Picture it: a writer is telling me what story she’s working on. Within ten minutes I know every detail of the opening scene, but I still have no clue what the story is about. I stop the writer and ask her three questions I once heard Harlequin editor Wanda Ottewell use in a workshop:
- What does the heroine want?
- Why does the heroine need it?
- How far will she go to get it?
If the writer can’t answer these questions, she doesn’t know her characters well enough. She needs to know the answers to this for both the heroine and the hero.
Another way of asking is: What are the goal, motivation and conflict? The romance writer community uses the acronym GMC to discuss this and Debra Dixon wrote a fabulous book on the topic.
