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.

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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

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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.

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!

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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!

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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

Author Lynne Marshall is here with some tips on how we can deepen our characters.

Take it away, Lynne!

Strangers in the Night

Are you having trouble getting to know your characters?  Are they reaching out to you but somehow not making contact?  Beginning a book is always a time of discovery, and sometimes our characters resist our delving.  So how do we writers break down the barrier?

A couple of summers ago, I had the good fortune of extra time and enrolled in a UCLA extension writing workshop: Deepening the Characters You Create.  The instructor used personalized questions to help each participant create realistic characters with distinct histories, points of view, and value systems. The goal of the class was that we would use this gathered information to weave into our current or future story. 

I had a vague idea about three siblings, two sisters and a brother, the Grady family.  I planned to write a book for each one, and the workshop proved to be the perfect way to get to know them.

Each week we received our particular questions, which were based on the information we gave our instructor via a brief synopsis of our stories. We were instructed to answer the question in first person, as if we were the protagonist. The instructor told us to allow at least thirty minutes for the character to free flow through the answer.

I planned to write the first book about Anne, the eldest sister, as her parents’ sudden trauma and subsequent special needs forces her back home, a place she’d run away from twelve years ago. My goal in the series was for each sibling to deal with their place in the family and their own private brokenness. That meant I needed to explore that brokenness.

Professor Doctor’s questions proved to be the perfect path to reach my elusive heroine, Anne, and in the process, I also grew to know Lucas, the middle sibling, and Lark, the youngest Grady.

A sample of questions that might be helpful with your characters.

• What is your earliest memory of injustice?  Go dark.
• Can you let go of grudges and resentments? Find the shame of what the character felt.
• How did your siblings show their love growing up?
• What was the glue that held your family together?
• Did either sibling have something you desperately wanted?
• How do you cope when the pain is overbearing? (tell the story)
• Re: romantic relationships – are you competing instead of nurturing?
• How do you sabotage relationships?
• What wounds have you kept hidden, and what wounds are yet to heal?
• What gifts do you have to offer another?
• What common miracles do you forget to notice?
• What does it mean to be free?
• Where do you find comfort to avoid feeling pain?
• What makes you feel alive?
• What does contentment look like?
• When did your heart move from cold to fire?
• How has compassion and empathy for others affected your life?
• When did a crack of light creep into the darkness?
• What have you chased with urgency, passion and veracity?
• What do you miss that can’t be returned?
• What is worth fighting for?
• What do you want right now that you’re not willing to wait for?
• What questions must you have answers to?

What I Learned

By answering questions like these in first person, I was able to bring my characters from distant billowing silhouettes into full focus. Since my trilogy revolves around three siblings, their shared childhood played a huge part in each of their characters, and by examining their past, the future became clearer. I learned that Anne was the rock of the siblings, solid, practical, dependable, and blunt to a fault. Eventually she’d discover that good things come to those who wait. Always mistaken as a slacker, Lucas was cautious, inward, and loyal, but in his story as he battled post traumatic stress disorder he’d learn that out of friendship blooms the truest love. Ethereal, fragile Lark would prove herself to be capable and strong after her teenage struggle with anorexia, and as she learned and embraced her destiny, contrary to her hopes and dreams, all roads would lead back home.  In the end, that is where she and her baby were meant to be.

This one particular insight by the professor blew my mind:  “There is always one moment in childhood where the door opens and lets in the future.”

RU Crew, can you define that moment for your characters? Leave a comment for a chance to win either a medical romance backlist book from Lynne or an ebook of One for the Road.

Join us tomorrow when Alicia Rasley shares her top ten pacing tips.

Bio: Lynne Marshall writes contemporary and Medical Romance for Harlequin and The Wild Rose Press.  The first book in the Grady family trilogy, Courting His Favorite Nurse, is a March 2012 Harlequin Special Edition.  Also coming in March in e-book only is, An Indiscretion, a contemporary romance with strong medical elements, from The Wild Rose Press.

You can connect with Lynne Marshall on the Web:

Website                Facebook             RomanceWiki         Author Page

COURTING HIS FAVORITE NURSE Harlequin Special Edition, March 2012 #2178, US

Anne Grady knew better than anyone that love was complicated. When she’d left her hometown, she thought she was leaving her past heartbreak behind for good, as well. But practically the moment she returned to care for her injured parents, she stumbled headlong into their confidant—her first love, Jack Lightfoot.

Jack had been unable to deny his feelings for Annie when he was a teenager dating her best friend, and he certainly couldn’t muffle the spark twisting between them now—even if memories of the past kept threatening to push them apart. This time Jack wasn’t going to let history repeat itself—he was going to show Annie that the two of them were meant to be much more than best friends!

Buy Links:

Harlequin     Amazon                 Amazon UK               B&N              Book Depository

Introducing your main character to your reader may be the single trickiest job for a novelist. You have to introduce the reader to a character in a very short time and entice us go on a journey with her into a brand new world. If you tell us too much, we’re bored, but if you tell us too little, we’re in the dark.

Important note before you read on: these are rules for your final draft ONLY. 

When you’re first diving into a novel, you’re not introducing your characters to a reader; you’re introducing them to yourself. 

All kinds of information about your MC will come up while you’re writing your first draft. Maybe she lives in a noisy apartment building. Or her mom is a gung-ho Amway seller. Or her next door neighbor is recuperating from a terrible accident. Or she feels a deep hatred for Smurfs. This stuff will spill out in your first chapters. Let it. That’s the fun part. 

But be aware you’ll want to cut most of the information or move it to another part of the book when you edit. 

It helps to remember this formula—FIRST DRAFTS ARE FOR THE WRITER; FINAL DRAFTS ARE FOR THE READER. 

Even if you’re not going the agent/publisher route, you need to keep your reader in mind. Self-publishers are judged, too, and reviewers and readers can be snarkier than any agent. 

Here are some dos and don’ts that should help in the revision process.

1. DON’T start with a Robinson Crusoe opening. That’s when your character is alone and musing. Robinson Crusoe is boring until Friday shows up. So don’t snoozify the reader with a character: 

   - driving alone in a car

  -  sitting on an airplane

  -  waking up and getting ready for the day

  -  out on her morning jog

  -  looking in the mirror

Especially looking in the mirror. It’s not wrong, but it’s a seriously overdone cliché.

2. DO open with the protagonist in a scene with other characters—showing how he interacts with the world. Two or three is ideal: not too many or the reader will be overwhelmed.

