On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [111]
What if? and backward plotting work extremely well together. By using them in turn you can develop your characters' problems, create a believable plot, and at the same time spot troublesome areas or holes before they develop.
Plot Building 101
Let's put cause and effect, backward plotting, and What if? together and see what happens.
What if your heroine's long-term problem is that she's never felt truly loved— and her short-term problem is that she discovers, just as she's about to walk down the aisle, that her fiance is only after her money?
What if she decides to run instead of going through with the wedding? But why would she go to such lengths? Heroines by definition are grown-ups. Wouldn't she just tell her father about the fiance, or walk into the church and announce she's not getting married?
Probably—so what if you have her try to call off the wedding, but her father refuses to believe she means it and goes to get the fiance to soothe her pre-wedding
jitters? That creates time pressure—if she's going to leave to give herself time to think without being pressured, she's got to do it immediately, without any time to plan or pack.
What does she take with her? What does she leave behind? Where is she going—does she have any idea at all? If she only has fifteen minutes to escape, how does she go about it? Does she run in her wedding gown? That could be really inconvenient for the story later on—so perhaps she should take five minutes to get out of her fancy dress and into jeans. But that means she has five fewer minutes to think about where she's going and what she'll need.
Or, for that matter, how she's going to get away. What if the wedding's not at an ordinary church but at her father's estate—which is locked up even tighter than usual to provide security for the wedding guests and gifts? If she tries to get past the gates, she'll be discovered. She can't take her car; she can't throw a suitcase over the wall. And time is ticking away.
What if she has help? Who would be in a position to help her? An estate employee? Not likely—that would be a great way to lose a job. A short-term employee, like a florist or a caterer? A wedding guest? Maybe. But how's she going to find this person who's willing to help? How will she know who's safe to approach?
What if she doesn't approach him but runs into him—almost falls over him? What's he doing? Why is he there? What if he's someone who has ties to the estate and the family but who isn't dependent on it for his livelihood? That means he can take action without fear of losing his job.
Why, though, is he even there, if he's not a part of the wedding? What if his father works on the estate, and your hero has known the heroine forever? What if he's suffering from a long-term crush on the heroine, so he's come to be near for a last hopeless moment before she's lost to him? How about making him the gardener's son, who's come to visit his father? He grew up there and he knows where there's a secret gate, so he can help the heroine get out.
What if he realizes that the ex-bride is too stressed to be sensible, so he goes along to keep her safe? (Maybe you can give him more gentlemanly instincts than are really good for him, to make that work.)
He even takes her in his car, since she can't get hers out of the garage. And you don't want her to have a car anyway—it would be too easy to trace. But now you're back to having all the same problems—she'll be seen leaving in his car. Unless she leaves through the wall, and he drives out in the usual way, and then they won't be suspected of being together.
Now you have them both outside the wall, with a set of wheels but not much else. No change of clothes, no cash, just what's in