Today, Ollin discusses the vital role of imagery in creating a compelling story. 

What Charlie Chaplin Can Teach You About Writing A Great Love Story 

Charlie Chaplin is widely known as one of the greatest silent film directors and performers of all time. Even though he stopped creating films decades ago, his influence on storytelling can still be felt, even today. 

Chaplin became one of the first filmmakers/performers to achieve international acclaim and worldwide stardom. Chaplin’s success was largely due to the powerful images he was able to create onscreen. 

He was especially a master at creating powerfully moving portraits of love and romance. When you watch one of Chaplin’s silent films, you can’t help but feel your heart stir. You find yourself having a deep emotional attachment to each character—almost instantly. 

Writers can learn a lot from Chaplin. 

By utilizing powerful images (or tableaus) in our writing, we too can create powerful stories that are both unforgettable and universal.

What is A “Tableau”?

A tableau is a striking or powerful image. 

Tableau’s are everywhere in literature. You might recognize them if I were to list some of them for you: a youthful Dorian Gray gazing into a portrait of his aging self; Anna Karenina walking onto the train tracks just as a train approaches; Jean Valjean, the wanted criminal, making a grand escape through France’s ancient and vast sewer system. 

Powerful tableau’s can also be found in popular films: an adorable-looking alien, named E.T., using his powers of levitation to lift a young boy, and his bicycle, into the night sky; Thelma & Louise driving their Ford Thunderbird convertible straight into the Grand Canyon; the enormous, majestic tree in Avatar falling into a cloud of ash and fire. 

As you can see, many of the best stories ever told have been told through a series of tableaus: powerful, moving images that help drive the emotion of the story forward.

A Study of Charlie Chaplin’s Use of Tableaus 

One of Charlie Chaplin’s best films is called The Kid. 

The plot of the movie is fairly simple, but it’s one of the most heart-wrenching love stories you’ll ever see in film. 

In The Kid, Chaplin reprises his famous role as The Tramp:  a poor, working-class American willing to resort to pretty much anything (even stealing) to get by. 

Now, if we cut the movie down into a series of tableaus, we might see what makes Chaplin’s story so emotionally potent for its audience:

Tableau Number #1: The film begins with an image of The Tramp picking up an abandoned baby at the side of the road. 

Tableau Number #2: The Tramp is having breakfast with a small boy (the baby is now grown up) and we see the Tramp counting the number of pancakes on his plate, making sure the number of pancakes on his plate is equal to the amount on the boy’s plate.

Tableau Number #3: The authorities are holding The Tramp back while the boy stands alone on the back of a truck. The boy is reaching out for his adopted father and is sobbing uncontrollably. 

Tableau Number #4: The Tramp, his adopted son, and the adopted son’s biological mother are re-united on the front porch of an extravagant-looking household. The End. 

As you can see, I don’t even need to give you a detailed summary of the movie itself. You can already gather the whole story just by becoming familiar with just a few of the striking tableaus that Chaplin utilized throughout the film. 

My description of these images in succession may have already stirred strong emotions in you without me having to show you the actual film. 

And that, my friends, is the power of using tableaus.

Utilizing Tableaus To Help You Write A Great Love Story 

Now that we’ve studied the way Charlie Chaplin utilized tableaus in his films, we can try using some of the same techniques to help us create powerful images in our own fiction.

Here’s how to do it: 

1. Cut your story down into 3 simple, tableaus, with each tableau representing the beginning, middle, and end of your story. (You can draw out these three tableaus, or you can write them out, whichever you prefer.) 

2. Once you’ve created your 3 tableaus, ask yourself if these images stir any powerful emotions in you. If they don’t, you may need to work on creating more striking images—images that will really stick in your readers mind and make them feel for your characters. 

3. Finally, insert these three, new and improved tableaus back into your story.

 Good luck! 

Hopefully, you’ve learned something new today: that tableaus can help you improve your romance story. Creating powerful images throughout your novel can help drive the emotion of your story home, and can create a tale as universal and unforgettable as a Charlie Chaplin film. 

***

What are some of the most memorable scenes you’ve seen or read? What techniques do you employ to visualize a scene? Share with us!

***

Author Lucy Monroe presents Because Romance is Healthy on Wednesday, May 23rd.

***

Bio: Ollin Morales is a fiction writer, freelance writer, ghostwriter and blogger. His blog, Courage 2 Create, chronicles his journey as he writes his first novel. The blog offers writing advice as well as strategies to deal with life’s tough challenges. His blog was named one of The Top Ten Blogs for Writers by WriteToDone two years in a row (2011, 2012).

I recently led a friend of mine through an exercise designed to shape a character, and with her permission, we’re going to discuss that exercise here. We run into this sort of issue pretty frequently: a character has a strong backstory, but that doesn’t quite translate into a strong, solid character. In this case, the character – we’ll call her Ashley – was defined as a woman in her mid-20s whose father is an abusive alcoholic.

That single fact drove most of the character creation, and was the answer to almost every question about this character. What was Ashley’s romantic history? Light and sporadic, because she can’t trust men because her father was an abusive alcoholic. What does she look for in a man? Sobriety. And so on, each question leading back to that single backstory detail. No matter the question, the answer was, “Daddy was a mean drunk.” In fact, here is what my friend offered as a brief character description:

She’s been conditioned that people will always disappoint her. Her father disappoints her by constantly falling off the wagon. Every time she puts any faith in him, he blows it. Her mother (although she has a good relationship with her) disappointed her because she never had the strength to leave Ashley’s dad and give Ahsley a more stable environment.

This is good, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. My friend, to her credit, knew something was off with this character but was having trouble grasping the smoke. The problem is one of focus. Daddy’s not in this book. The story isn’t about letting go of the original family. This is a straightforward romance novel with a strong external plot that doesn’t involve Ashley’s dad at all. So this means that every time we were talking about the backstory, we were talking about events that occurred outside the scope of this plot. Those events have no relevance OTHER THAN the way they shaped Ashley’s character.

So we had to reframe Ashley’s character. We had to focus on the results (how she behaves in real story time), rather than the cause (Daddy was a mean drunk).

Step one in this exercise was to come up with a list of character traits. I forbid my writing friend from mentioning Ashley’s father at all. I told her to come up with a simple list of character traits to describe Ashley. Each trait should be expressed in a word or two. Here is what she sent:

Suspicious

Controlling

Self-contained

Lonely

Miserly (in that she can pinch a penny until the head pops off. LOL)

Dependable (if she wants it done, she does it herself)

Driven

That’s a sad list, isn’t it? The traits seem overwhelmingly negative. This is a romantic heroine we’re talking about. The reader will want to be able to identify with this character, so that negativity might be a barrier. Also, keep in mind that we’re trying to understand how a formative situation shapes character. Ashley was forged in fire, and these kinds of circumstances can make you hard, but they can also make you strong.

So the next step was to challenge my friend to find a positive way to express these traits. Almost every aspect of character can be positive or negative, depending on how it is expressed in the story. So I asked her to look at her list and think of positive ways these traits might manifest. For example, a suspicious character might be hard to fool, which would be a good trait in a romantic suspense novel, right?

Here is what my friend generated:

Negative                      Positive

Suspicious                   Won’t be fooled

Controlling                  Orderly

Miserly                      Responsible with money

Self-contained             Self-sufficient

Lonely                          Doesn’t need to be entertained

Driven                         Wants to do a good job

Now we understand the different ways that the same basic trait might be expressed in the course of the plot. After getting this far and looking at her list more closely, we realized that Ashley’s core trait is that she’s cautious. This caution is expressed in multiple ways, and almost every trait on the above list, both positive and negative, can be seen as an expression of that cautiousness. Now we’re starting to really understand what drives Ashley, but there’s still one more step.

That final step is figuring out how these traits manifest in the world Ashley inhabits. This is where things get really interesting. Look at that list and think about some aspect of Ashley’s present world and how it might be impacted by each trait. Do you see any potential conflicts? I do. For example, if she’s good with money, but miserly, does she buy an investment property like an apartment building to live in, or a tiny condo with low payments, or something else? If she’s self-contained and entertains herself, does she have a great television system and movie collection, or does her miserliness keep her from spending money on this sort of thing? If she’s put on a work project team with a sexy, smoking hot hero, will she agree to work late and discuss the project over drinks?