3. DON’T give a lot of physical description, especially of the police report variety. All we know about Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice is that she has “fine eyes.” We don’t need to know eye color/height/weight. Give a general impression in a few broad strokes and the reader’s imagination fills in the blanks.

4. DO give us a few strong physical markers that indicate personality. Unusual characteristics like curvy hips or striking hair or an unusual way of dressing will tell us something about who a character is and make her memorable. But if all you say is she has green eyes and curly red hair—you’ve only told us she’s identical to the MCs of 90% of all YA romance novels, according to one agent. We don’t need to know the hair/eye thing unless the characteristic is important to the story—like Anne of Green Gables hating her hair and dying it green.

5. DON’T present your MC as a flawless Mary Sue. A Mary Sue is the author’s idealized fantasy self—an ordinary person who always saves the day and is inexplicably the object of everyone’s affection. A Mary Sue will make your whole story phony, because a too-perfect character isn’t believable (and is seriously annoying.)

 
6. DO give your MC strong emotions we can identify with in the opening scene. We don’t have to identify with the situation, but with the emotion: If the character is furious because her roommate keeps watching that DVD of the Smurfs—even if you’ve never heard of a Smurf, you’ll identify with the anger because everybody’s had their buttons pushed by somebody’s repetitive or insensitive behavior.

7. DON’T start with a POV character about to be killed or otherwise eliminated from the storyline. (Ditto DREAMS, or putting the MC in a play or videogame.) If you get us intrigued and then say “never mind”, the reader will feel her time and sympathy have been wasted.

8. DO introduce the MC as close to page one as possible. Don’t waste time on weather reports or long descriptions of setting. (That doesn’t mean you have to neglect setting, but make sure you’re doing something emotional and original with it.) 

Remember that modern readers want to jump into the story and get emotionally involved. Also, a modern reader doesn’t need the kind of long descriptions of far-off lands that Victorians loved.  Even if we’ve never been there, we all know whatLondon, or theAlps, or rain forests look like because we’ve seen them in films and on TV. 

9. DON’T start with a prologue. 

Sigh. I know a lot of you love them. But here are some reasons why prologues aren’t such a great idea. 

People skip them.  

The reader has to start the story twice. Just as she’s getting into the story, she’s hurled to another time or place, often with a    whole new set of characters. This is annoying. Annoy a reader at your peril. 

When an agent or editor asks for the first chapter—or you have a preview of the book on Amazon—you’ve got a major dilemma.  Do you send the actual chapter one—where the plot starts—or that poetic prologue?  

Agents hate them:  

I know you’re all wailing. But try removing the prologue. Read chapter one. Does it make sense? Could you dribble in that backstory from the prologue into the story later—while the actual plot is going on? 

A prologue is like a first draft—usually it’s for the writer, not the reader. It isn’t the overture: it’s the tuning-up. Like a character sketch, a prologue usually belongs in your book journal—not the finished project. 

Go ahead and write one to get your writing juices flowing. Use it to get to know your book’s basic elements. It can be mined later for character sketches, backstory and world building, but try to cut it in your final revision.

10. DO put the MC in a place and time right away.  If the MC is thinking or talking to someone—where is she? As I said, we don’t want a long description of the scenery or the weather, but let us know what planet we’re on.

11. DON’T start with dialogue. Readers want to know who’s speaking before they’ll pay much attention to what they say. It’s just like real life: if strangers are shouting in the hallway, it’s noise. If you recognize the shouters as your boss and the hooker from 12B—you’re all ears.

12. DO dribble in your MC’s backstory in thoughts, conversations and mini-flashbacks—AFTER you’ve got us hooked by your MC and her story.

13. DON’T plunge into action before introducing the characters. The introductions can be minimal, but they have to make us feel connected enough to these people to care.

Example: If you hear some stranger got hit by a car—it’s sad, but you don’t have much curiosity about it. If you hear your neighbor got hit by a car, you want to know when, where, how badly she’s injured, etc. 

14. DO give your MC a goal. All characters need goals in each scene. But the protagonist needs a compelling, over-arching goal for the whole book. She can’t be easily satisfied. She must need something very badly. A novel needs to be about one big thing, and the character has to have one big goal. Too many goals? You may have a series. That’s good, too. 

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Have you ever wondered how much information to include when introducing your protagonist? Do you write your first draft with the reader in mind or just to get the story down? 

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Please join us on Friday, February 17th when we present Ask an Editor with Theresa Stevens. 

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THE BEST REVENGE is a screwball rom-com mystery that debuted with Popcorn Press in December 2011. (Available in paper or ebook.)  It’s a prequel to Anne R. Allen’s previous Camilla Randall mysteries.

When Camilla, a 1980s New York debutante, is assaulted by her mother’s fiancé, smeared in the newspapers by a sexy muckraking journalist, then loses all her money in the Savings and Loan Scandal, she seeks refuge with her gay best friend in California. But her friend has developed heterosexual tendencies and an inconvenient girlfriend, so Camilla has to move in with wild-partying friends. To make things a whole lot worse, a famously debauched TV star ends up dead after one of their parties, and Camilla is arrested for his murder. In order to clear her name and find the real killer, she must turn to a friendly sanitation worker, a dotty octogenarian neighbor and the muckraking journalist who ridiculed her—who also happens to be her boss. 

Bio: Anne R. Allen is the author of five comic mysteries that debuted in 2011 with two publishers: Popcorn Press and Mark Williams international Digital Publishing.— FOOD OF LOVE (September 2011) THE GATSBY GAME (October 2011) GHOSTWRITERS IN THE SKY (October 2011) SHERWOOD, LTD (December 2011) and THE BEST REVENGE (December 2011) She is also working on a self-help guide for writers with PAY IT FORWARD author Catherine Ryan Hyde. Anne blogs about all things writerly at http://annerallen.blogspot.com, with blog partner, NYT bestselling author, Ruth Harris.

I don’t remember how I found Sloan Parker but I vividly remember the minute I finished her book, MORE, and immediately clicked back to the beginning and started the book over again. She was my first introduction into M/M romance and erotica and I couldn’t have chosen a better place to start – her writing has set the bar.  Sloan, as well as the other talented cream of the M/M crop, take the classic tropes of romance fiction and give them a fresh twist that takes my breath away and teaches me something incredible about the craft every single time.

In addition, as a woman in the M/M genre, Sloan constantly tackles the question of whether she can really write about the gay male experience.  Whether you are writing about characters of a different gender, culture, race or species – her post has something for us all.

