Today's Writing Community - Fiction Made Easy

By Teresa Slack

Creating Fiction that will attract publishers may be easier than you think. Learn how to step back and let the creative team inside your book tell the story for you.
One of the first things I learned when I decided I wanted my writing to be more than something to keep me off the streets didn’t come from a writers’ conference or out of a teaching manual. It came about by good old-fashioned experience. Hopefully, this article will spare you some wasted time and effort as I reveal the secret I learned.

Here it is. Are you ready?

Brace yourself. You may not believe it can be so easy.

Dear aspiring writer, you are not the storyteller here, your characters are.

There. That’s it. Wasn’t that simple?

Okay, okay, I see your wrinkled brow and the disbelieving curl of your upper lip. Before you click off this article and never follow any link associated with my name again, allow me to explain.

Characters are not created to act out some little story in your head. If they are, I guarantee your story will stall in the starting gate. Oh, you may start out like gangbusters with that wonderful idea that’s keeping you awake nights. But as you go along, your initial burst of creative juices will burn out, and you’ll find yourself staring at a forty-page manuscript asking, “Whatever made me think I could finish a book?”

Characters are created first, then the story around them. And the story must be told by the characters living it. In my book, Redemption’s Song, I created two characters for the sole purpose of filling roles I had already decided upon. The story needed tension, hence the birth of these two characters. For weeks I tweaked and adjusted, trying to manipulate the characters into what I thought the story needed. Neither character would cooperate. Every time I tried to force them into a predetermined mold, the scene fell flat and slowed down the progress of the story. The worst thing that can happen in a work of fiction.

Finally I realized those scenes weren’t working and they never would. I deleted every one and let the characters become who they were meant to be. Both hit the ground running and their storylines blossomed beyond anything I ever anticipated.

“These aren’t real people,” you cry out in indignation. “They’re products of my imagination, and by cracky, they’ll do whatever I tell them to do.”

Okay, if you insist. But you’ll only end up hurting your story. Just like real people, characters cannot be manipulated to behave the way you want them to or the way story needs them to. They must have the freedom to behave true to character.

Of course characters, like real people, are multi-faceted. Bad guys are sometimes good, and good guys have been known to mess up. That’s as it should be. But allow what happens in your story to happen naturally. One of the most exciting experiences as a writer is to watch your characters evolve in a way you never saw coming. That’s what keeps the storyline moving and your job worth losing sleep over.

So step back and let the characters tell the story in their own way. We’ve all read books where the author has intruded onto the page. Not an entertaining reading experience. For the sake of your story, put your pride aside and fade into the background. Disappear. Readers don’t care about what you have to say. They want to hear the story. Let them. Your characters will thank you. More importantly, your readers will thank you.

About the Author

Teresa Slack is a full time Christian fiction author from Ohio. Her newest novel, Redemption's Song, is scheduled for release in January, 2006. She is currently polishing Book 3 of her popular Jenna's Creek series and tossing around ideas for her next book. Read more about her and her fiction on her website http://www.teresaslack.com