What inner struggles is my character facing? How have past experiences brought him to this point, and how do they affect the way he views his present situation? How can he express his views on something in a way that won’t bore the reader?

These are the questions I ask myself as I write character-driven action-thriller stories. For me, it can’t just be about the boom and the chases. I get to care about the story through my characters. Though I normally don’t like to have paragraph after paragraph of exposition, I arrived at such a juncture in one of my books, Decisive Moment. Here, in the middle of a big, dangerous mess, Roger Morris has to photograph a wedding like he has no other care in the world. He goes in with some thoughts about how he feels about weddings:

When I tell people – even photographers – that I do weddings, I often get looks and reactions suggesting I’m in need of an emergency brain transplant. That in and of itself stands as acknowledgement of how challenging and, in some ways, undesirable taking on a wedding can be. All the more reason why I scratch my head as to how people can conceive that a photographer with the skills to pull off a wedding should take a vow of poverty.
What skills, you say? Let’s start with the inter-personal ones, like the ones for dealing with often drunk, sometimes antagonistic, distracted and disruptive people to somehow corral them to pose in a photo that someone will actually want to hang from a wall.
From the photography end of things, a wedding photographer has to be a jack of all trades and master of most of them. And whatever he’s up to he will have to accomplish at break-neck speeds because a wedding never stops for you to catch your breath. It all happens now and thirty seconds ago, and if you blink, you’ve missed it.
He will be an action/sports photographer on the dance floor or when something is happening in a hurry. He will be a studio/portrait photographer, often setting up complex lighting arrangements to pull off large and small group formal portraits, which he has to get done quick because people are itching to move onto the next, funner thing. He will be a photojournalist, ever sensing, ever anticipating those key moments before they happen. He will be a landscape photographer to capture beautiful sweeping views of outdoor grounds, and/or he will be an architecture photographer to capture striking interior and exterior shots of the wedding’s location.
Above all, he will be a master of light, able to get off a decent to amazing shot in any light you throw at him, whether it’s full blast, midday sunlight, overcast, partial shade, indoor lighting, or made lighting from artificial sources he sets up and controls. It’s no wonder many respected photographers have at some point cut their teeth in wedding photography. It doesn’t just pay the bills. It forces you to explore and master many of the skills you can use in just about any other type of photography.
In the end, though, if you find yourself shooting a wedding, I hope you’re there because you have a heart for it. Because you love it and what it represents. Because you get that above all other days a wedding springs forth a rush of emotions, both positive and negative, that in turn engender a long train of unique, once in time moments tailor-made for the camera’s ability to capture and freeze an image that portrays these special instants.

I hope you enjoyed that sample from Decisive Moment. Let me know what you think!

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