Finding the Heartbeat Within My Stories
Flawed. Fearless. Unapologetically Feminine.
No, I’m not describing myself… or am I?
Do you believe that the fictional characters a writer creates possess (even if only infinitesimal specks) aspects of the author’s personality? I do. After all, my characters are spawned from the recesses of my imagination.
So I want to amend my initial declaration about myself. Somewhere, residing deep down in my innermost being, a part of me is also—in some manner and degree—flawed, fearless, and unapologetically feminine, just like my main characters.
The Things I Collect
Writers are life-observers mining little nuggets from the world as they go about their day, usually during the most mundane moments. Writers note the ordinary and the unusual with equal vigor, never knowing if, or when, any of the multitude of benign elements will one day be removed from the little bag of nuggets stored away and polished up.
I collect a kaleidoscope of ordinary moments in my brain or scribbled in the little notebook I carry everywhere: an interesting facial expression witnessed while standing in line at the local coffee shop, a snippet of overheard humorous dialogue between a mom and her teen daughter at the next pump at the gas station, or the stunning eye color of a stranger walking by on a beach.
Sometimes I discover gold and gems; other times, plain flawed rocks and ugly black coal. Nothing in my collection is useless. In fact, I enjoy the flawed, misshapen, ugly rocks the most. These imperfect life nuggets excite my imagination and fuel my plot twists.
Where the Safety Bar Comes Off
Life is not the picture-perfect, 4K gloss I see everywhere: social media, TV, and advertisements. At least my life isn’t. If yours is… Congrats! Sincerely. Enjoy it.
But if your life is like mine in any way—a messy, often-mundane, chaotic, repetitive rollercoaster ride of good and bad days: Howdy! Climb aboard. Next ride’s about to start.
My philosophy for navigating life is: hang on and hope that the cart doesn’t fly off the rails, or lift your hands to the sky and scream with fear or joy. It’s your life; your choice. Personally, I’m usually the boring woman sitting up front, knuckles ghostly white and threatening to pop from the tension as I grip tightly onto the bar and silently wish for a day that ends uneventfully and with minimal damage. LOL.
But when I write, I search my imagination for stories and reach into my little bag of collected “people observation nuggets”; I let go of the safety bar and extend my hands to the sky with reckless abandon. Sometimes I scream in fear; other times I shriek with excitement as I craft and dig for plot twists, polishing the beautiful gold and gems of dialogue, and tossing in a few misshapen, ugly, flawed stones into the mix.
The result?
Hopefully a story that readers find entertaining, multi-dimensional, flawed, and when they reach “The End” …fantastic. Just like life.
Finding the Heartbeat
Experts I’ve read often talk about finding your niche by asking yourself what you write and, more importantly, for whom. For the longest time I answered those questions incorrectly. I was thinking too generic, too mainstream, too boring. Each time, I regurgitated the same answer: I write YA thrillers, YA fantasy, and contemporary adult thrillers for readers who enjoy plot twists. The answer mirrored my life: I was holding onto the safety bar.
Technically, my answers were accurate. Yes, those are the genres I write in, and yes, I hope my readers like the plots and enjoy watching my characters try to navigate the twists and turns of the lives and worlds I’ve plopped them into, but that is not what I write. It is not my niche.
My characters are not perfect. Some possess beauty, others disabilities. Some are kind, others cruel, and some fall into the morally gray realm which lies in between. But that is only a small part of each of them. As the readers turn the pages, my characters’ flaws, weaknesses, and strengths are revealed—the good, the bad, and especially the ugly. Thus, the genre that my books are categorized in is not what I write, nor for whom. While genre matters, it is not the heart of my stories.
There is a single heartbeat that pulses below the surface within every page of every story (novel, novella, or short story) of mine: main characters who are
Flawed. Fearless. Unapologetically Feminine.
That is my niche.
I create flawed characters living in twisted worlds… That’s it.
If this is your niche, all I have to say is:
Welcome aboard, and enjoy the ride!
