The Winner

 by Shelley Cooper from the August 17, 2020 issue

Tagline: When her identity gets mixed up with a lottery winner, Sarah Parker can't believe her bad luck...until a handsome stranger shows up to help.

Observations: What a super unique premise! I loved it. I wish I'd thought of it. But even if I had, or you had, you're not guaranteed a great story even if you have a grade-A premise like this one.

This is, at its heart, what I like to call a Man to the Rescue story. A Man to the Rescue story has a woman with a problem of some kind that the man solves or helps her to solve. (And of course, this can always be flipped to be a Woman to the Rescue plot.) The best way to plot a story like this is to brainstorm a bunch of potential problems.

Off the top of my head, someone could have computer problems, gardening problems, insomnia, a family member who is hard to buy gifts for, a need for a plus-one at a wedding, a broken appliance/car... I'm not super thrilled with any of these, so I would probably keep thinking until I had 20 ideas. In a writing workshop I took once, the instructor said she swore by The Rule of 20. She said that the first ideas your brain comes up with are usually the easy ones, the cliches, so you have to really push your brain to dig deeper. In my experience, I haven't had to get all the way to 20. I usually come upon an idea that sings to me before that.

After you come up with the problem, you figure out who is going to solve the problem and how. What sometimes tripped me up with Man to the Rescue stories is the old-fashioned idea that women need to be rescued by the big, strong man. If you're one of those people, I have this to say. First, the Woman's World reader demographic skews on the older side, so many readers won't feel miffed about this issue. Second, in reality, sometimes we need help with something, and there's a fifty-fifty chance it's a guy who helps you. Right? LOL Lastly, you can just make sure you show the heroine taking charge of her own life, being assertive in some way that demonstrates she's more than just a damsel in distress. 

Here in this story, Cooper showed Sarah Parker working up the nerve to let Chad know she was interested. And just like that, you've shown her to be a modern woman.