Write What You Know: A Woman Writing M/M Romance
“You’re a woman. How can you write about gay men?” It’s a question I get asked often.
The short answer: I’m not a gay man, but writing about people of both genders who are living different lives from mine comes with the job of author.
There has been much debate, both in and out of the m/m romance community, on whether the gender of the author matters. For some, it may. For others, it’s the story and the characters that are important, not the author behind the scenes. In either case, I don’t believe it’s anyone’s place to judge how another person selects books to read. Every reader has the right to choose based on whatever criteria are important and personal for them.
That said, I will admit it’s frustrating to know my work may be dismissed simply because of my gender and not the work itself.
The commonly stated advice of “write what you know” doesn’t always make for good fiction. If we only write what we have personal experience on, or about characters exactly like us, writers would be out of stories in no time. I’m certain my life experiences would bore the heck out of everyone except my mother. And even then, there are many things my mom wouldn’t want to know.
Writers are creative people. We couldn’t write within the strictest sense of “write what you know,” even if we wanted to.
To illustrate, here are a sampling of characters from the stories of several female friends who do not write m/m: a killer who uses a unique and mysterious method for offing his victims (which I can’t reveal since the book isn’t out yet), a secret team of werewolf shifters, an ex-spy on the run, a royal wedding complete with a prince and a reluctant princess, a single dad raising his teenage daughter alone, and a dead man who has a second chance at life.
None of those writers have direct experience with the sorts of lives their characters are living. But like all of us, they do know what it’s like to feel powerful, human emotions such as anger, happiness, despair, and love.
Emotions, especially in romantic fiction, are what drive the characters through the story. They help the reader invest in what is happening to these people.
It’s the part of “writing what you know” that works for me with any of my characters, male or female, gay or straight.
I’m not an expert on gay men, but I have learned a few other things that help when writing m/m erotic romance.
1) Focus on the character, not a label.
I strive to create men who do not adhere to one description of who gay men are, how they act, how they speak, what they like to do, drink, read, or watch on TV. I couldn’t sum up all gay men into one list of characteristics any more than I could all heterosexual men. I try to make my characters unique and real. To breathe life into them. Each man has specific experiences, families, friends, faults, strengths, hopes, and dreams that make him unique.

2) Draw from my own experiences and creativity, then research the rest.
With every erotic romance I write, I pull from a combination of life experiences, research, and creativity to get into the mindset of the characters, to correctly depict specific occupations, settings, and actions. A question I get asked a lot is how I know what I’m doing with the sex scenes. My own experiences and imagination help a lot. Research fills in the gaps. One thing I recommend to anyone who asks for tips on getting started writing the erotic elements in the m/m genre is to read personal sexual accounts or erotica written by men. And if you can, talk to men (both gay and straight) about their sex lives. Listen to the lingo, the descriptions, and what about the sex they focus on.

3) Don’t concentrate only on the actions of sex.
In erotic romance it’s essential to focus on the feelings of the characters, their need, lust, passion, and love. Even before the characters get to the falling-in-love stage, the sex can still be about what the point-of-view character is emotionally going through. Maybe he feels powerful in that moment, driven, on fire, alive. My male characters may not be good at talking about what they feel, or even identifying it. They may hide from their feelings. They may want to embrace them. In any case, they express those feelings in ways the readers can “see” because romantic fiction is very much about following the characters along on their emotional journeys.

4) Use what I love.
Loving men and the male body is something I have in common with my gay characters. When I’m writing from their perspectives, I focus on what moves me about men. Then I transfer that desire until it works for the character’s own preferences for the man he’s with. Digging deep into the character’s POV makes the scene more powerful than merely writing a series of actions (no matter how sexy those actions are).

5) Don’t worry about “getting it right.” Focus on making it powerful.
I’m beyond elated when I hear my stories have come across as authentic to some gay and bisexual men. I’m also certain there are gay men who would (or have) read my work and find that’s not true for them. As with any fiction, I’m never going to please all readers. Instead, I focus on being true to the characters as the men they are and making them real for the reader, making their story powerful.

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What do you think about an author’s gender in terms of the main characters of any story? Do you want authors to have life experiences that coincide with the plot or characters they are writing about?

Amy Wilkins, Assistant Manager for Digital Content and Social Media for Harlequin gives you her 5 Top Tips for Writing a Compelling Book Blurb

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One random commenter will win their preferred ebook format for Take Me Home, my upcoming m/m erotic romance. The winner will be sent the ebook on the book’s release day, December 13, 2011

Bio:
Sloan Parker has been writing and playing with fictional characters for years, but she finally found her true passion when she began telling stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Now she spends her writing life creating m/m erotic romances and romantic suspense. She loves to explore the lives of people who are growing as individuals while falling in love. Her novel MORE is the 2011 EPIC eBook Award Winner for Mystery, Suspense, and/or Adventure Erotic Romance and Winner of the 2010 Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Romance.

You can visit Sloan at her website: www.sloanparker.com,  on Facebook and Twitter.

We are thrilled to have Josh Lanyon with us at RU!  When you think of sexy, well-written, and riveting M/M romance and gay fiction  – Josh is the first one who comes to mind.  His witty, evocative prose and tightly woven mystery plots have created fans of anyone who picks up his novels.  (I picked  up the first Adrien English book and lost a weekend reading all five in the series).  Josh joins us today to discuss key questions to ask when creating believable male characters in your M/M fiction.

The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit

Probably the number one question I’m asked by women hoping to write m/m or gay romance is how to make their main characters believably masculine. Usually the primary concern revolves around the sex scenes, but the sex scenes — the insert tab A into slot C are actually the easy bit and any biology book should be able to tell you what you need to know if you’ve never actually enjoyed sexual relations with a man (or you kept your eyes and ears shut the whole time).

No, while I do totally understand why so many writers prefer to pay closest attention to the most obscure details of sexual relations in the interests of “getting it right,” it’s actually more when it comes to male psychology that most of these books fall flat. Alas, I can’t give you a magical tip for capturing The Male Psychology anymore than one size fits all when it comes to female psychology.

What I can do, though, is offer you five super easy tips for adding believing dimension to your male characters by answering the following questions.

1 – What is your main character’s political affiliation?
I’m not saying turn your character into a vehicle for pushing your own ideological agenda, but it’s fascinating to me how few characters in m/m fiction have any political thought beyond that of gay rights. Most of us identify with a political party and a set of political beliefs. Would it surprise you to know that there are gay Republicans out there? Gay does not automatically equal Liberal. There are gay socialists. Gay independents. Gay people who have never voted and don’t think beyond the next party. And I don’t mean political party.

Your character’s political beliefs probably won’t come up in the course of the story, but thinking them out ahead of time will give you fresh insight into exactly who this man is.

