Group Therapy

When you’re starting to write a novel, you never really know if your plot and characters have legs. You have your main characters, you have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen to them, you have a central theme, and an ending in mind. All these ideas swimming around in your head may or may not work on the written page.
That’s because what we imagine about our characters and their journey might not translate to the reader. What we imagine as writers may work in our minds, but not on the page. The final result might not resonate or connect with the reader, and this is the worst thing that can happen to a novelist. Not poor sales, not poor royalty cheques, not one or two bad reviews, not failing to win an award. No. It’s having a reader shake her head and say she has no clue what the author is trying to accomplish and feels nothing (or little) for the characters.
This is where it really helps if you have early readers or a writing group that you can talk to. These need to be people you trust, people who will be honest without trying to hurt your feelings, people with nothing to gain from your success or failure, but are there to support you, the writer. These are the people you can feel free to bounce ideas off of, to read some pages of your work-in-progress and then give you an honest answer.
My latest romance novel, Heartsick, was published this month (www.bellabooks.com). At its core, the book is about two characters whose respective partners are cheating on them…with each other! The two betrayed characters come together as friends and help each other through their mutual pain and grief, only to later discover they have growing feelings for each other.
At a writing retreat with my fellow Ascribe Writers over a year ago, I bounced this idea off them. I talked about how I wanted to start the novel, which was right at the point that the cheating comes to a shocking discovery. We all sat around the dinner table after a long day of writing and talked about how such a discovery might feel to the characters and what they might do with that discovery going forward.
Putting my novel idea to a group share, or group therapy, really helped me focus, and it really reinforced for me that my idea was workable, that I was on the right track. So before you get too far along in your novel, be sure to bounce your core ideas off someone — or better yet, off several people — because a flawed central idea will cause you a lot of heartache later on.