By thinking of these kinds of potential issues in the character formation stage, you not only develop a deeper understanding of the character, but you develop a sense of how different aspects of that character are prioritized. Which will she value more, saving money or protecting her privacy? In times of stress, does she hide or does she try to control everything? In the end, when this exercise is complete, you will have a more fully developed character, and you will understand better how to portray her in a deep, complex way.

***

RU writers, what’s your process for developing your character?

Join us on Monday with Ollin Morales’ post What Charlie Chaplin Can Teach You About Writing A Great Love Story

***

Bio: Theresa Stevens is the Publisher of STAR Guides Publishing, a nonfiction publishing company with the mission to help writers write better books. After earning degrees in creative writing and law, she worked as a literary attorney agent for a boutique firm in Indianapolis where she represented a range of fiction and nonfiction authors. After a nine-year hiatus from the publishing industry to practice law, Theresa worked as chief executive editor for a highly acclaimed small romance press, and her articles on writing and editing have appeared in numerous publications for writers. Visit her blog at http://edittorrent.blogspot.com/ where she and her co-blogger share their knowledge and hardly ever argue about punctuation.

In my previous post, I focused on how streamlining and tightening your prose can strengthen your writing. Line edits provide an opportunity not just to tweak the technicalities of writing but also to do some specific line-by-line content editing. When reading closely and objectively, ask yourself questions like: Is a specific action getting across the message it’s trying to convey? Am I relying too heavily on backstory for explanation? How can I give a particular sentence more dramatic weight (or in Gina-speak “oomph”)? And, perhaps most importantly, is the scene and/or chapter both moving the plot forward and starting in the right place?

Let’s take a look at our example…

Eliza Baxter had not survived the past four months to be daunted by the jeers of two hatchet-faced guards.

“Ey, would you look at this fine bit o’ muslin?”

“Hullo love, fancy a bit of leg-over once we make the high seas?”

Already, I’m intrigued by this seemingly unsavory situation the heroine is in and the mention of the “high seas.” Though, for effect, I would suggest opening with the dialogue and scrapping one of the two guards’ comments. Dialogue, when concise, direct and strong, often packs more punch when setting the scene.

She had shivered against Newgate Gaol’s underground stone walls, kicked brazen rats, and stopped her ears to the delirium during the typhus outbreak.

She had crouched in a dank corner of her cell, breathing through her sleeve to evade the miasmas that killed with a relentless efficiency, and reviewed her options. Until she decided or rather, accepted.

In these two paragraphs, the author loses me a bit with the list of all the indignities Eliza has suffered. Her past sufferings should be hinted at while still keeping the reader focused on the present. Also, what options was she reviewing? Someone who’s spent months in a cell with rats seems to have run out of them.

There had never really been a choice once she stepped into the Hunt’s carriage and traveled to London last May. Escape was the only alternative to-no don’t think of it. She couldn’t get much further than where she was now going.

Ah-ha, a mystery. I’m curious to know who the Hunts are and how they may have contributed to her current situation. However, the interrupted thought “Escape was the only alternative to—” isn’t used to its best advantage. The author could possibly be suggesting that there’s an option the heroine would rather rot in a cell than consider—an improper proposal, perhaps?—but there is not enough to go on to make that suggestion clear.

I’ve had just about enough. She dodged between the suggestive stances of the leering guards; their breath stained with the odor of stale gin as she stepped onto the gangway. And it’s not even started.

Instead of viewing masterpieces at the grand opening of the new National Gallery, she had blinked into the daylight streaming though the high courtroom windows of the Old Bailey. A judge with the same unhappy mouth as her father picked his nose. The jurors had whispered through the false charges. One dozed but woke in time to help deliver the sentence. Guilty. The thirteen other hollow-eyed prisoners knew what she was only just gleaning. All paths for a desperate woman eventually pass through the blackened archway of the Newgate Gaol.

Her sentence was read. The gallows.

Just as quickly her sentence was commuted. Transportation to Parts Beyond the Seas.

As she was escorted down from the dock, a few whistled bars rose up from the throng clustered in the balcony. The cheerful tone belied a menace that rendered her bones to jelly. The Grand Old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men, He marched them up the fields and then He marched them back again. She couldn’t find him in the crowd but her suspicion was confirmed. Jeremiah Hunt was indeed behind this.

Before the fatal trip to London last spring, she had never ventured more than thirty miles from her family’s small parsonage in the downlands of South Hampshire. Now here she was sailing for the backwater of the British Empire. Australia.

Here, my thoughts about revision changed from polishing this scene to restructuring it altogether. Aside from the technical line editing concerns, these paragraphs proved the most problematic because they bring up the question: does this scene start in the right place? The fact that a flashback takes up almost half the original word count says no. The drama of this court scene has overtaken the initial opening on the ship’s gangway and, to me as a reader, is much more interesting in both action and details. Perhaps that is the true beginning of this story.

Taking this into consideration, if we were to rework the book’s opening, it might look something like this…

“Hang the whore!”

Eliza Baxter had not survived the past four months crouching in a dank, rat-infested cell to be daunted by faceless jeers from the courtroom gallery.

I’ve had just about enough. And it’s not even started.

She blinked into the daylight streaming though the high windows of the Old Bailey. The thirteen other hollow-eyed prisoners awaiting their fates knew what she was only just gleaning. All paths for a desperate woman eventually pass through the blackened archway of Newgate Gaol.

She’d come to accept her lot. There had never really been a choice, not since she stepped into the Hunts’ carriage and traveled to London last May. Prison, though harsh, proved a better alternative to Jeremiah’s—No, don’t think of it.

A judge with the same unhappy mouth as her father picked his nose. The jurors whispered through the false charges. One dozed but woke in time to help deliver the sentence.

Guilty.

Her sentence was read—the gallows—and just as quickly commuted.

Transportation to parts beyond the seas.

A nervous laugh scratched her dry throat. All the times she’d dreamed of escape… She couldn’t get much farther than where she was now going. Before the fatal trip to London last spring, Eliza had never ventured more than thirty miles from her family’s small parsonage in the downlands of South Hampshire. Now here she was, sentenced to the backwater of the British Empire. Australia.

As she was escorted down from the dock, a few whistled bars rose up from the throng clustered in the balcony. The cheerful tone belied a menace that rendered her bones to jelly.

The Grand Old Duke of York, He had ten thousand men, He marched them up the fields and then He marched them back again.

She couldn’t find him in the crowd, but her suspicion was confirmed. Jeremiah Hunt was behind this.

Granted, without knowing the full details of the plot, I made up a lot of the backstory implied here. This is simply a rough sketch of one way the scene could unfold. The author, who better knows her story and characters, could further enhance it with descriptive details to clue the reader in on the physical and mental toll the heroine’s experience has had on her, or dialogue and narrative that further enlighten the reader’s understanding of the situation—what she’s accused of, etc. In fact, I’d strongly suggest this in order to beef up the bare bones I’ve come up with.

Overall, the goal of this close line-by-line read was to identify not only places to polish the writing but also to root out and fix any weaknesses in the scene itself. Do you think that was accomplished?

  ***

 RU Crew, what do you think about Gina’s suggestions? Can you apply some of Gina’s tips to your own scenes?

 Thank you to Gina for the valuable feedback! 

 Gina’s Bio: Gina Bernal has over eight years of publishing experience in both editorial and marketing/sales. She is currently a freelance editor for Harlequin’s digital imprint, Carina Press, for which she is actively seeking romance of all subgenres and heat levels, urban fantasy, and suspense/mystery novels with strong female leads. Gina loves books that make her laugh, books that make her cry and books that do both. She’s a sucker for tortured heroes, badass heroines, unusual settings and classic themes with new twists. She holds a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University and resides in the Boston area.

You can follow her on Twitter @GinaBernal

Dear Ms. “Editor”,

Marc’s Rock is a finished, 70K word, Mystery Romance. Take out the commas and use lower case for the genre. Romantic suspense might be the genre you’re going for here?

