This week’s guest poster is the wonderful P.C. Zick, who discusses revamping her contemporary romance series. Enjoy!

Creating a functional family within fiction

By P.C. Zick

“I’m from a dysfunctional family.”

We’ve all heard this statement so much, it’s a cliché—overused and meaningless.

However, as an author, I can turn the cliché into something meaningful. But first, I must make my fictional families as dysfunctional as possible to create the necessary conflict and tension. Once I’ve done that, I can turn them into my ideal version of functional. I don’t mean the vision of what we’d been told a “real” family looks like. Those ideas were created with the 1950s sitcoms, and probably messed us all up when we realized we didn’t have Donna Reed in an apron in the kitchen cooking dinner. Or Mrs. Cleaver greeting the Beaver and Wally with homemade chocolate chip cookies and milk when they…