I recently had the opportunity to visit the Art Institute in Chicago, which for me must include a swing through the Impressionist gallery. Some of those paintings are like old childhood friends. There is one gallery in particular with several Monet paintings which has been one of my favorite places on earth since I was a kid.

The display hasn’t changed much even with all the recent renovations to the museum. Along one wall are six of the haystack paintings. Another wall shows three large water lily paintings. Across from the water lilies is a wall with several paintings from the London series. Monet tended to paint the same subjects over and over again, even from the same angles — twenty-five haystack paintings, thirty of the Rouen cathedral, perhaps two hundred and fifty paintings of water lilies in his garden — and yet no two paintings are alike.

This is where the lesson lies for us today. Nobody ever said to Monet, “Geez, talk about formulaic. All these haystacks are like art for farm wives.” Yet we hear all the time that romance is formulaic and even “porn for housewives” because it examines a single subject in different varieties. That criticism is foolish, and Monet proves it.

Art, whether paintings or novels, consists of both form and content. For us, the novel is the form. It is built of language, but not just any kind of language; the novel is written in narrative prose. There is a recognized basic structure for this form (beginning, middle, end — or, if you prefer, initiation, rising action, crisis, denouement). From this basic structure, particular structural forms emerge, such as mythic quest structure and fairy tale structure, with archetypal characters beginning to take shape. From there, we can split our examination of novel form into two loose clusters of elements, story elements (plot, character, theme, setting — the things that survive a book’s translation to film) and narrative elements (action, description, dialogue, interior monologue, and exposition — the way we categorize the actual written words on the page). Even though there has been some literary experimentation with form and content, the novel’s form has held fairly steady since its inception. It’s a form that seems to work.

Content, we might say, is specific to a particular work. It’s what we put inside our form to make our specific work meaningful, or it’s what our work is about. It’s what we use to make an intimate connection to our audience. Form is “heroine,” but content is “Minerva Dobbs.” Form is “romantic conflict,” but content is, “Minerva knows Cal bet ten grand that he could get her into bed within a month, but she needs a date to her sister’s wedding so she strings him along for a few weeks.” There are other ways to define form and content, but for our purposes, form stays true from work to work, but content changes.

Photos courtesty of Wikipedia

What Monet did (and what we as romance novelists do in some ways) is extend the definition of form into areas that might otherwise be deemed content. A painter might ordinarily define his painting as “a painting of a haystack” to distinguish it from a painting of a puppy or a battlefield or a melting clock. The content in that case is what makes it unique. But with a series of paintings of haystacks, the haystack itself is as ubiquitous as the canvas, frame, or paint. It becomes part of the form. The content, then, is not puppy vs. haystack, but autumn haystack vs. winter haystack, or sunset winter haystack vs. sunrise winter haystack vs. noon winter haystack.

And so it is with romance novels. Saying that these books are formulaic because they concern themselves with romance is much like saying Monet’s paintings were formulaic because he repeated his subjects. Yes, our books are about people overcoming obstacles and falling in love. That is the form of the romance. Consistency of form doesn’t make all the works the same. What it does, instead, is free the creative mind to focus on particular aspects of the work. For Monet, it was light, season, and weather, and how those would change the appearance of a familiar object such as a haystack. For us romance writers, it’s character and conflict, what keeps people apart, what binds them as a unit.

The story begins with a heroine. She meets a hero. There’s an attraction, but there’s also something keeping them apart. How will the positive impulse overcome the negative barrier? What must the hero and heroine change in order to make that intimate connection? How do the hero and heroine know when it’s love? How do any of us know when love is real? These questions are resolved by the end of the story, which always ends happily with a committed couple.

This isn’t a formula. This is an established structure, a recognized form, and what matters is how the artist innovates within that established parameter. Innovation comes not in the big picture, but in the small details. We see shades of light within love the same way Monet saw it on the haystacks and ponds and bridges. He recorded the way weather changed the appearance of an object. We record the way the resolution of a trust issue can change the course of a life. This is an important matter, worthy of close scrutiny. That we also have a lot of fun with it says not that it’s frivolous, but that it’s satisfying and rewarding.

So the next time you hear someone scoff at romance for being formulaic, smile brightly and say, “If it was good enough for old Claude Monet, it’s good enough for me.”

