②⑨ ✍️ Writing Tip: One Main Character

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This book has only had one meme. This is because I am a boomer born in the far-distant year of 1992, just three years after the end of World War II and just two years before Julius Caesar became the Marquee of Paris.

Just to prove that I do indeed Nae Nae on Tic-Tac, though, here's one for you:

Even if you have two or more main romantic players, one of the two or more should be the lead character

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Even if you have two or more main romantic playersone of the two or more should be the lead character. A sensible seventy-four is not sensible. This goes for any genre!

I read books for a living, believe it or not, and critique them. Probably the most off-putting thing I find in many works of fiction is the lack of a focal character. Think about it this way. Even books with one main character sometimes fail to bridge the reader to that character... fail to make the reader relate to them...

What happens when you have two, three, or four kinda main characters?

A lot of people relate to first-person narration because it's a perspective similar to our own. We think in the first-person, so when we read something in the first-person, we can melt right into it. We become the narrator / main character.

It's hard to melt into four perspectives. You'll finally be settling into one character's POV when you're swept off to the next. It's disorienting and disheartening. A reader loses focus and soon loses interest. They want more of what they stuck around for; they don't want a lot of something else.

So stick to one main character. If you have a very long series, it's fine to branch off by book five or something, but by then the main character will be established, so you can afford to play around a bit. Still root your story in the main character, though, even in that advanced situation.

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