Stephanie Elliot's insider view on creating characters...plus a book giveaway

We are pleased to have Stephanie Elliot here for her third visit! She is one of the inspirations for Chick Lit Central in the first place, as Melissa A. won one of her first books from Stephanie, back when she had her Manic Mommy blog, which changed to Booking with Manic a couple of years later. More recently, it has turned into a Facebook page where there are still a lot of book giveaways. Stephanie always asks fun questions for giveaway entries, which was also an inspiration to us. She's even doing a giveaway right here...for her latest novel, A Little Bit of Everything Lost. TWO lucky US readers have a chance to win an e-book!

Stephanie Elliot is a wife of almost 21 years and a mom of three. She is a writer, book reviewer and edits manuscripts on the side. For more information, please visit her website. You can also find her on Twitter.

Stephanie is here today to talk about how she created her characters for this novel and why she puts them through the wringer.

Synopsis of A Little Bit of Everything Lost:
At 19, Marnie plunged into first love with Joe, a guy who was completely wrong for her. Their romance was fast and exhilarating and like nothing Marnie had ever experienced or understood. Just as quickly as it began, it was over, with no explanation. He left her with unanswered questions and unexpected feelings of loss and regret, and a quiet grief she would carry with her for the next fifteen years.

When Joe returns, Marnie is a 34-year-old wife and mother to two rambunctious little boys, who is slowly healing from a devastating loss. All the emotions she suppressed from the past fifteen years surge to the surface, threatening to ruin her marriage and destroy her family. She'll need to confront the one person who hurt her the most to realize that love and loss sometimes go hand in hand… and that you have to live with some of your toughest choices for the rest of your life.

A Little Bit of Everything Lost is part coming-of-age/part love story. It's a story about a woman desperate to make peace with the past. It's for all women who have ever experienced the magnitude of first love, whether it was a lasting bond or a fleeting moment. Because first love - while it might not have been the best love - is a love none of us ever forgets.

Creating Characters: If We Love Them So Much, Why Do We Hurt Them So Terribly, and What Can We Learn About Ourselves?

When I first began writing my controversial novel, A Little Bit of Everything Lost, I started writing about an ex-boyfriend and me. I actually took my journals from college and began transcribing them onto the computer, to see what kind of story I had. There wasn’t much there, just a little bit of tearful drama, so I had to create someone new for that ex-boyfriend to ruin. He had to RUIN her! But she had to be someone that I ADORED!

Why do authors do this?

Because, you, the reader, would be bored by page two if all you read was feel-good, love, love, joy, joy, and then they lived happily ever after. You WANT the bad stuff, don’t you? You want the adversity, the drama, the fight or flight, the should-she-or-shouldn’t-she?

So right from the beginning, I knew who would play the part of the ex-boyfriend. Oh, did I know him well. I had a character sketch drawn out over pages and pages in my college journals! But I didn’t really know who to cast for the girl in turmoil. Or what exactly would happen to her. Because I knew what happened to me. And at the age of 19, while it had all seemed so dramatic and painful, reading back on it a couple decades later, it just seemed a bit crappy, but it wasn’t all that terrible.

So I created Marnie, and I had to make things really, really bad for her. But it was difficult, because I discovered I really liked the girl she was turning out to be. Of course, she had to make some stupid choices to get where she was - to create a story I felt was worth telling. Marnie had to make bad decisions over bad boys, just like maybe most of us did at impressionable young ages. Didn’t we sometimes choose the wrong over the right because of some hot guy simply smiling at us just the right way, his hazel eyes steeling a hole right through our hearts?

Some might look at Marnie and think she’s a complete idiot. Some might say she did insane things over a guy who was a total asshole to her. Some might think she made wrong choices in her young life that affected her adult life in ways she could have handled differently. When we’re that young, we make decisions that may impact our life. We say yes when we might have meant no. We think we’re invincible, immortal, we don’t think of the consequences. We live in the moment… because we’re on the cusp of adulthood, and we’re in love.

As an adult, Marnie lives with regret and guilt over some of the decisions she made. Marnie spent many years living this way, as I believe many women do, secretly wallowing in pity and sadness. We women, as a whole are really hard on ourselves.

Forgiveness is key, and that’s one of the themes I explore in A Little Bit of Everything Lost. I wanted to create what I hope is a likable, relatable character in which women can see a tiny bit of themselves. No matter if there are any similarities from Marnie’s past and present experiences, I still feel that women are always much harder on themselves than we should be, and we deserve to cut ourselves some slack and love ourselves more!

I hope that you will love 19-year-old Marnie and 34-year-old Marnie, and feel an understanding and compassion for her as a lover, a griever, a mother, a student, a daughter, a friend and as a wife!

Thank you!

Thanks again to Stephanie for another wonderful and insightful post and for sharing her book with our readers.

How to win: Use Rafflecopter to enter the giveaway. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

a Rafflecopter giveaway


US only. Giveaway ends May 20th at midnight EST.