2 – What’s on your main character’s bookshelf?
This is another one that intrigues me — how few characters in m/m romances have ordinary reading habits. They either don’t read at all or they’re fabulously well read and spouting Shakespeare at the drop of a hat. None of them seem to own Kindles or Nooks. Few of them take anything other than a generic newspaper. And yet there’s no better way to get insight into someone than taking a peek at their bookshelf. Likewise, if your character is someone who doesn’t read beyond thumbing through Car and Driver occasionally or looking up a recipe, that tells the reader something too.

Ask yourself: is your main character the kind of guy who kept his treasured childhood favorites? Or was the last thing he read a high school textbook? Does he glance over the National Enquirer headlines while standing in the grocery checkout? Does he subscribe to Mother Jones or the National Review? Does he read Lee Child on long plane flights or Agatha Christie? Does he strictly read non-fiction? Any or all of these mentioned in passing will tell your reader something interesting about the character and make him more real. The character, I mean. Hopefully the reader is real.

3 – Does your character believe in God?
Most of us have some opinion on whether God exists. Again, it doesn’t have to play a role in your story, but answering this question about your character will give you a different perspective on who he is. Almost always it’s going to reveal aspects of his personality that you hadn’t yet considered.

4 – What music does your character listen to?
There’s a standing joke in the mystery genre that all hardboiled PIs listen to jazz. Usually classic jazz, at that. In m/m fiction, an inordinate number of characters listen to classical music or classic rock and roll. Nobody wants their character to confess to a love of musicals or Liza Minnelli or Snow Patrol or Emmy Lou Harris or girl bands or boy bands (unless the characters are in a boy band). But the fact is, almost all of us listen to music.

Think about how interesting you find someone’s taste in music when you’re first falling in love with them. We expect to gain insight into the person through their taste in music — and we’re not far off. Well, think about it. You want your readers to fall in love with your main characters, so it’s only natural that those readers would find your characters’ taste in music of interest.

5 – What does your character wear?
Clothes maketh the man and I’m not talking about boxers or briefs. M/M fiction is clothed mostly in jeans, tee shirts, kilts, and Italian suits. And, yes, it’s about that generic. There’s nothing wrong with any of these choices, it’s just that digging a little deeper will tell us more about the character. What slogan or graphic is on the T-shirt? Or does your guy have an aversion to free advertising? What colors does he like? There’s a difference between a guy who chooses designer jeans and a guy who prefers button fly Levi’s. Is your character self-conscious about his weight? Does he wear pajamas to bed? Does he pay to have his suits tailored? Would he rather be garroted than wear a tie? Does he use shoe trees? Does he travel with garment bags?

There’s a very good chance that having painstakingly answered these questions, you won’t use a single piece of this information in your m/m romance. But having this insight into your characters will make them both easier to write and more grounded and real to your readers.

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Do you struggle with trying to create believable masculine characters? Have you considered writing M/M fiction but are afraid to take the plunge? Josh will be here today to answer your questions.

Stop by Friday when Wayne Jordan, Kimani Press author, talks about being a man who writes romance fiction.

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Three lucky commentors will win a downloadable copy of Josh’s October 2011 release, MUMMY DEAREST

Drew Lawson is on the clock. He’s got twenty-four hours to authenticate the mummy of Princess Merneith and get back in time for his boyfriend’s garden party. What the wound-too-tight professor didn’t calculate in was a centuries-old curse, a reality TV show crew, and handsome, brash Fraser Fortune.

Drew just might not ever make it home in time for that garden party. What’s worse, he just might not care.

Josh also has DEAD RUN coming out on September 13.

Dead Run
Book #4 in the Dangerous Ground series
Contemporary, Action-Adventure, Law Enforcement

The boys are back in town — and Paris is burning!

For Speical Agents of the Department of Diplomatic Security, Taylor MacAllister and Will Brandt, the strain of a long distance relationship is beginning to tell after eleven months of separation. A romantic holiday could be just the thing to bridge the ever-growing distance, but when Taylor spots a terrorist from the 70′s, long believed dead but very much alive, it’s c’est la vie.

Now instead of sipping wine and seeing the sights, the boys are chasing a wily and deadly foe through the graveyards and catacombs of Paris.

Of course, it could always be worse — and soon it is.

I’m a busy woman. At the moment, I work a day job, have writing deadlines to meet, do my best to keep up with my toddler, and ride herd on three boys intent on destroying a chunk of middle Tennessee with the cunning use of bottle rockets, toothpaste, and lack of personal hygiene. I don’t have a lot of spare time.

Which means I don’t get to read nearly as many books as I used to. (Please note that my lack of reading time has IN NO WAY diminished how many books I purchase. My TBR pile is ridiculous because I cannot resist the Ooh, Shiny! feeling I get when I see a cover or read a blurb that attracts my attention. Please also note that you should not feel obligated to share that fact with my husband.)

When I do get a chance to read a book, I want it to be HolyCowAwesome. I want to be totally captivated by the characters, immersed in the world, and unable to put it down because I simply have to know what happens next. If I start reading a book, and it doesn’t deliver what it promised with its Ooh, Shiny! cover and premise, I simply stop reading. I don’t have the time to soldier forward in hopes that it will somehow get better.

I know a lot of other readers who do the same. So, how do you, the writer, make sure your reader gets infected with One More Chapteritus? I’m going to take cover this topic in segments since it’s multi-layered, and since nailing THIS means grabbing a reader/agent/editor and holding them until the very last word.

In the next couple of months, I’ll dive into specific things you can do to make your story HolyCowAwesome. This month, I’ll cover a few of the things that make most readers set your book aside and move on to the next Ooh, Shiny! story in their TBR (or slush!) pile. Ready to take a hard look at your story? Here are the top ten reasons why I would set your book aside.

1. You barely skimmed the surface of your main characters. I love to sink beneath the skin of your characters and live in their heads for the duration of the book. If your heroine has the emotional capacity of block of wood, don’t expect me to care if she gets put in mortal peril in chapter twenty. At that point, chances are good I’m rooting for her to bite the big one and put us all out of our misery.

2. Every character in your book is stunningly beautiful and perfect. I have a confession to make. Stunningly beautiful/perfect characters bore me to death. If you have an entire cast of them, I’ll wonder if some cruel trick of fate has landed me in the middle of an episode of America’s Top Model. I was about to say the only thing worse than reading an episode of ATM would be doing a workout with Richard Simmons, but at least he makes me laugh.

And he’s not afraid of sequins.