Carly James is running from her past and headed in a direct path that collides with her future.  What she has failed to see, is that her future is in the hands of Marc, the lead singer for an up and coming rock band.  We need to care about Carly and feel a connection with her. Give us who she is in a nutshell. “Carly James—__insert three adjectives or nouns that describe her__–is running from her past.” We don’t need “and headed in a direct path…” because no matter who we are, our pasts are bound to collide with our futures so that loses impact. You don’t need a comma after “see.” We need to connect with her, know that she’s running, and we need to understand what her agenda is—one sentence telling us her goal so that we can understand how Marc wasn’t part of the plan.

Marc Sanders has finally achieved his dream and is well on the way to becoming a successful rock band singer.  Suffering from a recent heartbreak; Marc fights with himself to lead his band and struggles with new lyrics. Use a comma instead of a semi colon after heartbreak. Why does the heartbreak cause him to fight with himself and struggle with new lyrics? Go deeper. And once we understand his struggle, tell us his agenda before Carly messes it up. J

After coming along on Carly’s vehicle – which is stranded in the middle of Death Valley – Marc and his band take Carly in while they continue on their tour across North America. Marc is running from a broken heart, while Carly is running from the law. Your last sentence is great!! Way to sum up each character’s reasons for running. Your first sentence needs some trimming. Say this in the simplest way possible. And then give us a sentence letting us know WHY Marc and his band would decide to do something as outlandish as take in a stranded motorist for the remainder of their tour. We need motivation and believable reasons here.

The chemistry between Carly and Marc is almost immediate; however, both have hidden secrets, some larger than the other.  Can they open their hearts to one another? Or will the law finally catch up with them and ruin any chance of a happily ever after? I suggest cutting “some larger than the other.” I think we need to know in paragraph one what Carly did to get the law after her. You don’t have to go into details, but maybe when you give us words to describe her, one of those can be “thief” or “murderer” or whatever it is she did. Good job summarizing the things that stand in the way of their happiness!

I am a member of the Romance Writers of America and the Liberty States Fiction Writers.  I have spent the past twelve years serving in the Air Force and (am) now investigating crimes in the financial world.  Throughout it all, I have been an avid reader and writer, often bringing the stories in my head, (delete comma) to life on paper.

If you are interested, I will gladly send you the entire manuscript.  I hope you will consider me for your list (comma) and I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,

Deserie Comfort

Thank you for sharing your query letter! I really love the idea of a girl running from the law and a boy running from a broken heart who are destined to meet. Sounds like so much fun! I think once you bring your characters to life a bit more and get rid of the proofreading/punctuation errors, you’ll have a much stronger query on your hands. Best of luck to you with this!

***

Readers, what questions do you have for C.J. regarding queries? We’d love to hear from you.

Thank you to Deserie for submitting to Query Writing 101. We appreciate you allowing us to use your work.

Stop by Wednesday when Voice over artist Cris Dukehart will share insider secrets with us – how finding a unique narration voice for each character is critical. She will also give away a CD set of Shiloh Walker’s If You Hear Her, the first in Walker’s romantic suspense Ash Trilogy!

***

Bio: C.J. Redwine is an author of young adult novels and an experienced teacher. After teaching high school for several years, she turned her love of using innovative teaching strategies to the publishing field and began creating materials designed to equip writers with the skills necessary to succeed. Her book QUERY: How to get started, get noticed, and get signed is available now for Kindle and Nook. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee with her husband, four kids, two cats, and one long-suffering dog. To learn more about C.J., visit her website: http://cjredwine.blogspot.com.

Hi all—it is always a pleasure to return to RU for lively discussions on writing. Thank you, crew, for having me back!

Chaos? Tame It So You Can Write.

I’ve always loved the Friday theme here, because chaos is how I start every manuscript. Literally. Look up chaos in the dictionary and you’ll see one definition states: “the formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe.”

Now, let’s be honest—when you write a book, don’t you feel a little like the all-knowing Creator? There’s joy in the creation of a story, fleshing-out the characters, unfolding the plot, the revelations of evolving emotion. It’s thrilling and cathartic. But it can be hard to break through from total chaos to the point where that story begins to really take shape.

It’s that shape that makes all the difference. Because a well-structured story speaks to readers. Don’t misunderstand—I’m not going to give you the magical formula for a story structure. I don’t believe there’s just one. Every story is organic, but just like every plant and animal that breathes life, every story will have a structure of its own that defines the shape.

How do you know when you’ve found it? The key evidence of structure is clarity. This means clean writing, well-chosen, powerful words strung together to weave a story that not only engages the reader, but succeeds in making the reader believe that every choice made at every turning point was absolutely the right and natural choice. It’s clear descriptions, clear actions, a voice and style that are natural to the story and engage the reader.

I’m not prescribing an info dump at the beginning of your book. But as each piece of information is revealed, it must be a clear and logical fit with the character’s previous actions. It must have meaning (even if the reader isn’t clear yet what the full meaning is). Highlight useful information to build clarity and cut the extraneous details that muddy the story.

Often, I find, clarity is lacking from my first draft. It comes with the revising and the polishing. That’s because I need to see the whole story before I can decide what elements need to clarified, what points need to be revealed when, what aspects of the characters will speak to the reader. I storyboard my story after the first draft to find all the lumps and bulges and sags in its shape. This is when I structure the story—again, not to any one formula, but to its natural shape. (See my former RU post on Linear vs Non-Linear Storytelling for a bit more on structure.)

Another important factor I find to achieving clarity with my story is focus. My focus. Focus is clarity’s friend and chaos’s worst nightmare. Focus allows us to immerse ourselves in the world of our story.

Ever been snorkeling or scuba diving? Try this analogy. Chaos is being thrown into the water with a mask and some sort of breathing apparatus (snorkel or tank). You have to get your bearings, clean your mask/visor. You have to come to terms with not breathing through your nose. You have to acclimate to water temperature, waves, wind, sun. I swear, it takes me fifteen minutes or more to even dunk my face below the water.

But when I do, I immerse myself in that world. The filtered light, the sounds of bubbles (yes, you can hear bubbles beneath the water) and splashes, the power of my limbs moving me through the water. I lose myself and simply exist while I watch fish and plants, corals and turtles, eels and starfish. I become one with the habitat and cease to think about anything that happens above the water.

Total immersion with your story leads to faster, cleaner drafting and better clarity of the final draft. But in today’s techno-speed, multitasking world, that kind of focus can be hard to achieve. Email and social media beckon us. We may have current releases to promote, blogs to write and read, a web site to update. We have contracts to review, negotiations to consider, readers we want to connect with, reviews we want to celebrate or wish we could ignore. An author’s life requires more than just writing fiction these days.

We want to immerse ourselves, but there’s always something making us bob our head above the water line, break focus, get slapped with a wave and forget how to breathe. Some authors learn to adapt and happily churn out pages in the midst of household chaos. Others, like me, flail about, trying to control the chaos (or ignore it) long enough to get in a few thousand words here and there.

If you’re a fellow flailer—or perhaps a debut author or someone who weeps every time technology changes—I invite you to visit Author E.M.S., a new online community for authors that I’ve started to build with the instrumental assistance and great advice of Kelsey Browning. The web site acts as a resource library filled with tools and tidbits to help answer your business questions so you can get back to writing fiction. Save Time. Reduce Stress. Improve Focus. Watch our intro video.

You may not always conquer chaos, but you can tame it in both your fiction and your life as a writer. Take the time to build structure in your writing day, find the organic shape of your social media interactions and clarify a plan that balances new fiction with necessary promotion.

***

What do you find to be the most chaotic part of your writing life or writing process? Have you experimented with different structures?

On Monday, May 7, C.J. Redwine returns with her monthly column. Join us!

***

Bio:

Amy Atwell worked in professional theater for 15 years before turning from the stage to the page to write fiction. She now gives her imagination free rein in both contemporary and historical stories that combine adventure and romance. When not writing, Amy runs the WritingGIAM online community for goal-oriented writers and has recently launched the Author E.M.S. online resource library. An Ohio native, Amy has lived all across the country and now resides on a barrier island in Florida with her husband and two Russian Blues.

