“Dear Jim,

I saw the updates on the book you have coming out (congrats by the way) and was wondering if you could tell us how you overcame certain obstacles. For example, in my writing, I’m having a hard time establishing character relationships. I don’t want my story sounding like a Disney princess story where two people just instantly fall in love, but I don’t want to flood my book with a lot of filler dealing with how they fell in love. I’m not writing a romance novel, but I do want it to have a romantic element.

Thanks,
Jbob”

Hi J,

Good question… and personally I myself have been trying to find ways around it for a while myself. There are three ways I’ve discovered so far;

1. Start the story off mid-relationship. Establish that your characters have had a relationship all along, so that when the story starts, you’re already where you need to be. You can go into detail through monologue or character discussions as to how the two of them got to where they are throughout the story. That isn’t something you necessarily need to find out early on.

2. If you plan to start your story off before your characters meet, this is where it can get a little more complicated. The way I’ve used so far is to start the story off before they meet, have them meet, summarize in a page or two what they’ve been going through over a few months to a year and then get back into the main narrative. This way you get the beginning of the relationship set and you get moved right to the main point in the story.

3. “The afterthought.” Start the story off at the climax and have the main character remember back to when they first forged their relationship and have him/her describe it in a few chapters leading up to where they are now.

Hope this helps, but I’ll open it up to the floor and ask my readers if they have found ways to establish character relationships quickly for the sake of the flow of the story. Feel free to email me if you have any more questions.

Readers,

Do you have a question about writing, publishing, my stories, etc? Please feel free to post a comment or email me.
jimthewritingwizard@gmail.com
I’ll use those comments to select my next blog post.

I have been writing for several years, have 4 published works, experience with publishing and independent work, so I can hopefully be of assistance.
Please note, I only do one of these a day and will do my best to respond to everyone, but it may take some time.

Also, feel free to check out my works of Fantasy and Historical Fiction, Available on Amazon and where ever books are sold. See the link below:

http://www.amazon.com/James-Harrington/e/B00P7FBXTU

Thanks friends!
Catch you on the flip side!

-Jim