3. Events happen that go against what a character would authentically do/choose simply so you can have the plot twist where you want it to twist. This a) is lazy writing and b) assumes I’m too stupid to realize you’ve hijacked your characters for the sake of sticking with your outline.

4. Your main character is never in any real danger. I don’t necessarily mean physical danger, though most of what I choose to read includes that component. Emotional danger works too. At some point, I need to worry the hero/heroine won’t get what he/she needs. I need to be afraid he/she won’t live, won’t succeed, or will be broken beyond repair. If you can’t deliver stakes like those, what’s the point of reading the story?

5. You repeat things I already know. It’s one thing to revisit an important fact/idea occasionally throughout the book. It’s another thing to SHOW me a character laughing and then fill up the next two paragraphs TELLING me the character found something funny. Give me the action and trust me to understand its implications. If more explanation is needed, do it in a way that doesn’t assume I’m too stupid to have figured it out on my own.

6. You rhapsodize endlessly about a certain feature on your hero or heroine. I love a sexy hero as much as the next girl. I don’t love endlessly reading gooey descriptions of the hero’s lips. Eyes. Jaw. Pecs. Whatever. Now, this one is certainly a matter of personal taste. I’m sure there are readers out there who enjoy having the hero’s adorable cleft chin referenced on every other page. I’m not one of them. I’m much more interested in what’s going on within the hero’s heart and mind. And I like to think the heroine is the kind of woman who’s intelligent enough to get past her initial OOOH! Cleft chin! reaction and start looking for signs of heroism beneath the external.

7. Your villain doesn’t scare me. Voldemort scared me. The killer from PSYCHOPATH (Keith Ablow) scared me. A villain who has the opportunity to cause pain and uses it instead to endlessly explain his every little move (All the better to give the hero a chance to arrive, my dear!) does not. I think it’s fantastic when a villain offers some sort of insight into the way his mind works. I just need it to be done in a way that increases how threatened I feel by him. If I’m not afraid of the villain, I don’t care about the story.

8. If I can see a convenient way out of the danger/situation, if all the hero/heroine has to do is do x instead of y and x doesn’t cost him/her anything, I’m done reading. I love to be on the edge of my seat, unable to see how the hero/heroine could either a) get out of the situation unscathed or b) pay the cost of the decision they’ll have to make. You do that, and I’m hooked for life.

9. Your ending is heavy on the exposition, light on the action. This is an easy mistake to make. You’ve got loose ends to tie up. Questions to answer. A foundation for the next book to lay. I get that. But I’ve been reading feverishly for the last two hundred odd pages to get to this point and I don’t want to sit back and read the equivalent of Driving Miss Daisy. I want action. Danger. Life-threatening/emotionally-scarring stuff. I want to be unable to put the book down because I’m so afraid the characters I know and love won’t come through.

10. Your stakes suck. For a story to really pull me in, the stakes have to matter. Really matter. I have to care deeply about the characters and the outcome of their struggle. I have to want them to make it. I have to see that the cost of them not making it is painfully high. It doesn’t actually matter if the stakes involve physical danger, saving the world, or finally making a romantic commitment to their soul mate–the stakes have to really matter to me. For the stakes to matter, you have to push the characters to their limit. You have to make me frantically turn page after page because I have this terrible fear that somehow the characters won’t pull it off.

Tune in next month to learn how to raise the stakes and make the conflict matter to the reader. Until then, I’ll be busy wrangling my four kids, writing my own HolyCowAwesome story, and searching the bookstores for the next Ooh, Shiny! to add to my TBR pile.

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So tell us readers, what makes you turn the next page, what keeps you reading when you SHOULD be in bed?

Join us on Wednesday for James Scott Bell and his special lecutre on writing The End of the Story

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Bio: C.J. Redwine writes YA fantasy and is repped by the fabulous Holly Root. Her debut novel, THE COURIER’S DAUGHTER, will be published in Fall 2012 by Balzer & Bray. To learn more about C.J., visit her blog at http://cjredwine.blogspot.com.

Also, I’ll be back tomorrow (Wednesday) to critique anything else new that’s gone up, plus any rewrites. Also, if there are any questions anyone has in general, I’m happy to answer.

page 44 THE SAINTS OF THE LOST AND FOUND

page 88-89 THE SAINTS OF THE LOST AND FOUND

POV_CHECKLIST

Feel free to ask questions!

It’s a sad fact: you—a writer—have very little time to grab a reader and do it so well, they’re compelled to keep reading. You might have as much as five pages for that first reader (the agent, or the editor), but it’s even more brutal in a bookstore. Most readers who browse, who get enticed enough to pick up the book (as a result of the title / name / or cover which pulls them in) and read the back copy (often not written by the writer) don’t even bother to open the book—their mind is often made up based on things outside the author’s control. Few authors can mandate what their covers look like, and few have title approval. A higher percentage contributes to the back cover copy, but that’s still edited to fit the space and often tweaked by people in marketing who’ve never even read the book. The one thing a writer does control is the writing, and if a browser bothers to pick up the book in the bookstore or click on an excerpt on the web, then you, as the author, have precious little time to grab their attention.

One of the first tools we have at our disposal is POV: point of view. Now, that might seem obvious, and it might seem like a surface choice. Do you write in first person? Or third? Close third or more distant third? Omniscient? Or maybe even second person? (Please don’t.) (Just my personal bugaboo.)

Those are weighty decisions that affect almost everything else you will do in the book. There are pros and cons to each, when you’re considering your story. (We’ll talk about those in a moment.) But there’s another entire facet to POV that a lot of people fail to utilize to the potential they have at hand, and that is that POV also stands for persistence of vision. In pure physiological terms, persistence of vision is defined as:

“The phenomenon where the retina retains an image for a brief split-second after the image was actually seen, and lends itself to animation by fostering the illusion of motion when we view images in closely-timed sequence to one another. We don’t notice the fractional skips between images because that persistence fills in the momentary gap to make the motion seem seamless.”

Now, technically, that specific theory is a little outdated (they have proven there are other physiological mechanisms at work to help our eye understand film as it progresses frame-by-frame), but we don’t need all of that for our purposes here. Just keep in mind the fact that there is a tendency of the eye—or our inner perceptual ability—to hang onto images in sequence which then builds a larger image, an impression of movement, an impression of reality.

This is how we build characters: image by image until we have created a series of images associated with that character. The images we choose to utilize when showing that character need, therefore, to be consistent with that character’s point of view, and that’s going to be affected by that character’s background, job, economic situation, personal histories, health, etc. – the soul of the character needs to bleed through every word choice you make while in their point of view.