Visit her online at her website, Magical Musings, Facebook, Twitter and/or GoodReads.

Adam Firestone takes questions at the OVRWA workshop

Romance University: At an Ohio Valley RWA workshop in April, you demonstrated how to set up a timeline charting the sequence of events in an action scene (this applies to action scenes in any fiction genre). The key, as I recall, was to determine if the timeline supports the required plot element. I think you called this the Dynamic Entry Sequence. Could you elaborate on that for us?

Adam Firestone: Sure! I think that a bit of explanation as to where this comes from may be useful. I’ve worked in the defense industry for many years as a “systems engineer.” Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering that focuses on the design and management of complex engineering projects over their entire life cycle, from concept to retirement.

I’ve designed systems involving naval mine warfare, amphibious warfare, countermine and demining operations and cruise missiles. All of those systems have a temporal component that is critical in determining system validity, or suitability for use in the intended environment. That is, a system may operate perfectly, but simply take too long a time (or, too short) to do the job it’s meant to do.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say we have an air to ground missile system designed to kill air defense radar. The missile system has to do a number of things to make this happen. For example, it’s got to acquire the target’s emissions, provide an indication that it’s ready for launch, get launched from the attack aircraft, start the motor, ride the target emissions and successfully detonate when it hits the target. The prototype does all of this beautifully, and the engineers throw a wild party to celebrate. Well, as wild a party as engineers ever throw. Wouldn’t want to bend the slide rules too much…

Meanwhile, the program manager, a former Wild Weasel pilot (Wild Weasel pilots flew missions expressly intended to suppress enemy air defenses.) walks in with a very dour look on his face.

“What’s wrong, Burglar?” says one of the engineers. (Former pilots, by the way, always go by their call signs…)

“Exactly,”says Burglar. “For your information, it takes a Greyhound twenty seconds to acquire, two to launch, and one point five to get to the target aircraft. That’s twenty three point five seconds. That means that while your missile is still attached to my wing, thinking about what the *$&#!!@ it wants to do, the bad guys have put a missile right into my air intake, and I’m flying with the angels. Epic FAIL.”

In this case, while the system worked as advertised, it was unsuited for the job because the functional timeline failed to support the operational reality. Similarly, when a writer creates scenes, she may get the detail exquisitely correct, but, due to the cumulative real-world time elapsed for each detail, wind up with a scene that doesn’t ring true, or worse, derails the plotline.

Adam with members of OVRWA

RU: You used the term “Sequence Analysis” to describe this process. “Violent action,” my notes say, “is rapid action, a complex sequence of events.” This process includes decomposing the sequence into Atomic Events, analyzing each event for components and deciding what has to happen first. What sort of components should an author look for?

AF: You do this every day without thinking about it. When you want to make sure there’s food in the fridge, you “Go grocery shopping.” But really, grocery shopping is a collection of a number of atomic events, each of which can have plot impacts. A simple decomposition of the Grocery Shopping process might look like this:

1. Grab list from fridge.
2. Walk to garage.
3. Get into car.
4. Open garage door.
5. Exit garage.
6. Drive to supermarket.
7. Park car.
8. Enter store.
9. Collect products.
10. Checkout.

One or more of these may be broken down into sub-events. We could probably break down “collect products” into another ten (or if you’re a particularly picky shopper, more) sub-events. The important thing for writers to remember is that each sub-event both takes time and is the entry point for a plot element.

In the case of the former, this helps to avoid situations where a character’s back is figuratively turned for fifteen minutes and an hour’s worth of story happens. In the case of the latter, it provides the author a number of potential springboards. For example, the car keys could be dropped when the heroine is getting into her car, and as she unexpectedly bends over to retrieve them, she might spoil the assassin’s sight picture and dodge a bullet.

Becke Martin Davis with a US M-4 Carbine - holding it all wrong, of course!

RU: You cautioned us not to brush off tricky details in an action scene, assuming it will all come together in the end. “They can just…”, you said, isn’t a satisfactory answer, particularly if it breaks the law of physics. My notes include process model, over watch scenario and other mysterious terms. Can you give us an example of a “They can just…” plot twist that ignores natural laws?

AF: It’s a longhand way of pointing to Occam’s Razor. Paraphrased, Occam’s Razor says that the simplest answer to an issue is usually best. For our purposes, this means that authors shouldn’t make characters do inexplicable or extraneous things. For one example, a character (other than in a paranormal story) can’t traverse a three mile distance in five seconds. For another, unless it’s absolutely necessary for the story, a character shouldn’t need to load her pistol at superhuman speed before she uses it.

RU: In a recent post on your blog, you noted that handguns aren’t very good at what they’re intended to do—which is not to kill, but to defend. Timing, as you noted, is critical:

Handguns aren’t especially good at providing effective personal protection. Let’s look at an illustrative example:

It gets worse, by the way. The average person can run seventy yards – that’s most of the way across a football field, folks – after being fatally shot with a handgun. Given that, in the above case, Bert may very well die after Alice shoots him, but not before he carves Alice like a Thanksgiving turkey. From the example and the timing (all of which is real, by the way), we can equate “effective personal protection” with “near instant incapacitation.”

Bearing that in mind, what defensive weapon and ammunition would be optimal for our heroes and heroines in a similar situation?

AF: I’m going to assume that you won’t let me arm your heroine with an AT4 antitank rocket or an M4 carbine with an underbarrel M203 grenade launcher , and that we’re limiting things to handguns. It’s important to realize that with handguns, as can be seen from my blog excerpt above, it’s really about multiple hits and shot placement.

It’s an article of faith in defensive handgun training that the threat is engaged with two rapid shots (a “double tap”), assessed to determine if it is still a danger, and either engaged again or attention is shifted to a new threat. Given that I’m a belt and suspenders kind of guy, I’m more a fan of what is called the “Mozambique Drill.”

This tactic, according to legend, derived from an experience by a Rhodesian mercenary during the Mozambican War of Independence. The Rhodesian, armed with a 9mm Parabellum pistol, turned a corner and bumped into a terrorist with an AK-47. The Rhodesian double tapped the terrorist, two rounds to the chest, but the terrorist didn’t go down. Taking deliberate aim, the Rhodesian shot the terrorist in the head. This time he went down and stayed that way. A Mozambique Drill, then, is a quick double tap to the chest followed by a deliberate aimed shot to the head.

It isn’t about being bloodthirsty, it’s about stopping someone who wants to do very, very bad things to you. Useful in plot situations where the bad guy is wearing a vest!

Anyway, the “best” is a combination of the largest and most potent caliber the character can carry that’s consistent with the story – it may be a pistol in some cases and a rifle in others, the most effective defense ammunition available – usually some form of jacketed hollowpoint and effective control of the firearm.

Author Kay Stockham at the OVRWA workshop

RU: In a sequence diagram, time is vertical—I think I’ve grasped that concept. In the workshop, you discussed breaking the diagram components into the technical and operational aspects of the scene. How does an author determine which category an event falls under?

AF: Operational refers to the character’s or the story’s goal. The character might need, to, oh, I don’t know, kill a dragon with a pistol. The technical refers to the means by which the goal or objective is achieved. Continuing the dragon killing example, the technical means would be the pistol itself. The writer should compare the technical means to the operational requirements to see if the two mesh.

For example, a 9mm Parabellum Glock, given the currently popular crypto-biology of dragons, wouldn’t work, and would likely turn off readers who are knowledgeable paranormal fans and gun buffs. A modern incarnation of the Confederate LeMat revolver firing a custom shaped charge shell would fulfill the scene’s technical requirements and resonate well with a wide spectrum of readers. To reiterate, operational equals the “what,” technical is the “how.”

RU: In the example I quoted earlier, you noted that an average man can run 21 feet in about 1.5 seconds. Is it necessary to know this kind of information, as well as details like the time it takes to shoot a gun or the speed of the bullet before we can create an accurate timeline?

