Guest Blogger Janice Hardy: Plot or Consequences

Juliette graciously allowed me to take over her blog today to help me promote the second book of my teen fantasy series, Blue Fire. This is one post of many in a month-long blog tour I’m doing, so if you followed me here from my blog, welcome and thanks! If you’re new to me, a big hello and nice to meet you.

When I first started The Shifter (the first book in my trilogy), I didn’t know it was going to be part of a series. But as the story developed, I saw the bigger picture and where the problem my protagonist, Nya, could lead to. As that story continued, I focused more and more on Nya’s journey, because stories are about the characters in trouble. But by the time I got to book three, I’d forgotten something, and Juliette was the one who pointed it out to me.

I was ignoring the broader implications of my original premise.

Nya is a “Shifter,” someone who can heal by shifting pain from person to person. This includes pain of her own, so anytime someone hurts her, she’s able to shift it right back into them. (Which made for some fun fight scenes). In the first draft of book three, Nya was doing this almost without thinking, and while she struggled over the moral aspects of shifting, getting hurt was no longer an issue for her.

This was all wrong. Nya should have been becoming more reluctant about getting hurt, because she’d endured far more pain than a normal person. The story was about enduring the unendurable to save those you love, fighting on through hardships and oppression. Nya’s reactions to pain needed to follow the same themes I’d first suggested in my premise.

Once I started revising with this in mind, the story became much richer and all the better for it. Nya’s physical fear of pain mirrored her emotional fears of pain. (I’m really mean to my protag) It tied in better with the overall story and allowed me to do some interesting things to bring the series – and the character -- full circle in the end.

So how do you apply the broader aspects of your premise to your stories?

Look at your themes
For me, it was about being trapped (in book one) and escaping (in book two) and taking a stand (in book three). I thought about how Nya and her abilities connected to those themes over the course of the series. Then I let them all come crashing down on her in book three. She was trapped by her own abilities, trying to escape them, but to overcome them, she had to take a stand against those trying to destroy her because of them. All of this also connected to her pain shifting and how she dealt with receiving all that pain. Look for ways in your story that you can explore your theme as it connects to your premise.

Look at your character arcs
This was really where I was missing an opportunity. Nya’s growth over the series had, quite frankly, petered out in that first draft of book three. She’d accepted her abilities and I wasn’t letting them affect her as much as I could have. By thinking about the larger ramifications of her abilities, I was able to kick start her grown and give her a much stronger arc for the book – and the series. Her skill at enduring pain was so much more than just physical pain. It became a metaphor for her whole character. How might you deepen your character arcs through your premise?

Look at your plot
What your characters do and the problems they’re trying to solve all connect back to your premise. But what do all those individual goals and problems mean on a grand scale? Chances are, you chose to do X over Y because it fit your premise better, or showed off something about your world or conflict. Maybe you can push those things even further. With Nya, the plot problems became more interesting when I started thinking about how they also affected her growth and the story premise. She might solve her immediate problem, but that also put her in situations where she had to face dealing with pain again. And that fear could in turn, affect what decisions she made and how far she was willing to go. (another theme of the series)

Your premise probably holds a lot more information than you might expect. There’s a reason it resonated with you, why you wanted to write about it, and why the idea is driving you and your characters. Try taking a closer look and see if it can also take you places you didn’t anticipate.


Part fugitive, part hero, fifteen-year-old Nya is barely staying ahead of the Duke of Baseer’s trackers. Wanted for a crime she didn’t mean to commit, she risks capture to protect every Taker she can find, determined to prevent the Duke from using them in his fiendish experiments. But resolve isn’t enough to protect any of them, and Nya soon realizes that the only way to keep them all out of the Duke’s clutches is to flee Geveg. Unfortunately, the Duke’s best tracker has other ideas.

Nya finds herself trapped in the last place she ever wanted to be, forced to trust the last people she ever thought she could. More is at stake than just the people of Geveg, and the closer she gets to uncovering the Duke’s plan, the more she discovers how critical she is to his victory. To save Geveg, she just might have to save Baseer—if she doesn’t destroy it first.

A long-time fantasy reader, Janice Hardy always wondered about the darker side of healing. For her fantasy trilogy THE HEALING WARS, she tapped into her own dark side to create a world where healing was dangerous, and those with the best intentions often made the worst choices. Her books include THE SHIFTER, and BLUE FIRE from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins. She lives in Georgia with her husband, three cats and one very nervous freshwater eel.