Ahhh, my first book. What a thrill. With that book, I soon landed on the speakers platform and began teaching at national seminars and giving workshops across the county. More books followed.
Then came audio tapes, large wall charts and...you guessed it...more books! After having written 18-20 non-fiction books I decided I wanted to try my hand at fiction. Well,l who doesn’t want to write a best-seller?
However although I did a fairly descent job on plotting the stories, my characters needed work. Researching, talking to published authors, and finally finding a wonderful critique group I decided to write a book (with some help from my co-authors, I do so love to brainstorm) that would help other struggling would-be writers with creating their characters.
From all of this came the highly successful Heroes and Heroines book which now a college course in several screen-writing departments at the universities across the country.
Fast forward. Two more non-fiction books done...and still no novel. Time to start again. Aack...still having trouble with creating good characters. Need another character book. This time we (another group of great co-authors) made it into a workbook so every writer would be able to work through his or her own characters. Ta-da, the birth of Ten Steps to Creating a Memorable Character.
Playing around with the characters led me to develop and create the brainstorming card game, Deal a Story. The idea being that when the “little-gray-cells” refuse to function, all you have to do is pull out this deck of cards, choose a few, and presto, you have a new idea, a great sub-plot or even an interesting way to add some unique personality quirks to your characters.
Okay, what’s next. Well, on the drawing board is a companion book to the character book, Ten Steps to Plotting a Great Story and a desk flip book to help guide the writer through the various steps of writing and marketing a book.
Ah well, my novel will just have to wait a bit longer.