Sandra’s Miscellany

So you’ve maneuvered your heroine through her adventure, given her a hot love interest, and boxed her in so that she has to make a choice between getting everything she wants (via making the wrong decision) and giving up everything she’s been trying to achieve (via making the right decision). And she’s done it — she’s sacrificed everything in order to do the right thing and truly achieve that “hero” status fiction readers crave.

Now what?

If you’ve paid attention to your heroine throughout the story, there’s a very good chance you’ve noticed a different between what the heroine wants and what she needs. Since we’ve taken away what she wants, let’s give her what she needs.

Or, as Dwight Swain puts it, what she deserves.

The want is the external, in-your-face desire for something. In The Orchid Hunter, it was Jessie’s desire to save her great-uncle’s life that drove every action. She wanted to save him more than anything.

But what she needed was to let him go, to let him decide for himself what he wanted to do and to accept his decision. She had to learn to stop clinging to this man as North on her emotional compass, and to live her life without him.

So she got what she needed when she gave up what she wanted.

I think this is true of most popular fiction books I’ve read. Oftentimes, the heroine discovers that what she’s been looking for has been right under her nose the entire time. For example, I just finished Debbie Macomber’s Thursdays at Eight, in which Karen wants desperately to be an actress. She’s good, has an agent, goes to auditions, and has a job as a substitute teacher to survive on until she gets her big break. It takes Karen much of the book to figure out that although she wants to be an actress, what she needs is to share her love of the stage. So she ends up becoming a high school drama teacher.

Here’s one way of looking at it: What the heroine wants drives the external action, but what the heroine needs drives the internal one.

In the case of Bombshell, we’re challenged with figuring out what the heroine needs that can be fulfilled within the course of a high-action plot. If the need is internal, it has to be satisfied in the denouement, which is the story that occurs after the climax (in which, presumably, the villain is revealed and caught). In Jessie’s case, her need to let Scooter go was fulfilled when she realizes, six weeks after his death, that she’ll survive without him. He’s moved into a healthier place in her life, and she’s capable now of having a long-lasting relationship with a man. That reward — the reward of a lasting relationship — must necessarily come in the form of Rick, the first man to touch her heart and show her a different path.

What does your heroine need? Once you identify that, you can map out what she wants, which for maximum emotional effect might be the opposite of what she wants.

Happy Bombshelling!