I wonder if you may have backed yourself into a corner somewhat. With his personal position within his family, the duties expected of him, and his injury, what options will he have in his life? Can he find a way to break the mould, or stand up to his family for what he believes to be right and just? She could perhaps run away, which would cause all kinds of problems. It might be worth looking at stories such as Tristan and Isolde, King Arthur et all, to get an idea of the duty side of things.
I am know for backing myself into corners. Joren has been in a bad situation with his family for years. Yelling at them won't help. Cressida could run away,,but she has no place to go.
That is one mental model for thinking about your creative process, but nevertheless, you are in control. If you have zero control or decisionmaking power over the story, how does it make sense to ask for advice on the story? Surely the characters will just solve your problem for you. Except, they're not solving the problem for you. That's presumably why you're asking for advice. Is there any sort of advice that you could possibly take? If you can't make any change at all in the story, and must cede all control to your characters, I can't see how asking for advice makes sense.
I have enough control to say, "I have known idea how to write that" , because what they want to do is not what I can write, so I need an alternative, because we don't need them to start on what they want.
I haven't read all the replies, but if this work is set in medieval times, they did marry young, and they often were married to men much older than they were. I sent this link to someone who is writing a similar piece: https://engelskhistoria.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/the-medieval-wedding/ Juliet of Romeo and Juliet fame was about the same age as the OP's protagonist. OP, don't worry so much about making your protag fall in love with Joren. In fact, the conflict of them trying to learn to live together, to just get on even,could be an interesting topic. But, if I'm honest, when you mentioned Rowen, I thought he was going to be the one Cressida is supposed to fall in love with.
I'm not clear on your position of them forming a friendship based on the mutual effort to mislead their captors. Is this charm the only roadblock to that?
It will be interesting to see them learn to live together, especially with the circumstances of their relationship. Ah, Rowen, Cressida has had a crush on him, as has ever other girl in the kingdom. But nothing will come of it, Rowen is sworn never to marry, and in any case would be unitrested in Cressida or a nother female.
Cressida and Joren are not happy. You would like them to get along. Their unhappiness is just about the only thing they have in common. That unhappiness comes from the people who forced their marriage and control them. Therefore, that one thing that they have in common could be something that helps to form a friendship. A romance seems unlikely; a friendship seems fairly plausible. I think that friendship is infinitely more likely if there is no marital rape involved. Therefore, it would be good to find a way for them to not "consummate" the marriage. Therefore, eliminating this "charm", or finding a way to fool it, would be a good thing.
Ah, sorry I didn't get it the first time. Yes, they, and my have a lot to figure out. I am writing the second chapter as I write here, and so far it is not going in the best possible way.
I am very puzzled as to what you hoped to accomplish from this thread. If you have no input into the story, how will you asking advice help?
I my have little input, but I still have to write it. And I don't know how to word some of what needs to be seid.
If you have no rights and no input, how can you even say that the characters should get along, much less have a romance? They don't want to get along, and you obey their orders, so obey them.
I'm going to put this one more way: I think that very few readers are going to tolerate a plot arc that starts with A rapes B, and ends with B loves A--or at least they're not going to see it as anything but a creepy, dark, horrible outcome.
Don't try. You are in control. Exercise it. As much as it's good to let your characters behave as they will, that's all a roundabout way of saying that you are building the story with your character concepts in mind. If you don't see your writing as a series of conscious decisions by you, that is a slippery slope to bad writing because you won't take as much responsibility psychologically. You don't try to get work done- you just do it.
Try is all I can give it, as I have to manage characters that are far to stubern for their own good. (Joren)
@ChickenFreak , I know you said you're done, and I respect that, but a love or romance of sorts developing from arranged marriages could happen, and yes, if/when the newlyweds were royalty or nobility, it was commonplace for someone to check the bedsheets after the wedding night. From the link I included above; I also sympathise with @GirlWriter101 in that whole characters take over thing, because it has happened to me - I imagine one character saying something to the protagonist, and another character decides she's the one saying it instead of the dude that I originally imagined. I've also had a protagonist wake up from a coma when I wasn't ready for him to wake up, and the entire prologue (shock! Horror!)of my WIP was written because the FMC decided to take over. There I was, trying to write it in 3rd person past tense, and she came along and said, "nope! This is 1st present - deal with it and get writing!" But, that said, I do agree that as writers, we do have control - and more than a little. We ultimately decide whether or not to go with those characters' suggestions, or plough ahead with our own ideas and the way we want the story to go. To go back to the comatose protag, an example of me taking back control (Oh God! I sound like Theresa May! ) was to let him wake up, then have a tertiary character who is never even named, come along and poison him so that the docs had to put him in a medically induced coma until I was ready for him. So to me, it does sound like the OP knows what she's talking about, and I believe the world she's trying to create does have the element of believability. If this was written in modern times, there's no way I'd want to read about a 13 year old girl forced into marriage, raped by her husband and falling in love with him anyway, but this isn't written in our times. How many people love Snow White and Jasmine from Aladdin? They were only 14 and 15 respectively: http://www.zimbio.com/What+Were+They+Thinking/articles/T73Nezmnoxw/Ages+Disney+Princesses+Will+Shock
Isn't this exactly what happens in Game of Thrones with the dragon queen with the horrible hair and her barbarian husband?