AF: The short answer is “yes.” Timelines are as much a product of the “how” as the “what.” If you don’t have a handle on the mechanism by which the scene is effected, then the scene fails. This spans genres and historical periods. For example, a realistic description of transportation by horse requires at least some understanding of the horse’s carrying capacity, average speed, food and rest needs and the effects of terrain. Taking that a step further, you have a system consisting of horse, rider and environment and writing effectively requires familiarity with all three.

RU: Do you have any other tips for choreographing action scenes?

AF: Can I be shamelessly self serving for a moment? The best tip I can give is to retain me as a consultant to help with your novels.

Following that, the answer is to learn as much as you can as often as you can. Knowledge of the “how” makes the vision of the “what” much easier to convey. In the end, writing is about creating and sharing a vision with the reader, and the more you know, the richer, more complete and more plausible that shared vision will be.

RU: Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us!

***

Do your stories include action scenes? Do you plan them out step by step?

Join us Friday when author Amy Atwell discusses taming chaos in story structure.

***

Bio:

Adam Firestone brings more than 25 years of experience with weapon systems including small arms, artillery, armor, area denial systems and precision guided munitions to Romance University. Additionally, Adam is an accomplished small arms instructor, editor, literary consultant and co-author of a recently published work on the production of rifles in the United States for Allied forces during the First World War.

Adam has been providing general and technical editing services to authors and publishing houses specializing in firearms books since the early 2000s. Additionally, Adam provides literary consulting services to fiction authors including action scene choreography, technical vetting and technical editing. In this line of experience, Adam has had the fortune to work with well known authors including Shannon McKenna and Elizabeth Jennings.

You can read Adam’s full bio here. Check out Adam’s blog, Arma Virumque Cano. He’s also on Facebook

Welcome to RU, Sherry!!

Some people say the devil is in the details. I say the divine is in the details, especially when it comes to a story. It’s funny because in real life I don’t notice a whole lot of details, but in books details jump out at me. And I carry them with me years later. So here are a few things I want to say about details:

1) Details are wonderful for world-building. I’ve forgotten most of the plot of the first Harry Potter book, but I will always remember that the great hall at Hogwarts was lit by thousands of candles floating in the air. And no matter how you feel about it, the sparkling vampire is memorable. It distinguishes Stephenie Meyers’ vampires from all those who’ve come before.

If you write historicals, like me, you are also required to world-build, to recreate a vanished time. There is nothing like a good detail to take your readers back a century or few.

In Meredith Duran’s 1880s-set historical romance Written on Your Skin, the hero is poisoned. The heroine helps him by giving him an antidote.

“It’s only vin Mariani,” she said. “They call it the French tonic, sometimes.”
He knew the wine. He’d told Collins he wanted to create a brand of it for American distribution. Its main ingredient was not alcohol, but syrup of—“Coca.” The word was his, the voice unrecognizable. Hoarse, as though he’d been screaming.
“Yes. And the powder you inhaled—also from coca.” Her lips quirked into a strange smile that made her appear much older. “Mr. Monroe, you will be so full of coca by the time you leave, you won’t even feel a bullet.”

Holy smoke. She is giving him a diluted form of cocaine. And he talks about selling it! (It would have been good business too. The word coca in Coca-Cola was truth in advertising: Until it became frowned upon to consume cocaine, cocaine was present in minute amounts in Coca-Cola.)

We are taught from kindergarten to say no to drugs, but many of today’s forbidden substances were legitimate medicine 130 years ago. By using this detail, right away Meredith takes us to a different era.

2) Details are also wonderful for character-building. Going back again to the Harry Potter books. Let’s take one of its most beloved characters, Hagrid. We can spend gigabytes talking about Hagrid, but you know what I always remember from the books?

Hagrid’s domestic activities. He knits, he darns socks, and he cooks really terrible food—rock cakes that will chip your teeth and a beef stew in which Hermione finds a talon.

Kids devouring HP books might just cackle at these little descriptions. But what J. K. Rowling has vividly portrayed is the life of a middle-aged bachelor of limited means. He does these things because he has no one else to do them for him—no wife, no house elf. Hagrid never complains, but his is at times a lonely lot.

3) Details are wonderful for character description.

From Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart:

She felt herself strangely daunted by him, overpowered by his greater size, the black line of his legs, the heavy square links of the belt that hung at his hips. He wore it as if it had no weight at all, though each joint, ornate and thick, studded with the silvery sable of marcasite crystals, would have balanced a cobblestone on the measuring scale.

This passage comes late in the book. The hero has been established as a thoroughly wonderful knight. But until this point, I haven’t really thought of him as sexy. The belt, however, clinches it for me. Can you imagine the magnificent physique it takes to wear such a tremendous belt? I can and someone please pour a bucket of cold water on me.

4) Details are wonderful for regular description.

From The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, here is the heroine imagining leaving her asshole of a husband to live by herself and wait for her lover to come back from the war:

She’ll sew curtains for the windows, yellow curtains, the color of canaries or the yolks of eggs. Cheerful curtains, like sunshine. Never mind that she doesn’t know how to sew. She’ll starch the curtains and hang them up. She’ll get down on her knees with a whisk and clean out the mouse droppings and dead flies under the kitchen sink. She’ll repaint a set of canisters she’ll find in a junk store, and stencil on them: Tea, Coffee, Sugar, Flour. She will hum to herself while doing this. She’ll buy a new towel, a whole set of new towels. Also sheets, these are important, and pillowcases. She’ll brush her hair a lot.

Everything here is detail after detail after detail. You can feel how much and with what intensity the heroine has imagined this scenario.

5) The iteration of details become important motifs in your book.

In my recent RITA-winning historical romance, His at Night, the heroine lives under her malevolent uncle’s thumb. Her only escape is a book of travelogue. Whenever she is anxious, frightened, or wakes up from a nightmare, she reads about Capri and dreams of freedom.

Later on in the book, when the hero suffers from his own nightmares, she tells him about her beautiful Capri. And when the hero screws things up, to woo her back again, he finds a copy of the travelogue, memorizes the section on Capri, and recites it to her.

Reviewers often single out this last scene for praise.

It doesn’t need to be Capri—I chose Capri since I’d happened upon a 19th century travel guide to Southern Italy when I was researching another book. She could have been reading about the Wild West or even horticulture. The important thing is the layering, the repetition. Setup and payoff, in film parlance.

6) The questions:

a) How many details constitute the correct quantity of details?

The answer does not lie in the numbers, but in the results. What you want is to banish generic-ness and hone specificity in your writing. That’s what the details are for. When you have achieved specificity, you have the right quantity of details.

b) How do I know my details aren’t just more words?

Tough question. You’ll have to be the judge. But this simple rule of thumb can help you. Ask yourself, are your details doing double—or even better, triple—duty? In the example above from Meredith Duran’s book, the quick three paragraphs involving coca not only give you a flavor just how different the 1880s are from the 2010s, they also move the plot along and demonstrate the heroine’s cool-under-pressure character.

Giveaway information

Sherry will be happy to give away a copy of her latest release, BEGUILING THE BEAUTY.

When the Duke of Lexington meets the mysterious Baroness von Seidlitz-Hardenberg aboard a transatlantic ocean liner, he is fascinated. She is exactly what he has been searching for—a beautiful woman who interests and entices him. He falls hard and fast—and soon proposes marriage.

And then she disappears without a trace…

For in reality, the “baroness” is Venetia Easterbrook—a proper young widow who had her own vengeful reasons for instigating an affair with the duke. But the plan has backfired. Venetia has fallen in love with the man she despised—and there’s no telling what might happen when she is finally unmasked…

Excerpt from BEGUILING THE BEAUTY

Venetia froze. Striding down the street toward her, tall, haughty, and impeccably turned out, was none other than the Duke of Lexington. He cast a cursory glance at the automobile and headed inside the hotel.

Her hotel. What was he doing here?

Her first instinct was to run. But a perverse pride refused to let her. If anyone ought to run in the opposite direction, it was he, not she. She had not slandered anyone. She had not spread malicious rumors. She had not spoken without regard to consequences.

Not until she was crossing the onyx-and-marble rotunda of the hotel did she realize she was still fully veiled. The hotel clerk blinked once at her appearance. “Good afternoon, ma’am. May I help you?”

