This is probably obvious but today I’m mapping out my hero’s relationship with his father. I chose their past relationship (“His relationship with his father was fine. Not super close but his father was present. A little demanding and pressury but not overly. He was distant-ish, present, mostly interested in his own thing, didn’t bother his son too much”). I chose their current conflicts, which have echoes of conflicts from his childhood. I chose how I want those conflicts to resolve emotionally. Now I’m trying to construct scenes that illustrate these conflicts, how they blow up, and how they resolve.
This is actually a pretty small part of the book, which is a romance novel, and mostly about the relationship between the hero and heroine. But it got me thinking about how a writer creates different arcs and different threads in a book, and if you can have them all come together towards the end where there is a situation that ties all the conflicts and pressure points and growth together–that’s very satisfying for the reader.
ahousewifeauthor 