March 2018: Runaway Characters
~ Cynthia Sax ~

CTR asked:
How do you handle characters who change personality without your say so? Or, how do you handle characters whose spontaneous actions change the plot or course of the story?

Cynthia Sax said:
This is what I want as a writer – to have characters come alive, drive their own actions, take over the story. I’m a character-driven panster (A pantser is someone who writes by the seat of her pants, having no fixed plot. Character-driven means I allow characters to lead when writing.). Much of my early writing in a story is wandering in the wilderness, waiting for my characters to form their own personalities and make decisions.

This results in rewrites on these early chapters when my characters DO come alive but that’s okay. That’s part of my writing process, part of the magic. I include rewrites in my writing schedule, designating days for that task. (I tend to write forward in the first draft, assuming the rewrites have been completed and then, during draft two, I’ll change the earlier chapters.)

There are things I can do to help my characters come alive. I can craft the bare bones of their personalities – what they love, hate, fear, want, their inner and outer conflicts, their histories. I can think about how they might talk, what they might look like, how they would earn a living. I can put them in normal situations. How would they order coffee? What type of coffee would they order? Where would they order it from? I can introduce them to other characters, see how they interact (this is especially important for romance – there should be chemistry between the characters in the romantic relationship).

What happens when the characters don’t come alive? I swap those characters with other characters. (No work is truly wasted in writing.) Characters might come alive under a different premise, with a different plot. I find if I force a character into a story, the story lacks magic and, in this crowded market, any stories I share should be magical. My reading buddies have limited reading time. They deserve that magic.

– Website – http://cynthiasax.com/
– Twitter – @CynthiaSax

Taking Vengeance

[Cyborg SciFi Futuristic Romance]

The only force stronger than their hate is their love.

Vengeance hates all humans. They killed every being he ever cared about. When the huge C Model cyborg is told he’s genetically compatible with the enemy, he makes it his mission to capture the female and use her to expel all humans from his home planet. That should be disappointingly easy. She’s a weak, fragile human.

Then she blows up his ship, blasting to bits his preconceived notions about the enemy.

Astrid, aka the Buoir Berserker, hates all cyborgs. They killed her entire clan, including her baby sister. The warrior female has vowed to hunt down and destroy the enemy. When a savage cyborg arrogantly puts his hard, sexy body within her reach, she does the only thing a female can do—she peppers his muscular physique with projectiles.

The more passionately they fight, the stronger their attraction becomes. Neither of them will relent on their missions, yet they can’t keep their hands off each other. Their battle will either end in love to last an eternity or in death.

Taking Vengeance is Book 12 in the Cyborg Sizzle series and is a STAND-ALONE story.
It is also an enemies-to-lovers Cyborg SciFi Romance set in a dark, gritty, often violent universe.

Available in Ebook:

– Kindle – https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Vengeance-Cyborg-Sizzle-Book-ebook/dp/B079YGMLD2
– Nook – https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/taking-vengeance-cynthia-sax/1128043105
– Kobo – https://www.kobo.com/ebook/taking-vengeance-1
– iBooks – https://geo.itunes.apple.com/book/taking-vengeance/id1352770472

More Authors Dish about their runaway characters.

Read them all: https://coffeethoughts.coffeetimeromance.com/welcome-authors-dish/