Well, we’re back to blogging! It was great seeing so many of you at the ACFW conference in Denver. Please make plans to attend the conference in Indianapolis next year.
For those of you who attended our continuing education class, thank you. It was great to have such a large, lively group.
I wanted to bring some clarification on “dropping the bomb.” In the class on Saturday, I talked about not hording a plot point, but going ahead, getting the “big news” out there and see where the story ran from the “explosion.”
Here’s what I mean. If you’re telling the reader your heroine is pregnant outside of marriage, but the hero doesn’t know, GO AHEAD, tell him, see what the fall out would be! Don’t “horde” the point.
Or worse, don’t keep hinting at the fact she’s pregnant. “She was so concerned he’d discover her secret.”
Okay, that works for like, um, a chapter, or two. NOT a whole book!
What if the heroine tells the hero she’s pregnant, and he suddenly leaves town. Hmm, now we got a story. Have a bit of tension. Please, don’t let the heroine or hero live their story in their head. Live it out loud, on the pages, in dialog.
If the hero doesn’t know the heroine’s secret, neither should the READER!
On the other hand, when writing The Sweet By and By, I told the mother’s problem right away. Just put it out there on the page. During my edits, my editor suggested NOT telling the reader. Wait and let the mother tell the heroine in her own time. Ah, yes, makes perfect sense. And because the mother probably wouldn’t be musing about her secret all over the pages, I didn’t have to hint at it very much at all. She’d sort of tuck it in her heart and deal with it.
Once I hid her problem, I hid it. I referenced she had an issue, but didn’t say what. I didn’t let the reader in on the secret until the mother spoke the words out loud.
You have to feel your way through these things. What is the greatest and best path to creating tension on the page? Is it keeping the secret? Or is it blurting it out, blowing up the story and see where the rocks fall?
One thing’s for sure: don’t tell the reader if the other protagonist doesn’t know. Always think, what will create tension and conflict. And choose that path!