You’ve heard the ‘smooth sailing’ metaphor, as in it’s either smooth sailing or it’s not, right?

In writing, it’s our goal to make the writing as choppy as possible. For someone like me, whose whole goal in life is to make things comfortable for those around her, this is a hard idea to wrap my head around. So, in my fiction (as in my life), my characters often accept what others hand to them, reacting instead of proacting (yeah, I made the word up. So what?)

But that is dull. And makes for not very likeable characters, unless you happen to like super-neurotic, premise-accepting people (and if you do, you are likely a friend of mine).

So my goal in writing right now is to make my characters as feisty and proacting as possible. For example, the hero in my current WIP is going to kiss the heroine to get her to stop asking questions, but instead of leaning into the kiss, as she really wants to do (he’s smokin’!), she’s going to haul off and slap him, because she knows he’s only kissing her to shut her up, not because he wants to kiss her.

It’s an eye-opener, thinking of things to put my characters through I would never want a friend to experience. But it’ll make for better fiction. And maybe help me get more proacting, too.

Megan