Before she could reply, another clerk several feet down the counter offered a greeting of his own.

“Good afternoon, Your Grace.”

She froze again.

“Any news on my passage?” came Lexington’s cool voice.

“Indeed, sir. We have secured you a Victoria suite on the Rhodesia. There are only two such suites on the liner, and you will be assured of the greatest comfort, privacy, and luxury for your crossing.”

“Departure time?”

“Tomorrow morning at ten, sir.”

“Very good,” said Lexington.

“Ma’am, may I help you?” Venetia’s clerk asked again.

Unless she abruptly abandoned the counter, she must speak and, at some point, give her name. She cleared her throat—and out came a string of German. “Ich hätte gerne Ihre besten Zimmer.”

She was running away after all. She balled her fingers, the chaos inside her igniting into anger.

“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”

Through gritted teeth, she repeated herself.

The clerk looked flustered. Without turning, without ever having appeared to pay attention, Lexington said, “The lady would like your best rooms.”

“Ah yes, of course. Your name, please, ma’am.”

She swallowed and reached randomly. “Baronesse von Seidlitz-Hardenberg.”

* * *

Sherry, thanks again for joining us today! Such a terrific workshop. Don’t forget to leave a comment for a chance to win Sherry’s newest release, Beguiling the Beauty!

RU Readers, what about you? Do you key in on the details of a story? What types of things jump out at you as a reader?

Please stop back on Monday for a great lecture by award-winning historical romance author Monica Burns. Monica reveals details about  Rock*It Reads and gives us her take on self-publishing.

* * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sherry Thomas burst onto the scene with PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS, a Publisher Weekly Best Book of 2008. Her sophomore book, DELICIOUS, is a Library Journal Best Romance of 2008. Her next two books, NOT QUITE A HUSBAND and HIS AT NIGHT, are back-to-back winners of Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA® Award for Best Historical Romance in 2010 and 2011. Lisa Kleypas calls her “the most powerfully original historical romance author working today.”

Her story is all the more interesting given that English is Sherry’s second language—she has come a long way from the days when she made her laborious way through Rosemary Roger’s SWEET SAVAGE LOVE with an English-Chinese dictionary. She enjoys digging down to the emotional core of stories. And when she is not writing, she thinks about the zen and zaniness of her profession, plays computer games with her sons, and reads as many fabulous books as she can find.

For more details, please visit Sherry’s website at http://sherrythomas.com

Welcome back, Theresa!

This month we continue our line editing series with an entry that gives us a chance to talk about content editing as well as line editing. Let’s start by reading the full excerpt.

Sienna Edwards loved the feel of power and the roar of the engine right beneath her. She easily moved through the thick Chicago traffic on her beloved Suzuki Hayabusa. She didn’t know of any more powerful feeling in the world than the wind rushing through her long curls and the honks from upset drivers.

Thoughts whirled around inside of her head and as usual were spinning out of control on her birthday. A horrible day to her if she had to be honest about it. Normally everyone got older and that hadn’t been what bothered her, it was the past birthdays, or the lack thereof. Life wasn’t always as peachy as people thought, but she was determined to have fun on this particular birthday, finally being able to spend it with friends that truly cared.

Through the thick fog that settled throughout the city, Sienna could finally make out her destination from a distance. The club Diablo announced itself to the world with glowing red lights and the flashlights that seemed to make it all the way to the sky. Since her and her friends knew the owner, they were frequent visitors. The fact that her kind could also feel completely safe there, only added to its appeal.

With a motorcycle, curbside parking did not take long to find. Before she managed to perch the bike and start walking towards the entrance, Sienna pinned her hair back in a messy bun with a handy chopstick that rested between her breasts.

Glares definitely lingered on her small but endowed figure which had been accented by the tight black leather pants, the knee high stiletto boots, and the tight black V-neck t-shirt that showed the top of her breasts. Men were definitely attracted to her, which she enjoyed, though didn’t let on. After one look from her in their direction and the whole group of guys that stood smoking and waiting to get in, averted their eyes.

“Hey my lady,” the bouncer smiled as she walked up. James, one of her own, knew her since before the bar even opened. The fact that he called her his lady always flustered everyone else. James, being a man easily over six feet tall with muscles that gave Schwarzenegger a run for his money, could definitely be mistaken for a common convict. Tough though he may be on the outside, Sienna knew all too well how a gentle of a soul he could be.  His mate being one to attest to that fact first and foremost. Cutting through the entire line, to a mass of groans and some appreciating whistles, she stood before him.

“Hey James. Not being too mean I hope,” she motioned towards the line before giving him a slight peck on the cheek.

“Nah, you know me. Just wanna build the suspense up a bit,” he smiled wickedly, “but you go on and have fun. Lauren and Sonya area already waiting for you,” he said lastly and turned his attention to the next guy in line causing trouble. No one could get past James especially with his hunter senses.

My first response to this is that it’s inconsistent. Sienna could very well end up being an interesting character, but in this specific moment in time, she’s not as clear as we want her to be. The line editing in cases like this has to start with something more akin to content editing. We have to examine the way the character is coming across on the page, and we have to do what we can to shape her up – but on a sentence and paragraph level rather than on a scene and story level.

Take another look at the first two paragraphs. Look at them separately, and then look at them together.

Paragraph 1:

Sienna Edwards loved the feel of power and the roar of the engine right beneath her. She easily moved through the thick Chicago traffic on her beloved Suzuki Hayabusa. She didn’t know of any more powerful feeling in the world than the wind rushing through her long curls and the honks from upset drivers.

Okay, so (ignoring for the moment the line editing concerns), this is a paragraph about a woman who feels free and powerful on a motorcycle. There’s something uplifting and bold about her in this moment. Because of the repetition in power and powerful, we might decide she’s an ambitious, power-hungry person. Because of the repetitions in loved and beloved, we might also decide she’s a force for good, maybe even big-hearted.

But then we get to paragraph 2:

Thoughts whirled around inside of her head and as usual were spinning out of control on her birthday. A horrible day to her if she had to be honest about it. Normally everyone got older and that hadn’t been what bothered her, it was the past birthdays, or the lack thereof. Life wasn’t always as peachy as people thought, but she was determined to have fun on this particular birthday, finally being able to spend it with friends that truly cared.

This is not the same character from paragraph one, is it? This character is mopey, overwhelmed, maybe a little self-pitying, though she’s trying to overcome it. She has bleak thoughts, which she might be trying to replace with more positive thoughts, but nevertheless, this paragraph is packed with a kind of gloominess. Spinning out of control, horrible day, feeling gypped on past birthdays, life isn’t peachy – these add up to a negativity that seems hard to reconcile with the power-lover from the first paragraph.

So what is the character’s dominant mood in this moment? The reader won’t know because the text hasn’t told her. The character could be exhilirated from the ride, or she could be the determined-to-be-cheerful sad girl from the second paragraph. Because it’s unclear, the reader will have a harder time bonding with the character. So the first step here is to figure out what she’s really thinking and feeling in this moment, and stick with it. The character might be complex enough to feel everything currently on the page, but that kind of complexity is best developed over the whole text.

Next up, paragraphs 3 and 4 – which I won’t repeat here – focuses mainly on the fact of travel to a destination. It’s my standard practice, when an author presents a first scene with travel details, to cut most of this run-up material and start at the moment of arrival. Some editors might let this kind of short leading material to stand, but I usually won’t. The moment of arrival is almost always going to be more interesting than the moments of travel, and the descriptive details can be blended into the actual arrival. So I would cut most of what’s in these two paragraphs, though some of the details might be seeded into the rest of the scene.

One option might be to start with the moment she parks the motorcycle – that way, you still get the motorcyle into the text – and go from there. Establish her dominant mood in the first paragraph, and don’t dilute it with material that doesn’t support that mood. For the purposes of demonstration, I’m going to choose “determined to have fun” as her dominant mood in the revised excerpt below.

You can use the conversation with James to bring out the fact of her birthday, and some of the other details can be salted in along the way, too. But you don’t need to explain a lot at this point. Your goal is to hook the reader and build a quick bond, and a little bit of mystery will help with that.