Theresa

PS. Monet was also ridiculously proficient, something else he has in common with us romance writers. And people love his paintings, much the way readers snap up our books. There are benefits to innovating within a strong form. =)

***

Writers, do you write out the basic structure to your novel? Do you seek out the small changes of light like Monet?

Have A Wonderful Christmas Everyone!!! Happy Holidays!

***

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.

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.

***

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

***

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.

***

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

***

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

***

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.”

When I decided to take workshops last year, I was amazed at the myriad of classes available. It’s kind of like being at a shoe sale. You’re there to buy a pair of sensible pumps and you end up with several pairs of shoes you don’t need. I say this because I took at least twelve workshops in 2010. While I learned something from each one, I went overboard.

Some workshops sounded fun, but they didn’t fit my current needs. Some workshops weren’t interesting enough to keep my attention. And some workshops made me question my sanity and ask myself why I wanted to be a writer. Ironically, it was these workshops that helped me the most.

The Plotting Wheel: Instructors - Becky Martinez and Sue Viders
This workshop covers the ten integral parts of plotting a story. Characters-Crusade-Cause-Complications-Companions-Clashes-Crisis-Change-Climax-Conclusion.

The class consisted of ten assignments beginning with characters and ending with the conclusion. I thought I knew my characters, their GMC and the plot. After all, it was my story. Wrong. But why, Jennifer? I heard that a lot in the first couple of weeks. Becky and Sue made me reach for the pickaxe and shovel. Why became my mantra for the next few weeks.

Why does Casey refuse to get involved with Gray?
Uh, because she’s had a string of bad relationships.
But why has she had a string of bad relationships?
Um, because she doesn’t feel worthy of being loved.
But why doesn’t she feel worthy of being loved?
Gee, because her mother’s a cold-hearted social climber with a penchant for Italian leather goods, who physically and emotionally abused Katie. (Applause)

The class forced me to dig deeper and flesh out my character’s true motivations, their attributes and flaws, the cause of their fears and needs. I was the shrink asking questions and taking notes while my characters lay on the sofa in my imaginary office and spilled their guts. The answer was there. I just had to find it. And boy, I suffered through a lot of ‘duh’ moments.

I learned the importance of fully developing my characters from the inside out. Because of this, I was able to weave their emotions and motivations into the plot more effectively and make the story more engaging. A great plot is nothing without strong characters.

Becky and Sue commented on every assignment and addressed all of the participant’s questions. I found it interesting that they each pointed out different problems when commenting on my assignments. The class handouts are definite keepers. I still refer to them to when I’m creating a character.

Synopsis Workshop: Instructor – Mary Buckham
As writers, we all know the synopsis is a permanent part of our landscape. A contest newbie, I’d noticed some contests which required a synopsis. There were several examples of synopses on-line and lots of blogs on how-to-write-a-synopsis. And they all had conflicting information.

In Mary’s class, the assignments required us to fill out a template. Each template covered one of the elements of a synopsis—characters, internal and external plots, the first plot and second plot points, the black moment and resolution. Combine the templates in their respective order et voilà a synopsis! It’s a simple, no-nonsense approach, and it’s a lot tougher than it sounds.
Answering the questions on the templates required more digging.

Again, I thought I knew my story, but Mary (a serious taskmaster, who’s also seriously nice) questioned my character’s motivations and pointed out possible plot holes. While I knew the answers, my problem was presenting them in a concise and coherent manner. By the end of class, I understood the importance of each component in a synopsis. I managed to write a 500-word synopsis for my projected 100K word manuscript. Let me tell you, amazed doesn’t even come close.

Mary also provided two different methods of writing a synopsis, one which includes back-story, derived from the internal conflict (for romance) and another, written with back-story based on external conflict (for suspense-action).

While there was a limit to the number of participants in the class, I was astonished that Mary followed everyone’s stories, gave individual feedback and patiently answered our questions. Writing a synopsis isn’t my favorite thing to do, but this class clearly defined the purpose of a synopsis and made it less scary. I completed a ten-page synopsis two weeks ago. I know I would’ve been in a straitjacket if not for this class. The handouts are the bible of synopsis writing. Learn from the master. www.marybuckham.com

Writing Hot Delicious Love Scenes: Instructor – Nicole North
A kiss isn’t just a kiss when you’re trying to convey the emotion behind that kiss, how it feels and tastes. Providing examples through written scenes and videos, Nicole combines the necessary elements of a love scene beginning with vocabulary. What you say? Well, how many different ways can one describe body parts?

