I write romance, and that means my stories are, by necessity, character driven.  That doesn’t mean I ignore plot or story — my books have plenty of plot, and storytelling is my favorite thing about writing.  But in a romance the story should grow out of the struggles of the characters.  More important, the love story in every romance requires the characters to grow.  The hero and heroine need to learn something by the end of the book that allows them to have their happy ending.  The bigger the transformation the more satisfying the ending.

Coming up with ideas for that inner character arc is not easy for me.  I can come up with ideas for situations and story lines and conflict, but figuring out what a character has to learn before he or she gets to the end of the story is really hard.  I need all the help I can get. 

Otherwise I’m liable to find myself in the middle of a story and suddenly realize that the characters are two-dimensional and don’t really have any significant barrier to their love story.  When that happens, major revisions are usually required. 

I hate major revisions.  Like the plague.  Unfortunately, when I was first learning how to tell a story, this happened all. The. Time. 

And then, one day about ten years ago...

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