Immortals After Dark series and Gena Showalter with her Lords of the Underworld series are prime examples.

A more heavy hand twists to alternate history, or alternate universes, and focuses on the characters and Society like the lighter hand does, but puts emphasis on the background and events that brought about the current status quo. Allison Pang’s Brush of Darkness is a great example of this as well as Lia Habel’s forthcoming Ya Dearly Departed and Meljean Brook’s Iron Seas books. These books rocked alternate histories and timelines, to give the books depth and dimension.

Extreme world building, Like Gail Martin’s Summoner Series or Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series is the very top of the world building ladder. You see this most in High fantasy and Scifi, but it is slowly making its way into the mainstream of romantic fiction with series like Michele Armstrong’s Settler’s Mine series. I look forward to seeing others.

It’s your duty as the author to know what kind of world building you are capable of, so that you don’t short change your readers or your story. Getting into a groove with your writing is paramount and the sooner you realize where you sit in the world building arena the faster you will realize just how important it is to your work.

Stella Price
Award winning best selling author
www.stellaandaudra.com

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Character Devleopment in the Four Act Structure

Sascha Illyvich 6 Responses »

Apr 142011

In the last blog post we talked about the four act structure for novels in general. I promised I would cover how to write and use of the four acts in erotica/romance novels and how to apply it. We’ll take one of my longer stories as an example writing tip.

To react is to behave negatively and BE CONTROLLED by the situation. To respond is to behave positively and CONTROL the situation.

A reminder:

ACT ONE – INTRODUCTION
Here we meet the characters, get into the basics of our conflict

ACT TWO – CONFLICT
The main issue is slowly brought to light and dealt with using the characters old ways of being.

ACT THREE – THE REVERSAL
In this act we give the characters what they think they want, rather than what they need. We also make things more difficult in order to FORCE new behavior on our characters.

ACT FOUR – RESOLUTION
The characters learn lessons and change their ways of being to resolve the core issue.

First off, I used the words react and respond at the end of the previous post. The plot arc covers this as our characters go from reacting to an event to responding. The difference is simple. When plot and character arc happen to the character, initially they react, meaning they let the situation control their feelings and emotions. Behavior occurs with an old way of being. In my Male POV workshop we cover this concept of being, extensively but for now understand that just like us, our characters have a predefined tape in their heads. In our first act and throughout the story until we reach our black moment, our characters are going to react the way they normally would, despite having new information and a new way of being. This, in conjunction with conflict will ramp up tension for the reader and make them continue to read. This is especially true if we’re writing erotic romance where the plot has a strong focus on sex between the hero and heroine. The sexual encounters are where passion is explored and where emotional conflict comes out as characters think their way through their previous actions, think for the future of any relationships and continue to react to events in the first and maybe second sex scene.

In the middle sex scenes, characters have experiences that maybe didn’t go as they planned or were used to. They begin to question things and this is where the conflicts start to get heavier. As more pressure is put on our characters in the middle of the second Act that drives us towards conflict, they start to see that their old ways of being no longer work with the same results and something new needs to be done. But what?

This is where our black moment has the most impact. Our characters are lost both emotionally (depending on plot) and perhaps physically. The arc we’ll explore in another post will discuss character development in greater detail but for now, understand that there should be a shift in behavior on both parties. The point of view character starts looking at a new way of being to a situation. Thus, responding should occur during the climax and resolution of Act Four.

My next post will focus more on the character arc. Until then, stay tuned for Ralph Greco and our SEO adventures!

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