One of the things I liked the most about the workshop was the way it progressed, much like a build-up to a love scene. That is, there was a logical order to the lessons. After gaining a foothold on vocabulary, we explored sexual tension, motivation, and foreplay as well as the physical and emotional aspects of sex.

I learned a lot about writing internal thoughts and deep POV, which is necessary in a love scene. What are your characters thinking about during intimacy? Is your heroine mentally balancing her checkbook while the hero’s thinking she’s the next best thing to the NFL cable channel and a cold six pack? Does your heroine have an emotional response in addition to her physical one? If there’s one thing that stuck with me, it was how a love scene wasn’t really about the sex, rather how the act affected the character’s emotions and how it added to the conflict.

This was my first workshop. It taught me how to write a well-balanced, emotionally satisfying love scene through the use of dialogue (establishes the personality of the character) and the senses (very important), deep POV and internalizations (get inside his/her head), and humor (personalizes the scene).

I’ll admit I’m shy about having people read my stuff. However, Nicole created a comfortable environment for the class participants to share their assignments. I’ve taken two other workshops from Nicole, Sexual Tension and Instinctive Characterization, which were well worth my time.

A gifted and enthusiastic instructor, Nicole gives plenty of feedback and patiently answers everyone’s questions. I’ll share a secret with you….the class handouts alone are worth the price of the workshop.
Nicole’s teaching a workshop beginning February 1st on Description and Detail: Bringing Your Story to Life. www.nicolenorth.com

***

Are you still with me? Let’s talk shop! Tell us about some of your favorite or most useful workshops.

On Wednesday, join us for an interview with world traveler and author Loucinda McGary.

Jen’s Bio:

Jennifer Tanner writes contemporary romance with a sprinkle of humor. By the time she was ten, she’d read through the entire children’s section in the bookmobile and began forging her mother’s signature in order to check out adult-themed books. After twenty-five years in the transportation business, she now writes full-time and fantasizes about a spotless house and perfect risotto.Currently finishing her first manuscript, Jennifer is a member of the RWA and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two cats.

If you saw yesterday’s wonderful post – and who didn’t? – you’re going to LOVE our workshop today! Toni will be stopping by throughout the day to answer questions about POV and comment on your snippets. Only 2-3 lines please! Get out your masterpieces and let Toni have a look-see. =)

***

Join us on Monday when Jennifer Tanner talks shop about her favorite writing workshops.

***

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.”

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.

***

Toni will be taking questions on POV today, but tomorrow, stop on in when she takes examples of your work in a special POV workshop! Don’t forget to comment today – Toni’s giving away THREE $25 gift certificates to the bookstore of your choice to lucky commenters!

Join us tomorrow when Toni takes examples of your work and offers advice – a genuine workshop only here – on Romance University!

***

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.”

M is for…hmm, what?

Romance writers probably envision different M-words than, say, bricklayers or hair stylists. For us, it’s all about — well, let’s see.

Manuscripts.
Marriage-Minded Men.
Mail from fans.
And — oh, yes — Motivation.

Both our own and our characters’.

It’s amazing how writers in other genres don’t necessarily spend much time thinking about motivation. My son used to be — and maybe still is, but now he’s off at college — a big fan of dragon-fantasy-quest books, so I’d read his favorites as a conversation starter. (Anybody else been through that with their teenager?)

And pretty much every questing hero was motivated by, say, the desire to Save The Kingdom. Or to Slay The Dragon. Or to Befriend The Dragon. Nothing that required much in the way of character development, but which did provide plenty of firestorms.

Those were fabulous books, especially if you like firestorms.

I can just hear my son saying, with equally exquisite courtesy, “My mom’s books are fabulous, especially if you like people falling in love.”

Which certainly CAN involve rip-roaring action, but which tends to emphasize the internal world as well.

That’s where we get into motivation. (And the next several paragraphs will be familiar to those of you who’ve already studied it with me.)

