Ask Annie: How to Write the Perfect Hero

You may recall that I've been taking questions from the Ideas Jar of late, and the most recent one I've received is this:

Following on from your post on point of view – how exactly do you approach characterisation between the genders?  i.e. male point of view and female.  How do you research the male psyche?

Well, I had to have a bit of a think about this question, because it immediately made me feel as if I ought to research the male psyche.

But after a bit, I decided to ‘fess up.  I don’t really hold to the prevalent view that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.  We are all from planet earth.  We all react to the trials and tribulations that life throws in our paths according to many factors apart from our gender.  Our personality, background, previous experience of similar situation, the state of our health, stress levels, or even whether we’re hungry or tired or just plain in a bad mood for some other reason.  And while I find articles like this one, that is supposed to highlight the difference between the way men and women think very amusing, I don’t believe it really does demonstrate basic differences between the sexes.

I don’t hold to the view that women, as a rule, would spend that much time dissecting their relationships – at least, not the kind of women I want to write about.

Nor would any hero of mine be so inattentive to the woman he is dating that he loses the thread of the conversation entirely.

When I write a hero, he will think, and behave, far better than that.  If he is going to be a swoon-worthy romantic hero, then he is going to have real goals, and a compelling motivation for thinking the way he does, for saying what he says, and for acting the way he does.  Because any heroine I write is most certainly not going to be feeble enough to fall for a man who is not worthy of her.

Having got that off my chest, I have to admit that when I write a story, I do tend to find it easier to imagine what my heroine is thinking and feeling, and often start by writing the romance almost entirely from her point of view.  And the hero I write for her has to be what she needs, specifically, rather than being a stereotypical hero in any way.

He also needs to have goals in which a modern reader can sympathise, and motivations that make sense.  He needs to be, first and foremost, a person.  A person that readers can relate to, and cheer for, and want to find a happy ever after.

Now that, actually, is where I do face having to make some tricky choices.  My hero needs to be the kind of man that will make a modern reader swoon, yet he also has to be a believable Regency male.  And because of the era in which he lived, he would have had a very different outlook in many ways, to a modern man.

Both he and his female counterpart would have known their place in the social hierarchy, which was much more rigid than ours today.  He might well have known what kind of life he would have lived, from his birth, particularly if he was born into the peerage.  He would have been closer to the land, more aware of the passing of the seasons, and familiar with handling animals.  He would have known how to ride horses and how to shoot pigeons, and would not have thought either pastime anything out of the ordinary.  He would have attended brutal bare-knuckle fights, and cock fights, but he would also have gone to church as a matter of course every Sunday, and been proud of being English (not British).  If he was from the upper classes he would have also had a working knowledge of Greek and Latin.  He would not have been ashamed of believing he was innately superior to women, (and most other men).  Nor would he have thought it unreasonable to pay a skilled man to spend his entire life taking care of his clothes, or spending a small fortune on getting a jacket that moulded to his shoulders, and breeches that outlined his fine, muscular legs.  He would also have consumed so much alcohol – since water wasn’t often fit to drink – that nowadays he might be deemed to have a bit of a problem!

And yet I still need to portray him as a person with whom modern day readers can empathise.

And so I draw a veil over the cock fights he attends, and don’t let the reader in on the fact that he probably consumes so much alcohol that he is slowly but surely pickling his liver.  Instead, I concentrate on his reaction to, and his treatment of, my heroine.

If ever he acts badly towards the heroine, the reader needs to see that his motives are not from sheer unpleasantness, but because he is damaged in some way by the blows life has dealt him.  And be able to believe that the heroine I write for him will be capable of bringing him healing, through the love he develops for her.  And that she bestows on him.

So, to sum up, when I write a hero, I want him to be believable as a character from his time period.

I want him to have the kind of character that a woman, from any time period, could find totally swoon-worthy.

And I also want him to be a perfect match for my heroine.

And it won’t hurt if he also looks like this!

Annie's next hero is Lord Ashenden, whose story will be told in "The Debutante's Daring Proposal" which is released in June, but is already available for pre-order through Amazon (and other retailers)

Two sides to every story - except when there isn't... by Valerie-Anne Baglietto

Earlier this year, I left the cosy confines of North Wales and headed down to London to take my daughter to see Wicked. We both love the Wizard of Oz, so we’d been dying to see this musical for ages. I expected to enjoy it, but what I didn’t expect was that it would ignite something in my Writer’s Brain that I’m now finding endlessly fascinating. I mean, I already knew about POV, of course I did. After nearly two decades in this business, I’m hardly a novice. But now I’m thinking much more deeply, not just about POV but about perception.

We’ve had a couple of great posts on Novelistas Ink already about this subject, and I don’t want to repeat what Juliet and Annie put so eloquently. They’re well worth a read or re-read.

This particular post is the one about my own point of view about point of view (yes, I was trying to be too clever there).

