Write Your Novel Step by Step (80)

Man Made follows a mysterious force as it sweeps around the globe erasing anything man made - from buildings, vehicles, and technology to medicines, clothing, and dental work.

Governments stagger under the panic, religions are at a loss for an explanation, scientists strive for any means to stop or divert the phenomenon, and the world’s population from families to individuals struggle to prepare for The Event, which will drive humanity back beyond the stone age.

The Event is coming.

Are you prepared?

Storymind

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~ Step 80 ~

Emotional Relationships

Emotional relationships begin with a "baseline" and then evolve. You will need to establish how your characters feel about one another at the beginning of your story. Later, in the Storytelling stage, you'll describe the growth of these emotional relationships over the course of the story.

Both characters in a relationship need not be present to establish how they connect. You might give your readers a look at one character's room where he keeps a score of framed pictures of the second character, his female co-worker, in a little shrine.

Then, you describe the second character's room where there is but a single picture of the first character which has been made into a dartboard. It is obviously well used as evidenced by the great quantity of dart holes. There are three darts in it as another slams in to join it, thrown by the second character.

Or, one character might write a story about the other for a newspaper or a school report. A photo album might show two people in a series of pictures over the years.

In Citizen Kane, the relationship between Kane and his wife is established by a series of vignettes over the years in which the size of their dinner table grows, moving them farther and farther away from each other.

Of course, in real life most emotional relationships are not a single melody but a rich and complex symphony. You may want to develop a different specific means of revealing each aspect of a complex emotional relationship, or you might prefer to have a single illustration that reveals the complexity all at once.

Again, even if you can't think of an inventive reveal now, at least put in a placeholder example that you can fall back on if the Muse fails you. Make sure that the audience is absolutely made aware of every important emotional relationship among your characters.

In this step, then, describe how you will reveal to your readers the emotional relationships that exist among your characters. Use specific story scenes or moments.