You already know that, no matter what kind of plot you’re building, it’s gotta be motivated by your characters in order to feel plausible. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing an emotional plot or an action plot or both — what makes it work is the characters.

So what IS it that makes your characters do what they do? Or another way of asking that is, what makes anybody do what they do?

There are all kinds of theories of motivation, and they all boil down to the same thing.

We want to be Okay.

Whatever it takes to be okay, that’s what motivates us.

Maslow talked about that, saying that to be Okay we first need Food and Water…yep, okay…Shelter…got it…then Safety…and in most books, those issues are pretty well taken care of. Sometimes you’ll get characters fleeing the murderer in the North Woods or laid off from the factory job, but food isn’t usually a driving motivation.

So we get into the next level of what people need to be Okay, which is Belonging / Acceptance / Love. Then there’s Respect of Others and Self-Respect, and finally there’s the drive to Be All You Can Be. Everywhere along that continuum, you’ve got some great motivators.

And that matters, because it’s the motivation that makes a character interesting.

Some writers start with the motivation: “let’s see, a woman who’s motivated by the desire for adventure would be THIS type of person.” Other writers start with the character: “my heroine wants to sail to Jamaica, so that must mean she’s motivated by adventure.”

Either way works fine. And either way leaves you totally free to write any kind of story you want.

Say, given this heroine who wants to sail to Jamaica in search of adventure, could your story be full of soul-deep emotion? Absolutely. Dizzying suspense? Yep. Mystical fantasy? Yep. Quirky humor? Yep. The hottest sex imaginable? Yep.

It all depends on how you write it.

So in that case, why does the heroine’s motivation even matter?

Because it’s what makes her credible. Same as we can’t have pink-elephant aliens showing up in some 14th-century castle without sacrificing a bit of credibility, neither can we have this woman sailing off to Jamaica without SOME plausible motivation.

And that’s where it’s easy for us authors to fall down on the job. We love this heroine who’s rigging out her sailboat, we love that she’s going to Jamaica, and we know that on the way she’ll meet this incredibly witty sailor, and there’ll be a pirate attack — oh, and the pirate ship will have a yellow parrot named Sidney! — it’s all taking shape. We KNOW it’ll work, because we can SEE this story.

But it’s that dazzling clarity which can get us into trouble. Because our readers weren’t IN on this first glorious flash of inspiration. They can’t see that wonderful vision. All they see is a heroine rigging out her sailboat for a trip to Jamaica, and they have no idea why she’s doing it.

Unless the readers GET her desire for adventure, they’re gonna feel out of the loop. They might not know why the story isn’t working for them, but they’re missing her motivation.

And motivation is what makes a book memorable.

For some writers, it comes so naturally that they never even question how their characters’ motivation will feed into the plot. (Which sometimes leaves them at loose ends, wondering what they heck can HAPPEN in this plot.)

For others, it’s more of a tack-on because their strength is in plotting. (Which sometimes leaves them wondering how to explain WHY this character did something that seems senseless but is actually integral to the plot.)

Either way, motivation is vital. And yet we’ve all found ourselves in trouble with motivation every now and then. So that’s my question for you:

When was the last time you found yourself dealing with a problem character? Who was this person? What did he or she do? How did you resolve the situation?

Everybody here will be able to sympathize with such a situation, because pesky characters strike EVERY writer! And somebody who posts today will win help for all their future characters with free registration to my “Plotting Via Motivation” class at www.WriterUniv.com next month.

Meanwhile, I can’t wait to see those pesky characters on parade — because it’s always a lot more fun to read about other people’s problems than to focus on our own.

Laurie, in the first month of a new job where I’m being VERY scrupulous about checking email only during lunch and after work…so don’t worry if it takes a while to hear back; I’m definitely checking soon!

***

RU Crew, give Laurie’s questions a shot. Tell us about how you dealt with motivation in one of your characters.

Join us Thursday and Friday when Toni McGee Causey stops by with a POV workshop – you won’t want to miss it!

***

Laurie’s Bio:

Laurie Schnebly Campbell (www.booklaurie.com) grew up in a family that discussed psychology around the dinner table. With a marriage counselor for a mother, she felt well equipped to get her romance-novel couples to a happy ending…which might be what helped her win “Best Special Edition of the Year” over Nora Roberts.