View on Amazon

By the time I saw Wicked, I’d already finished the first draft of my latest book Four Sides to Every Story.

POV was something that had been constantly on my mind for several months, since the title for the book first popped into my head while I was staring out of a window on a train one day. (Seriously, what is it about trains? Didn’t JK Rowling come up with the idea for Harry Potter on a train?) Anyway – my story, which has a grown-up fairy tale romance at its core, didn’t just have the hero’s and heroine’s sides to take into account, there was also the fairy godmother to consider, and the hero’s stepdaughter. Their roles in the story were crucial, and it was imperative they narrated their parts, too.

But just like Wicked, it wasn’t enough simply to get into each character’s head for a scene or two. How the characters perceived the same unfolding story, and how they were perceived as people within that tale, were paramount. I don’t want to give too much away of the plot of Wicked. After all, if you haven’t already had the pleasure, you might want to read the book or see the musical for yourself. But basically, it’s the Wizard of Oz from a different angle, so it helps if you’re familiar with the landscape of Oz. And it shows us, in such a fiendishly inspired way, how a different narrator can turn an entire story on its head. An exciting concept for a writer. I came away with my head BUZZING. (Maybe my life is very quiet and I’m easily pleased.)

Propaganda is a powerful tool, not just in wars...

It can scramble our brains, make us forget to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. The same with gossip. How quickly we can think ill of someone, without knowing their side. And villains, after all, are the heroes of the stories we tell - in their own eyes. Recently, movies like Maleficent also help us to see a well-known tale from a different POV. I wanted to do something like that within Four Sides to Every Story. My fairy godmother is young, and not at all theatrical like the kind we’re used to. But we see the tale from her perspective too for once, as well as from the others involved. Although the plot of the book isn’t a modern retelling of an actual fairy tale, we all know the markers, the familiar thread, the way the story ought to unfold. But it doesn’t. It starts going very wrong. The path to true love becomes perilously rocky. And not everyone is telling the truth or letting us completely under their skin.

And that’s another thing. The trendy-but-not-new device of the "unreliable narrator". The omissions. The secrets they don’t share with the reader.

Ah, I learned to love that, too; although it wasn’t easy to begin with. It was too new to me - or so I thought. If you have more time to spare, make a large mug of tea or coffee and look the term up on Wikipedia. In essence, all fictional narrative is unreliable to an extent, because if we're using POV correctly then the story is filtered through the narrator's eyes, with his or her own life experience, prejudices, moral code, etc. But while I was working on Four Sides I hadn't researched the device, so failed to appreciate the history behind it, or the fact that I'd absorbed the subtleties of using it from many books I'd read in the past, including Agatha Christie.

Out of the four points of view in my story, there are various degrees of 'unreliability'. Ooh, the fun I had once I got into my stride. This was my Happy Book, as I nicknamed it. The one that was a joy to write after the torturous bit at the start when I couldn’t see beyond the first few chapters. I’m grateful to it for giving me those months of unadulterated pleasure. I’m indebted to the lessons it taught me.

Of course, in my earlier rom-coms, I tried to use POV as effectively as I could, too, but on the whole, the narrators were the ‘goodies’, even if they sometimes behaved badly. They always laid themselves bare to the reader. I received a tweet a couple of weeks ago which brightened up a rainy Sunday. It was from a fan of Fresh as a Daisy, which is over a decade old now, who said she still read it at least once a year. She liked the fact I had managed to make all the participants in a love triangle sympathetic. It got me thinking, and re-reading it myself. There were three ‘nice’ people involved, who made mistakes throughout the story, but none of them was out to hurt anyone. They were real and ordinary and exactly who they claimed to be, even if they didn't spill all their secrets out in one lump on the page; the idea being, the reader would perceive them as such and be sympathetic to their problems.

But that isn’t quite the case in Four Sides to Every Story. This is a modern fairy tale, with a twist.

I felt I had to go one step further than the way I normally approach the craft of writing POV. It reminded me of a still-life art class, with all the artists in a circle around a bowl of fruit. Each completed painting will look different, depending on the individual artist's perspective. And not just the image in their line of sight, but how they translate it in their heads, too, and how they choose to capture it pictorially. At the end of the day, though, it’s the same bowl of fruit.

So this is how I visualised the book in my head as I wrote it, with my storyline in the centre and my characters as the artists gathered around it. A floundering, surly hero. A heroine who isn’t just prickly with the other characters but with the reader as well. A fairy godmother who desperately needs things to play out the way the reader expects. And finally, a child, who perceives things as they truly are, without the complications, as only an innocent can.

One story. Four very different perspectives.

Wicked fun to write ;-)


Why not have a go playing around with POV, too, and take it a step further than you normally would? You never know, there might be a whole new chapter ahead of you. Just let me know how you get on! 

