April 2019: Which Comes First
~ Raisa Greywood ~

CTR asked:

Which comes first when you start a new story? The title? The characters’ names? The plot? Explain your starting process and what you need before you can write the first words.

Raisa Greywood said:

CTR Author’s Dish wants to know what happens first when I write a new story.

Honestly? This is going to sound a little weird, and I promise I’m not crazy – well not very much anyway. I get characters, springing almost fully formed from my head, like Athena from Zeus. They have definite personalities, and while some of them are content to wait until I have time to set them down on paper, others are so annoying, so insistent, that I have to do it almost immediately just to shut them up – even when they don’t have names. Hell, sometimes they don’t give me a name until I threaten to call them Cecil or Francis, or something. The ladies get names like Eunice.

When characters show up like that, I’ll usually get one at a time, and then I just wait for a few days for the person most likely to piss that first character off. For example, when I wrote Bastard’s New Baby, I came up with the hero, Jackson, first. BNB is part of the Roosters series from Changeling Press, and all the books feature cocky heroes who sometimes step over the line into a$$hole. Once I had Jackson down, Siobhan stepped right up, rubbed her hands together, and said, “Heh, hold my beer.”

The ‘meet cute’ in that book is truly epic, if I do say so myself. I laugh every time I think about it. Actually, for that one, the meet cute scene was about the first thing I wrote between them. The story eventually revolved around Jackson screwing with his phone while driving, running a red light and almost hitting Siobhan, then her tearing a stripe from his hide with copious f-bombs – not fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to meet with him for a job interview.

Jackson doesn’t like kids much. He won’t even date a woman who has children. Siobhan is raising her infant nephew after the death of his parents. Jackson wants a groomed, submissive, quiet woman who will look good on his arm at parties and do as she’s told. Siobhan is a former college rugby player, an astute businesswoman in her own right, spends most of her time in yoga pants and stained t-shirts (hello, raising an infant here), and has no f*cks left to give. Of course, it wouldn’t be romance if they didn’t get themselves together at the end.

I love creating characters who clash with each other. It’s way too much fun to let them spar, even when the sparring takes the story in a direction I didn’t intend at first. I enjoy, and I hope my readers enjoy, watching characters fight their attraction along with whatever external conflict I’ve introduced. That eventual submission from both characters when they realize they have to face that external conflict together is supremely satisfying.

That leads me to the true first thing I write when new characters pop up. I write the ending. Yep, you heard me. The ending comes first. When I finished Wicked Deception, a dark paranormal romance, a few of the side characters stuck with me. Lily, one of the heroine’s friends, and Michael, one of the hero’s. Neither are what they seem at first glance. Lily isn’t a weepy little miss, too downtrodden by circumstance to protest. Michael… Well, he’s the one who put her in a bad way in the first place, though she doesn’t know it. And when I pictured these two characters together, I kept getting this image in my head of them in a modern Manhattan apartment getting ready to go to a concert. Except Lily was born in 1875-ish. Lily and Michael said, “You’re the author, word monkey. Figure it out.” Then they went to Guantanamera near Central Park for supper. They didn’t even bring me leftovers, the big meanie-heads. If you’re ever in midtown Manhattan, you should go there. The old Havana elegance is worth waiting for, and the food is divine.

Ugh. Thanks, guys. Really. That scene is now the epilogue to Wicked Truth, which will set the stage for Wicked Flame. You’ll have to read Wicked Truth to figure out how I did it.

In any case, I’m not sure why, but I need to know where the characters are going to end up before I can figure out how to get them there. My process is basically to start with the characters – even if they aren’t written down aside from notes – figure out where they want to be, and lastly, I set the stage for the journey.

Thanks, CTR Author’s Dish, for allowing me to participate in another great Q&A!

– Website – https://raisagreywood.com/
– Twitter – @Raisa_Greywood

The Leopard Mage

[Paranormal Romance]

My brother is dead, executed at the hand of my beautiful and fierce snow leopard mate, Chen Daiyu. But Norkad was a pawn in a bigger game, and chose death over helping me protect my female. I want to resurrect him just to kill him all over again.

The bond between me and my elegant, deadly mate grows stronger every minute, until we know each other better than we know ourselves. She is perfection, body and spirit, and in her feral desires that heat the blood in my veins.

But there are those who would use my Daiyu for their own purposes. And when they take her from me, nothing will stand in the way of getting her back. For her, I would destroy worlds and dance in the ashes.

Available in Ebook:

More Authors Dish about which comes first.

https://coffeethoughts.coffeetimeromance.com/ad2019-apr-comesfirst/