Here’s what I mean by that: whether you’ve chosen first, second, third or omniscient point of view, you have to show us the character, without always telling us about the character. One of the things I see many writers—even long established writers—do that is robbing their work of impact is that they tell me a great deal about the characters as the characters show up in the scene. What that does is inform me intellectually—but it doesn’t bring the person alive, doesn’t make them feel real. If they had utilized point of view carefully, however, they could have shown me things about the character that only that character in that book would have seen in that particular way, which makes that character real. It’s a combination of point of view (whether it’s 1st, 3rd, etc.) and “persistence of vision” – how that character sees what they see and how they interpret what they’re seeing. No two characters in any book should see the world in the same exact way. None of us do in real life.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Let’s say that there’s a small bistro in the neighborhood: worn black and white square tiles, old mahogany bar, small tables with red checkered table cloths crowded as close together as possible, vases on the tables of real flowers, probably droopy white daisies, something affordable. Every table has the typical salt/pepper shakers, ketchup, Parmesan cheese, packets of sweetener for the tea that most people order there. There are a few patrons scattered about, a bartender whose seen better days, and overhead lighting that doesn’t seem to be making much of an effort.

Okay, let’s stop there for a moment. You probably were able to see the place, because I gave you enough visual cues to lead your eye. What I also did was give you cues in the same approximate order that you would normally take in on your own, if you should walk through that door. That’s important, that order. You’ll do yourself a major favor if you think about specific powerful details as you enter the room. Ask yourself, what’s the impact point? What’s the first thing the eye grabs? It’s usually color (black and white worn checkered floor, mahogany bar, white daisies, ketchup bottles, etc.). Next, it’s lighting and space—does the space seem crowded, spacious, etc., and what is the quality of the lighting.

And even so, we’ve only done maybe half the job that we could do for that space. Because right now, you have no idea who’s seeing that space. It’s a generic description. It’s visual, sure, but when you don’t have much space to grab your reader, you’ve got to give them much more than just visual. You’ve got to give them character and attitude, too.

Here’s where I tell you the warning of how many manuscripts and scripts—when I was a screenwriter—that I read where I got several pages into a story that had lush description, and several pages in, I still did not know more about that character who was in those scenes than I did when I started the manuscript. If I can get several pages into your story and not know your character? You have failed. That’s harsh, but it’s the truth. Do not waste my time, as a reader. Do not fritter away your opportunity describing crap for the sake of “setting the scene.” Setting the scene is a waste of time if you don’t clue me in to who you’re setting the scene for / with. Whose point of view it is. Give me attitude, give me character in what they’re choosing to share with me, and you’ll pique my interest.

So let’s go back to that bistro and think about that setting. Let’s say that your main character is a cop, walking into that scene. A cop is going to see that bistro much differently than a down-and-out-of-work twenty-year-old who’s been on the grift, looking for a little cash-under-the-table job. A cop’s point of view—whether you utilize the mechanics of first person or third or omniscient—his point of view, his “vision” is going to have a specific kind of attitude, a wariness, an assessment, that is different from any other character walking into that same bistro.

We’ll use first person here. (First person is generally used when you want the reader to very closely identify with the character and not have any ability to know more than what the character knows in that moment. It’s typical of first person stories to be told through the point of view of the main character for the length of the work, but there are exceptions—a narrator, for example, or multiple first-person characters, where the POVs switch between characters, usually with each subsequent chapter.) Here the example:

I hated that damned bell on the door; every eye in the place turned toward me when I entered, and it felt like a target painted dead center mass for the few seconds it took me to move through the door, through the thick greasy smell of fried bacon and stale beer, across the scuffed checkerboard tile, to a table in the back where I could look out over the place. The lighting was crap—like it had given up trying last century and nobody bothered to notice. It made everything I had to do here tonight that much harder. Didn’t help that I couldn’t wear my vest here, and here is where I’d most likely get shot. Fucked, that’s what that was.
Murray was hunched behind the bar as usual, working a rag on some invisible spot on the bar, hardly listening to some grifter kid try his spiel about how much he needed work while he was surreptitiously trying to lift the wallet of the old man sitting next to him, just below Murray’s line of sight. I gave Murray a nod and eyeballed the kid—let him stop the idiot. I sure as hell wasn’t blowing my cover for petty theft.
The chair wobbled—this was the worst of the rickety tables. There were two college girls at my favorite spot, the one closest to the easiest exit; they were wailing about boyfriends who done them wrong, each looking to try to top the other one. I could tell ’em each that they were going to keep gettin’ crap from guys if they hung out at shitholes like this. We were three-and-a-half blocks into hell-and-gone cheap-ass territory, barely on the outskirts of ghetto. I could’ve told ’em to go over to Charlie’s, over on sixth. They had better food, better beer, slightly better idiots willing to fork over dough for the pleasure of listening to them whine. Didn’t bother though. Girls like that never learn.
As soon as I’d walked in, I’d counted seven people in the room besides me: Murray, the kid, the old man, the two girls made five. I hated the way the tables crowded together, stained tablecloths barely cleaned from previous patrons. It made moving fast, getting to my gun, just that much more of a hassle. I hated hassle. I hated a lot of things, but I really fucking hated hassle. I’d discounted the five I already mentioned as soon as I saw ’em. That meant that one of the two people left was the asshole I was looking for, the perp trying to hire a hit-man to solve a problem. I was the hit-man. Or at least, that was my role tonight. I looked it. Smelled like it—smelled like six days of booze and cigarettes crammed into one. Well, that’s how I usually looked and smelled. Probably why the sarge wanted me for the job.
Of the two people left in the room, the lady near the front window was a contender, but not likely—she just looked too worn out to give a good damn about having anyone killed. I pegged her as a cleaning lady, coming off a rough night, too tired to do much more than scrape at her burned toast and runny eggs. She had dust on her gray sweater and smudges on her too-thin face and gray eyes that looked beaten. That left the shiny happy broad over in the opposite corner. The redhead who kept reapplying her lipstick, using her mirror to scope out the room. She wasn’t completely dim, then. That’s a problem. I don’t mind stupid criminals. It’s when they’re stupid-but-think-they’re clever that someone usually gets hurt.
Lately, that someone had been me. I was battin’ a thousand in shitty luck, and tonight, I had a bad feeling.
One day, I’m gonna learn to listen to that.