Valerie-Anne x

P is for...Point of View by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer.  And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order.  This month, she's reached P...

While I was trying to get my first book published, I read a very helpful "how to" book called "The 1st 5 pages", by Noah Lukeman, which contained a piece of writing advice that stunned me.  It suggested that before I even started my story, I ought to decide from whose viewpoint I was going to tell it, and whether to do so in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.

Er...what?

What is a viewpoint character, I wondered, and what is the difference between first, second or third person narration?

In a nutshell, in case you didn't know either, the viewpoint character is the person through whose eyes a reader will experience the story.  The person whose story it is.  If it is written in 1st person, it will be "I" did this that or the other.  I'm currently reading a fabulous thriller by Dick Francis, who always seems to tell his story in the first person, and comes up with some amazing opening lines because of it.  Because he uses the first person, you always feel as if you are experiencing the story alongside someone who has only just gone through it themselves, and is telling you all about it.

2nd person is "you" did it.  Apparently this is the hardest of all to write and is rarely used.  I can't think of a single example to give you - sorry!  3rd person is "she/he" did this that or the other, and is the most commonly used.

I knew that writing a story is a kind of world-building exercise.  I'd always thought of it as painting a picture with words.  But this chapter likened it to playing a piece of music, in which any inconsistency with the viewpoint would sound like a clashing, crashing discord, shattering the harmony.

So I read the single chapter dealing with viewpoint very carefully, and then looked at my own current manuscript, as recommended.  Firstly, I discovered that I had been writing from my heroine's viewpoint (mostly) in 3rd person all along.  Which, coincidentally, turned out to be what Mills & Boon recommended in their guidelinesat the time.  And since Mills & Boon was the publisher I was targeting, it was a jolly good job too.

I also learnt about the various ways I could make mistakes with handling viewpoint.  I could change from the viewpoint of one character to another with bewildering rapidity, I could tell sections of the story from the viewpoint of characters who really didn't matter, and shouldn't have come to the fore, or I could fumble it altogether by having a character say or think something she couldn't possibly have known.

I'd thought my writing was pretty good, before then, but after reading the chapter on viewpoint, that story suddenly seemed full of discordant notes.  I had indeed switched viewpoint so quickly any reader would have had trouble keeping up with who was the main player in a scene.  I had also written substantial chunks from the point of view of characters who shouldn't have been speaking directly to my reader.

Those errors wouldn't have been errors at all if I was writing the kind of story where it is fine to have several people giving their account of the story.  In crime novels, for example, one incident can be related by several witnesses.  I've also read family sagas

where the thread gets taken up by someone from the next generation.  So long as the change from one character's viewpoint to another is made clear and doesn't confuse the reader, that method can suit certain types of story.

However, since I'm writing romance, and I want to create an intense emotional experience for my reader, it is far better to get right inside my heroine's head, and stay there (unless I need to let people know what the hero is thinking).  When the reader knows what my heroine knows, understand what motivates her to act the way she does, it creates empathy.  Even if the heroine acts badly, the readers should know why she did what she did, and will therefore still keep rooting for her.  Same goes for the hero.

But if I introduce scenes from anyone else's point of view, and take the focus off the main characters, it dilutes the intense emotion I want my reader to feel.  There was no need for the woman my heroine (Amity) met in the dressmaker to suddenly start talking to the reader.  It was Amity's story, not Mrs Kirkham's.  Similarly, I shouldn't have written anything from Amity's brother's point of view, particularly since he was going to die in chapter 4.

Nor should I have had Amity knowing exactly what her brother was thinking, no matter how close they'd been as children, except by reading his body language and taking her best guess.

In fact the only viewpoint mistake I hadn't made was switching from first (which I'd never used) to second or third.

So, once I'd learned about the various types of viewpoint, I then began to think a bit harder about whose viewpoint to use in any scene.  To create the most impact for the reader, it's best to think about which character will have the most invested at the time.  Who has the most to lose or gain?  Since I write romance, I really only have the choice between the hero or the heroine, but it is a point that still needs careful consideration.  Do I focus on the heroine's determination to resist the hero, whose rakish reputation has already made her turn down his proposal of marriage more than once, in spite of the almost overwhelming attraction she feels for him?  Or do I get inside the hero's head, and let the reader know that this time, he has really fallen in love, and his devil-may-care smile hides his fear of rejection?

 

Once I'd got the hang of considering point of view, it made a huge difference to my writing.  Once I stopped digressing into the mind of the heroine's brother, his commanding officer, a woman Amity met in the dressmaker, or anyone else, the story focussed more closely on my heroine, and her journey of discovery, and therefore became more interesting.

Amity still hasn't found a publisher - but I'm working on it!

 

 

 Annie's latest book is "A Mistress for Major Bartlett", 2nd in the "Brides of Waterloo" series from Harlequin.  Currently available from Amazon