Just for an example, I’m going to take a swing at this. But this is for demonstration only. I’ll use your words as much as possible, but I’m going to trim and tighten quite a bit so that the focus is on the action and interaction.

Sienna Edwards perched her beloved bike, a Suzuki Hayabusa, next to the curb and walked toward the club entrance. The club Diablo announced itself to the world with glowing red lights and the flashlights that seemed to make it all the way to the Chicago sky. Sure, she came here all the time, but tonight was different. It had to be. With a determined little sigh, Sienna pinned her hair back in a messy bun with a handy chopstick that rested between her breasts.

The group of guys that smoked and waited in line lingered on her small but endowed figure which had been accented by the tight black leather pants, the knee high stiletto boots, and the tight black V-neck t-shirt that showed the top of her breasts. Men were definitely attracted to her, which she enjoyed, though didn’t let on. Not even tonight, not even when her one and only goal was pleasure. She cut through the entire line to a mass of groans and some appreciating whistles, until she stood before the heavily muscled bouncer.

“Hey, my lady.” James, one of her own shapeshifting kind, had known her since before the bar even opened.

“Hey James. Not being too mean, I hope.” She motioned towards the line before giving him a slight peck on the cheek.

“Nah, you know me. Just wanna build the suspense up a bit.” He smiled wickedly. “But you go on and have fun. Lauren and Sonya area already waiting for you. They tell me it’s your birthday.”

“Yes, and for a change, I thought I’d have a fun birthday. You could say I’m determined.”

“Uh-oh. And we all know, what my lady wants, my lady shall have.”

See, now the premise has been established. It’s her birthday. She is approaching it as a task to be accomplished: Have fun on my birthday, for a change. We don’t know why she has this attitude, but at this point, any explanation would slow down the pacing of the narrative. So skip the explanation. Establish the facts, and get the scene moving. Use James to throw in some details, and get to the interior of the bar more quickly. You can keep the sexual interest from the men in line because that accomplishes two purposes: it gives us a little bit of character description, and it establishes the fact of her sexual power. We lost a small sense of her love of power when we cut the paragraph about riding the motorcycle, so this reinserts it in a different way.

The revised opening has a clearer emotional content and a faster pace. I think it works better, don’t you?

***

RU Crew, do you have any questions for Theresa regarding her suggestions? 

On Monday, Jessica Scott tells us how an Army company commander became a romance writer. 

Bio: Theresa Stevens is the Publisher of STAR Guides Publishing, a nonfiction publishing company with the mission to help writers write better books. After earning degrees in creative writing and law, she worked as a literary attorney agent for a boutique firm in Indianapolis where she represented a range of fiction and nonfiction authors. After a nine-year hiatus from the publishing industry to practice law, Theresa worked as chief executive editor for a highly acclaimed small romance press, and her articles on writing and editing have appeared in numerous publications for writers. Visit her blog at http://edittorrent.blogspot.com/ where she and her co-blogger share their knowledge and hardly ever argue about punctuation.

Take it away, Louisa!

The first comment I usually get when someone reads my book, One Month to Become a Mum, is ‘I love the humor.’ Truthfully, I didn’t start out to write a book that made people smile, but it seems my voice has a lightness to it. Life is no fun without laughs, it’s just too darned hard to be serious all the time. And a funny feisty heroine, laughing at herself against the odds is endearing to the reader. Humor can add power and poignancy to a scene, and can give the reader welcome relief from a dark moment.

I’m not talking slapstick, forced jokes or fake jollity that drags the reader out of the story.  I’m talking upbeat banter, rhythm and context. As Jenny Crusie, queen of romantic comedy, says in her Comedy Workshop ( in How to Write Funny edited by John B Kachuba) humor has to come from voice and character; ‘Humor tells more about character than anything else except action…the comedy or tragedy of any premise depends on the characters stuck in it.’

Ms Crusie is not only extremely talented and writes amazingly funny stories, but she’s also very clever- she writes long books, she has complex plots and time to set everything out. I, however, write category romance, and am limited to fifty thousand words to give my reader an emotional rollercoaster. I have to be short and snappy and set out my characters quickly. Humor is a great way to do this – one quick laugh and we’re all digging for a hapless heroine.

My editor, however, doesn’t just want light, she wants intensely emotional and sizzlingly sensual too. Stretching the reader from laughing along with the heroine to rooting for her to overcome deep internal conflict is hard. I try to counterbalance the two- although sometimes my editor has to rein me in!  There’s a fine line between feisty and brutal withering sarcasm (apparently). But to make things easier I use themes or motifs, something light, that starts out as a little joke or a quirk that I can build an emotional arc into. Light turning into dark – the joke becoming serious and more meaningful. Immediately the reader can latch on to an idea/thought/theme and recognize it as important later. That way she is hooked into the character’s expectations or experiences on a kind of subconscious level- it’s like leaving little clues she can pick up. As a reader I enjoy finding these clues, it makes me feel clever!

I’ll give an example from my debut, One Month to Become a Mum:

Chapter Two: (Set up: Jessie is a doctor dealing with a pregnant patient. Jessie has lost a baby and is now infertile but remembering her own pregnancy):  It was the small details that had surprised her the most; how, in the pregnancy books, fetal development was measured in terms of fruit. The size of a strawberry, then a lime, then a grapefruit. She used to joke about how she was going to give birth to a fruit salad.

[Okay, so it’s not exactly a belly laugh, but there’s humor there in a sad memory. The fruit theme runs through the book and gets progressively more serious and poignant. NB: it works better if it’s sprinkled lightly, the reader wants a connection, not a hammer blow.]

Chapter Eight:  Stacey put down her plate and ran a hand over her stomach. It was the first time Jessie had seen her do anything maternal towards her unborn child.

With a start she found herself mirroring the action. And then realized it was something she’d been doing a lot recently. Sheesh, why were all these deeply submerged emotions brimming to the surface again? She needed to control herself.

‘I’ll manage.’ Stacey patted her belly. ‘I read through those leaflets you gave me. Termination isn’t an option, this thing…is the size of a lime, can you imagine? It’s real. I can’t get rid of it.’

A lime. Of course. The citrus came first. Jessie smiled. ‘I totally understand.’ More than you can ever know.

And then the doozy:  It was so hard to explain, how much she wanted him, but how much it would be better for them both if she left.

‘I just watched the joy and pride in Colin’s face as he stroked Stacey’s stomach. And I want you to have that. You didn’t see Chloe’s belly swell, feel the flutter of kicks against your palm, experience your baby growing from a strawberry, to a lime, to a grapefruit and you deserve to have that. And as many siblings for Lucy as you want.’

‘I don’t care about any of that. I want you.’

‘And I want you, Luke, but I can’t ask you to give that all up. And one day, when you think you’ve dealt with not having it, you’ll want it so badly you’ll resent me.’ Her voice had cracked but she was holding it together. No tears. Yet. Good. ‘And I can’t risk loving you then losing you. I’ve lost too much already. I don’t think I could recover from that.’

So the fruit salad started as a quip, but became a metaphor for what she’d lost.

Writing funny or with a light touch doesn’t come naturally to everyone, it doesn’t always come naturally to me, but when I write/edit a scene I always examine how I can heighten emotion – and often that means humor as well as heart wrenching. We are entertaining after all – emotional rollercoaster means ups as well as downs. Is there a motif I can bring in to create a connection with the reader? Is there an ‘in’ joke  I can create between the characters that I can explore and exploit further? Is there another layer I can add?

By the end I hope I’ve tapped into every part of my reader’s psyche, given them an emotionally satisfying read- and tickled their funny bone!

***

RU Crew, what about you? Do you enjoy reading stories with humor? Do you enjoy writing them?

Thank you to Louisa for being with us today.

RU Crew, join us on Friday when Theresa Stevens returns for another installment of our line editing series.

BIO: A lifelong reader of most genres, Louisa discovered romance novels later than most, but immediately fell in love with the intensity of emotion, the high drama and the family focus of Medical Romance.