Okay, not that that’s great, but I wanted to show you how that set up does several things in 645 words and what you “get” about that room is now significantly different than the generic version: 1) we know that room is being described by a very specific person with a very specific attitude, and (2) we know he’s a cop—though he never actually tells us and (3) we know he’s weighing and measuring everyone in the room, and how the room is laid out, (4) who might be carrying a weapon, (5) that he was in danger and knew it and (6) that he was going to do his job anyway. At the same time, you’ve gotten enough details to see the scene (the bistro)—and it’s the same details as what I described earlier, but it’s told with his very specific perception / attitude. That cop would count the people when he walked in, would assess the threat level, would look for ways to place himself in a position of retreat, should he need it, etc. Other patrons might not notice anything like that. Without actually telling you his attitude (I never said “he has a pessimistic attitude”), I showed it through his slant on what he saw, and how he perceived those things around him. That attitude has to be consistent throughout. Every time we’re in his point of view, we should have his persistence of vision—his specific way of seeing the world—which does more to characterize him than all of the descriptive modifiers any author could attach to him.

Let’s look at the same scene told through one of the other patron’s eyes. This time, I’ll use third person. (Third person is generally used when the author wants to convey a little bit more about the scene than a character might convey in the strict sense of “telling” the story. If an author wants the reader to know more than the protagonist knows, the author can switch to other characters’ POV—generally done now in their own sections or their own chapters—which can reveal information that creates stress for the reader, because they know more about the danger the protagonist is in than the protagonist does—yet. And the reader feels tension as the protagonist catches up to that realization.) Now, I’m purposefully not doing dialog or action here, just a section of description to show point of view. Here ya go:

It was a quaint place, as places go, for hiring a killer. She hadn’t expected it to even have tablecloths, or actual silverware. She’d done a little bit of research before agreeing to meet with the killer-for-hire here: rundown little bistro out on the edge of civility, struggling to survive in this economy. She felt for the place, really. She knew what it was to be struggling on the edge, barely able to make ends meet, trying to figure out a solution.
They’d done a fairly decent job, here: there were daisies in the vases on the tables. Sure, the vases were cheap—the kind you’d get at Wal-Mart, maybe, but there was nothing wrong with Wal-Mart. She didn’t know why people always said Wal-Mart with their noses in the air, like they were too good for the place. She bet every one of those people secretly shopped there and didn’t want to admit they were the same as regular, normal people. She just really didn’t understand people like that. Staring down their noses at perfectly good vases, for example, acting all high and mighty. People like that? Were no good. No good at all. She wanted to give them a piece of her mind, sometimes, and she bit back the words. It didn’t make for a good alibi to be the kind of person who stuck out in people’s memory as having been angry. No, no, she’d just bide her time. Her time would come.
But she liked the little white daisies. Real flowers instead of plastic. They were trying hard to be pleasing. The whole place was, really, like that waitress in the kitchen who’d looked harried, who’d worked hard to keep the tables bussed and the orders coming out quickly, who’d been crying her eyes out over something bad that had happened this past week, she’d said, as she apologized for sobbing over her order. She had wanted to soothe the girl, to empathize. Empathizing, though, made you memorable. She knew better than to be memorable.
She’d been waiting for the killer for the last hour, coming in early to get a feel for the customers—which ones were the regulars (the old guy at the bar looked like he’d grown there since the fifties… she was actually surprised when he was able to stand to go to the restroom)… and the not-so-regulars… the hussy who kept applying her lipstick, checking out the room. Probably some floozy, waiting for some woman’s husband to come along, checking out all of the angles, making sure the wife wasn’t hanging around in the shadows, about to catch them. She was probably someone in the process of breaking up a home, that hussy.
She was in the middle of thinking about changing her hired-killer order to a two-fer when the skeevy guy came in, creeping across the room like some sort of nasty beetle, his eyes shifting around, taking everything in, looking at her, passing her over as just another fixture. It was probably the dust on her sweater, the smudges on her face, the sturdy cleaning-lady shoes that had done it. It was what she’d intended, to be forgettable. Still, it rankled. She’d apparently been forgettable to Harry, too, with him cheating on her with another hussy, just like that one over there in the corner.
The skeevy guy was reflected in the big picture window, since it was dark outside. She watched him without being obvious about it, and he looked tense. He checked out everyone in the place, over and over, waiting. Nodded to the bartender about something she couldn’t see. She thought maybe he was the killer-for-hire, but there was something odd about him. Something a little too TV-villain perfect, and little warning bells went off in her head. Maybe he was a cop.
He was already making his way over to the hussy, and she watched, eating her bad eggs—they really could do a lot better in this place with a decent cook—and the skeevy guy asked the girl, “So, you looking for me?”
The girl screamed, then, and jumped up and did the damndest thing: she shot the guy. Twice. And then ran.

Okay, that’s 701 words, and we have an entirely different POV: we’re in third person, and specifically getting that person’s attitudes about life, about her surroundings, about the people there, the details that she would notice that the cop wouldn’t. We’re seeing her point of view as well as her persistence of vision: her take on that world. Nowhere does she tell us what she does for a living (but we get the details). Nowhere do I give you her slant on life, but you can tell it’s a bit schizophrenic—empathizes with the place, loves the daisies, but is obviously contemplating killing not just Harry, her husband, but some random woman who she feels is a hussy. We know a great deal about that woman just from what we see through her vision. How she sees her world and the details she picks out matter. They’re tools for you to use.

We could keep going with the other characters, playing with other forms of point of view. Omniscient has the advantage of giving us a lot more information than the protagonist usually has, and as such, can sometimes create a lot of tension (we see the bomb beneath their seat that they have no clue is there)… but it can also leave us feeling a bit detached, emotionally, from the characters if not handled very carefully. There’s also the risk of losing or confusing the reader with too much head-hopping (moving back and forth between character’s POVs)—which you can do in omniscient, but it is a real risk, and the reader has to be carefully led (the segues better be fabulous).

The pros and cons of the mechanics of point of view—which one you choose to use—have to be weighed carefully. If you want us to be in the shoes of the protagonist, then we can’t know more than he or she knows, and that in and of itself can create a lot of obstacles. One, for example, would be: how do you show important stuff that he needs to see which is a clue, but not have him pick up on the clue right now (which might mean he either looks dumb or he’d figure it out too soon and oops, the story is over). This issue definitely applies to first person, but can apply to third person, if the only point of view in the book is that one person.

The drawback to third person is that you have the ability to show some of the things the character doesn’t quite pick up on, but you run the risk of the reader being too far out ahead of the character and getting frustrated with the story as the character catches up.

