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A Romance Writer's World
Opening scenes in novels
When I was writing my first novel, The Dashing Debutante, I sent the first few chapters to a well-known American romance author and asked her for some feedback. She emailed me a critique of the book and told me that I had started it in the wrong place and that I needed to grab the reader’s attention with an action scene rather than the scene I had written, where my heroine was sitting on a log next to a stream, fishing and contemplating her life. I proceeded to make the changes the author suggested, and started the book with a much more dramatic scene.
A Romance Writer's World
Do you like your characters?
Even though an author creates her characters, she also has a relationship with them. And it’s very clear whether a writer either likes – or dislikes – her characters. It comes out in the level of empathy she has for them. Is her attitude sympathetic, caring - or judgemental? Does the author gloss over her characters’ faults or does she dwell on them? Does she present them in a black and white fashion or does she allow for the varying shades of grey to shine through?
A Romance Writer's World
Setting up your story
The first few chapters of a book can start off with a bang, or take a while to take shape. It all depends on how you prefer to set up your story. I find that I tend to feel my way along in the first few chapters, looking for a firm foothold as I put the platform in place for the rest of the book.
A Romance Writer's World
Getting to know your characters
How do you get to know the characters in a novel you’re writing? Do you introduce them to yourself in the first chapter and find out all about them within the pages of your book as you write it, or do your characters flash into your mind fully formed before you even start writing about them?
A Romance Writer's World
Getting into the writing zone
There is such a thing as a writing zone. It’s that space you’re in when writing seems effortless. However, writers often make excuses not to write, and I’ve come up with some ideas as to why we do this…
A Romance Writer's World
Plotting
I’ve been plotting my novel over the last few weeks. However, when I’m writing a book I find it difficult to think too far ahead, as often story ideas only become clear during the writing process. What I try to do, therefore, is combine the two processes. I formulate a general outline, and then I start writing.
A Romance Writer's World
Getting back into the Regency world
I’ve decided to write another Regency novel. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that I’ve decided to re-start writing another Regency novel. A few years ago I wrote the first three chapters to the sequel of my second Regency novel, Lord Fenmore’s Wager….
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing and rewriting - it’s now or never
I recently read that, before he begins a new novel, EL Doctorow writes 60-or-so pages of dialogue between his main characters – then throws them away and starts again.
I don’t know how he does it. It must break his heart. But I do understand why.
Having just finished a rough draft of a new novel, I have been giving him a lot of thought lately – and wishing I had his discipline (not to mention his talent).Reading my manuscript from beginning to end, I can see how the voice of the protagonist, and the novel as a whole, develops as I gain confidence. At the start, my protagonist is a tentative being, just drawing her first breaths in the world I gave her. By the end, she is more confident in her skin. She speaks and reacts in a way that is more true to who she is.
Writing Quips and Tips
Writing about it is a lot like having it
If you’re self-conscious about sex in real life, you’ll be so on the page. You’ll hide coyly behind the frills of metaphor.
And if you’re over-confident, you’re likely to charge at the task and batter it with clinical description. Either way you’ll be cringy.
Since we were on the subject of sex in literature, (Last week’s blog on why no one writes about sex anymore), it occurred to me that sex in life is a lot like sex on the page. And learning to write about it can show us quite a lot about having it.
Writing Quips and Tips
Plunging and grinding doesn’t make a story
A judge for this year’s Booker prize, commenting on the state of the British and Commonwealth novel, said no one was writing much about sex anymore.
“It’s as if they were paranoid about being nominated for the Bad Sex Award,” he said. He was referring to the now famous, and little wanted award by the Literary Review. He added that “a lot of people” were writing about “taking drugs, as if that was a substitute for sex”.
The Bad Sex Awards were inaugurated in 1993 in order to draw attention to, “and hopefully discourage”, poorly written, redundant or crude sex in fiction. The intention, they say is “not to humiliate”.
That might not be their intention, but it must be absolutely mortifying even to be nominated. Yet I wonder if it is the Bad Sex Award that’s discouraging sex scenes.