With a Bachelors Degree in Communication and a nursing qualification under her belt, writing Medical Romance seemed a natural progression, and the perfect combination of her two interests. And making things up is a great way to spend the day!

An English ex-pat, Louisa now lives north of Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, two teenage sons and two male cats. Writing romance is her opportunity to covertly inject a hefty dose of pink into her heavily testosterone-dominated household. When she’s not writing or researching Louisa loves to spend time with her family and friends, enjoys traveling, and adores great food. She’s also hopelessly addicted to zumba.

Hi, everyone. It’s a very great pleasure to be talking to you here at the Romance University today.

When Robin invited me to write an article, I really had to scratch my head for a topic. It’s not that I’m not brimming over with thoughts, but I was aware that RU is a forum where authors – very erudite and successful ones – offer insights to readers and writers into the process of writing romance, and although over the past couple of years I’ve thought more about technique and method than I ever did when I was only writing for myself, I do remain a very seat-of-the-pants sort of author. Not so much in terms of plot – selling books on proposal means you do have to come up with one and stick with it – but when it comes to the daily business of making places and people come alive on the page.

Eventually I gave up and asked Robin what she thought a good topic would be. She was kind enough to say that my work engages readers emotionally whilst avoiding melodrama, and that my books offer fresh, original characters, settings and storylines. (Thank you, Robin.) She suggested I share with you some ideas about how I provide that emotional connection and come up with those protags, places and plots. That idea appealed to me a lot because, although the process to me is very organic, obviously there is some conscious thought going on! “I just do it” is not a helpful answer, and not a true one either – ultimately I want and need to create a saleable book for the romance market, and that immediately provides me with a set of guidelines, a target audience and a plot dynamic.

What I’d like to say first of all is – what an amazing amount of room for manoeuvre there is within those romance guidelines! When I started the first book I intended to try and publish, I did wonder if my M/M heroes had to be just that – leanly muscled semi-divinities who strode about solving their problems and everyone else’s, falling into bed together to an accompaniment of orchestral music and fireworks after just the right amount of angst. I’m a bit ashamed of myself over those fears now. Over the course of eight books, my publishers have accepted, and readers taken to their hearts, an enormous range of seriously flawed and struggling men, including a middle-aged Edinburgh copper with a drink problem, an army doctor racked with PTSD, an illegal immigrant and, in Scrap Metal, a Glasgow runaway who may or may not have committed a terrible crime. I haven’t felt trammelled in any way when creating these guys, and the happy-ever-after requirement hasn’t felt restrictive either. No-one wanted an HEA for McBride, Tom, Sasha and Cameron more than I did. I’m pretty optimistic about the chances of love, redemption and happiness in life, and for me it’s been a matter of harnessing redemptive potential within my protags to carry the story through to a satisfactory and realistic conclusion. I don’t deploy miracles. The road to love can be a tough and dirty one, and maybe it should be. There’s hard work and a big effort of self-realisation involved, and often a leap in the dark. One form of believable magic I do enjoy is placing someone there to catch.

With regard to forging emotional connections between my men and my readers – for me that’s the easy part. No matter how bad a day I’m having, how uninspired I’m feeling, I still have my basic qualification to do that, which is that I’m human. (Some days it takes a coffee or two, but still.) That means I can write a believable rescue pilot or a doctor. I haven’t been either of those things but I know how it feels to fail to help or save someone, or to succeed in doing something good for someone, and I bet you do too. Obviously I research the technical stuff, but the basic connection I need is right there.

I know that the enormous majority of my readers will share the same base palette of emotions and reactions, and the very ordinariness of those feelings is what makes them so precious. We most of us know what it’s like to be lonely, heart-thumping scared, teetering like an idiot on the brink of falling crazy in love. I’m not reaching far for these driving forces in my prose. Melodrama isn’t necessary. The ordinary forces in our lives are enough to sling us down into the mud or upward into heaven. So for me it’s a matter of getting inside my own skin, remembering how it felt for me, then getting inside of Tom’s skin, or Cam’s or Flynn’s, and showing – not telling – how it feels for them. (That’s an important distinction. You can inform your readers till the cows come home how awful or how ecstatic a character is feeling, but you bull’s-eye the target when you make the guy get up and do whatever it is these emotions are compelling him to do.)

I’m glad my characters come across as fresh. I’m glad the storylines do too, because I’m sure that my tales of love, loss and redemption have been told in their essence a billion times before, and that’s no bad thing. I don’t believe there are many “original” stories, not when it comes to romance and the motivations of the human heart. But if as an author you can truly get inside a protag’s head, wrap yourself up in his hide, whatever story he tells is going to come across as fresh because although we share common feelings, our individual way of experiencing those feelings is unique. Perhaps that’s the writer’s gift – to make a string of different protagonists out of her sole self, to get inside different skins.

Having said all that, I do absolutely cheat with settings. Man, settings are a gift! The world is full of the most fantastic backdrops against which to tell a story. A tower on a Cornish cliff! Great stuff. An ancient Roman wall, or a priory besieged by Vikings, or Edinburgh in winter – bring ’em on. Even if I’m struggling to give a protagonist an individual voice, I can take him and his lover and set the pair of them loose in one of these environments, and they’ll start to react for me as no-one has ever reacted before. Or, okay, never mind the exotics – give me a lonely teenager’s attic room, or just a street in my own home town where I’ve walked a million times before. Now I’m sitting up there as Laurie in A Midwinter Prince, wondering how the hell I’m ever going to escape my wealthy, stifling background. Or I’m Matthew in Life After Joe, and the boring street has just become riveting to me because I’ve got a skinful of nightclub drugs and I’m running down it for my life with a gang of murderous thugs in pursuit. I am, by the way, a woman in her mid-forties, of very staid daily habits, and I’ve never had much to do with drugs, thugs or (unfortunately) wealth. It just isn’t necessary. I just need to feel the basic emotion, and switch skins. That’s what I’d say to anyone struggling for a fresh scene, story, character – just feel. How would it be for you? See the environment. Smell it. Plonk down on a wooden bench on the promenade and promptly get a splinter in your bum. Detail, detail, visceral physical detail. You wouldn’t be in this writing game if you weren’t already empathetic, imaginative and simply dying to tell your story. I’m pretty sure that for most of us, the tools for that fresh magic, that original way of serving up even the oldest of tales, are right there at hand.

I’ve really enjoyed this. If you’d like to comment and/or discuss with me any of the things I’ve been talking about, or indeed anything else, I’ll be around to answer all today. Anyone who leaves a comment has a chance of winning a nice little prize – I’ll random-pick three of you, and you can each choose either a copy of my latest release, Scrap Metal, or two ebooks from my backlist, details on my website. Thanks to Robin, and the Romance University, for the opportunity of blogging here today!

***

Whew!  What is your organic process to touch your readers, create memorable characters, and fresh settings?  As a reader – what touches you and makes a book one you can’t put down?

Emmie Dark, debut Harlequin Superomance author is here on Monday. Don’t miss it!

***

Scrap Metal
On a rainy Scottish island, Nichol is struggling to save his grandfather’s farm. Lonely and nearing the end of his rope, he almost shoots the intruder who breaks into his barn one stormy night. But Cameron, on the run from a Glasgow gang, quickly charms his way through Nichol’s defences and into his heart. Even Nichol’s curmudgeonly old grandfather takes to Cam, whose hard work and good head for figures help set the business back on its feet.

Nichol is grieving for lost family and the academic life he’s had to leave behind him in Edinburgh. As a cold Arran springtime melts into summer, Cam’s presence restores all his love of the island and his joy in life. He’s falling in love – with a young man whose heart is full of secrets and who stays resolutely silent about his past.

When tragedy strikes the farm, Cam’s secret is finally revealed. Now Nichol has to face the truth. He’s given his heart to a stranger, and it’s time to pay the price. Is their bond strong enough for love to survive – no matter what Cam has done?

Bio:

Bio: Harper Fox is a UK-based author of M/M romance fiction. She’s had eight novels published in the last two years and is living in a scary abyss between her day job and full-time writing. Find out more about Harper’s books, inspiration and ongoing projects at www.harperfox.net