The pros to using omniscient is, of course, scope: big epics, S/F/F (where there’s a tremendous amount of world-building), and period pieces can truly benefit from omniscient. The pros to first person is that immediacy of emotion / reaction—the reader tends to more closely identify with the character. The benefit of third is that you have some of the advantages of first (that close identification with the character), but you have a bit more ease in switching into another character’s point of view (and I’d generally recommend doing that with a section break or a chapter break when you make the switch, just to keep the voices of each character clear). The disadvantage to multiple point of view characters (third person or omniscient) is that, if you’re doing your job right, you’re creating different voices (styles of thinking/speaking/seeing the world) for each character. (This is not to be confused with “voice” of the overall project. That’s a different subject for a different day.) If you’re utilizing POV well—giving us the attitudes and details that only that character could give us, then when you switch into another character’s point of view, we should be able to tell it just from what they relate to us and how they are seeing their world.

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Take a few minutes to click through the links below – you’ll learn more about POV than you ever thought possible!

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Join us all week long for our POV workshop with Toni McGee Causey!

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Bio: Toni McGee Causey is the author of the critically acclaimed and nationally bestselling “Bobbie Faye” novels—an action/caper series set in south Louisiana; the series was released last summer in back-to-back publications, beginning with CHARMED AND DANGEROUS, GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE GUNS, and WHEN A MAN LOVES A WEAPON. While pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting, Toni had scripts optioned by prominent studios and, just this year, produced an indie film, LA-308, which now has offers of distribution pending. Toni began her career by writing non-fiction for local newspapers, edited Baton Rouge Magazine, and sold articles to places like Redbook and Mademoiselle. She was recently a contributor to the anthology Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans, as well as Killer Year: Stories to Die For. She has had several of her blogs syndicated nationally from the group blog, “Murderati,” and she can also be found at “Murder She Writes.”

Stories are not lists of things that happen.

They are transformative affairs.

This became clear to me one night when I was reading a bedtime story to my five-year-old daughter. In the story, five sisters had a picnic, then played dress-up, then ran around outside, then danced, then sang. Finally, my daughter sighed and told me she was bored.

“You don’t like the story?” I said.

“‘Course not!” she exclaimed. “Nothing’s going wrong!”

Aha. Yes.

Even at five years old, my daughter understood that a story is not a list of events; it is the account of a character facing a struggle.

At its essence your story isn’t about what your protagonist does, but rather what she is trying to achieve, overcome, or accomplish. Tension, not action, propels a story forward. So, one of the first keys to building engaging stories is to stop asking what should happen and start looking for ways to make things go wrong.

Key #1 – Create Reader Empathy & Concern
Readers will not care about your story until they care about what happens to your protagonist. And they will not care what happens to your protagonist until they have both empathy for that character and concern about her.

It has to be both.

Your protagonist might be sarcastic, but she must not be smarmy. She might be unhappy, but she cannot be whiny. She might do undesirable things, but she cannot be unlikable. Only when the reader has both empathy and concern for your protagonist will he or she connect on an emotional level with your story.

To engage readers in this way, you’ll need your main character to desire something your reader desires, but not (at least at first) be able to get it. For example, your protagonist might want to love or be loved, to find freedom, to pursue her dreams, to overcome the wounds of the past, to learn to forgive, or any number of things. But only when readers emotionally identify with that central unmet desire of your protagonist will they be drawn into the story.

Key #2 – Add Multi-layered Struggles
In the world of marketable fiction today your protagonist will need both an external struggle and an internal struggle. So, give her both a problem to solve (avoid foreclosure, slay the dragon, escape from prison) and a desire to fulfill (any of the things I listed in Key #1). These two intertwined struggles drive the plot and the character development forward.

And remember, the initiation of at least one of these struggles must happen on the pages of your story.

Depending on the logic of the story you’re telling, one of the two struggles might have occurred before the first chapter. For example, in my book The Pawn, you first meet my protagonist, FBI special agent Patrick Bowers, on a helicopter flight to a crime scene in the mountains. You soon find out that he’s still emotionally devastated from the death of his wife eight months earlier. So, the introduction of the external crisis occurs in the first chapter, but the introduction of the internal crisis happened eight months earlier.

You might explain one of these struggles, but you must render the other one.

Key #3 – Escalate the Tension
If the tension of the story doesn’t build as the story progresses the reader will lose interest.
Generally, the worse things get for your protagonist as she tries to resolve her struggles the more the readers will be drawn into the story. We want to see the main character get into an impossible situation, and then find a way out that is both unexpected and inevitable.

So instead of constructing a story around a theme (such as forgiveness or freedom, or whatever) build your story around a moral dilemma: What’s more important: truth or justice? What makes us different from those who do the unthinkable? At what point does intimacy require dishonesty?

Tension is built by raising the stakes, deepening the danger, and shortening the time available to complete the task at hand.

It’s all about unmet desire.

Think about this: in a romance story as soon as the romance begins, the central internal struggle of the two main characters is answered, their desire is fulfilled, and the story is over.
So in a very real way, romance stories are not about romance; they are about romantic tension. To deepen this tension, introduce more cultural or societal pressure to keep the couple apart, add misunderstanding between the lovers, create meaningful deadlines, or make one of them choose between saving the life of the other, or sacrificing him (or her) self.

Key #4 – Reveal the Transformation
When I was a sophomore in high school my English teacher told us that a story is something with “a beginning, a middle, and an end.” To this day I remember sitting in class thinking, So what? Everything does! A description of a chair has a beginning, middle, and end. But that’s not a story.

Over the years I’ve heard other teachers give this definition of a story, and, quite honestly, it’s not a very helpful one for people who are serious about improving their storytelling.

At its heart, a story is about a vulnerable character who faces a struggle and makes a discovery that changes his life. I like to tell people that a story is “transformation unveiled.”

So if your character is the same (emotionally, physically, relationally, spiritually, or psychologically) at the end of the story as she was at the beginning of the story, you don’t yet have a story; you simply have a list of events.

If your protagonist isn’t altered, your story isn’t finished.

In summary, create reader empathy and concern, develop meaningful struggles for the protagonist to overcome, continually tighten the tension, climactically resolve the conflict, and then show how the protagonist’s life is altered, and you’ll snag readers’ attention early and keep them engaged until the very last page.

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RU Readers – how do you find ways for more things to go wrong for your characters?

Join us tomorrow to read an excerpt from Ann Charles’ Nearly Departed in Deadwood, followed at 8pm CST with a live chat!

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Bio: Steven James has a Master’s Degree in Storytelling. He has written five critically acclaimed psychological suspense novels and taught writing and creative communication on three continents. Publishers Weekly calls him “[A] master storyteller at the peak of his game.”