The only thing she loves more than writing romance is working with other writers, which is why she now teaches an online class every month and has written a book for novelists who want to create believable characters with built-in fatal (or not quite fatal) flaws.

Hi, Carli,
Great question! I agree that emotion is a critical element in not just romance, but in all good stories. And yes, I also agree that there can be too much emotion. This is sometimes called melodrama or sentimentality, and it can be a real turn-off for readers. But the truth is that in all those years of scouring the submissions inbox, I rarely saw a melodramatic manuscript, but I saw heaps of manuscripts that were flat or inappropriately subdued. So for most writers, you don’t have to worry about how much is too much.

Instead, think about ways to get more emotion into each scene, line by line. Here are my top ten tips to help you achieve this.

1. First and most important, get your reader invested with your characters and their situations. This generally means three things: a worthy goal, a dire consequence, and a character we want to see succeed. If any of those three pieces is missing or inadequate, the reader’s emotional investment will suffer.
2. Modulate the emotion over the course of scenes and sequences. A steady stream of shrill anger, for example, will soon numb the reader. But building peaks and valleys into the expression or experience of that emotion will give it more impact.
3. Vary the emotions themselves. We tend to focus on lust, anger, suspicion, and of course, love itself. But this is a tiny subset of human emotion. Incorporate a variety, and you’ll instantly have “more” emotion, quite literally.
4. Use contrasting emotions against each other to heighten the impact of each. Remember the line from Steel Magnolias, “Laughter through tears is my favorite emotion”? Pairing the heartbreak with the laughter made each feel more poignant.
5. Don’t shorthand important emotional moments. Naming an emotion is probably the most common form of emotional shorthand. (She said angrily, he appeared baffled, she felt anxious, etc.) This is weak writing, though it’s appropriate for moments when you want to downplay the significance of a character’s reaction and move on quickly to other things.
6. Focus instead on action and dialogue to convey emotion. Emotions often have physical components and lead us to say particular things. Let the emotions shine through these details.
7. Interior monologue can also convey an emotion, not by focusing on the emotion itself but by focusing on the facts that give rise to the emotion. Compare: 1- “I feel very determined to leave this house.” 2- “If Carson thinks he can keep me from going out just because of a little rain, well, let him try to stop me!” Second one has more impact, right?
8. Avoid cliches. This one might seem like a no-brainer, but really, I don’t ever want to read about a man shoving his hand through his hair out of frustration. When an action is this overused to convey an emotion, the emotional impact is flattened.
9. Choose the concrete over the abstract. Sometimes we can’t help but get abstract when a character is experiencing an emotion, especially when that character is trying to understand or come to terms with that emotion. Find ways to anchor these moments in the concrete world of the story. Make them *do* something while they analyze their hearts, and let those actions reflect their true emotions.
10. Make sure you know what the characters’ true emotions are, moment by moment, throughout the story. This might sound obvious, but you can’t narrate an emotion that you don’t know about. Go deeper. Feel what your characters are feeling in that moment. How does it color their view of the world around them?

* * *

So, writers, what other tips would you add to this list?

Join us next week Monday when Adrienne talks with agent Kevan Lyon. You won’t want to miss it!

Theresa’s 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.

Welcome back, Tawny!

I’ll admit it, the major hook for me in any romance is the hero.  I love me a sexy hero.  Alpha, beta.  Nerd, Soldier.  Teacher, biker, CEO.  I love ‘em all.  I read romances for the story, of course, but also to fall in love with the hero.

Or I should say, to fall in love—along with the heroine.

Because as hot and sexy and wonderful as the heroes are (and they definitely are, aren’t they!) it’s the heroine that most readers connect with the strongest.  And it’s the heroine that we, as writers, need to focus on to draw readers in to the story.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten in writing was from my uber-awesome editor, Brenda Chin.  She said that the heroine had to be relatable.  The reader falls in love with the hero, but does so through the heroines’ eyes.  She has to be empathetic—someone the reader can identify with in some way.

Does that mean the heroine has to be syrupy sweet perfection?  Of course not.  Does it mean she has to be a good girl, an average woman, a just-like-Jane-up-the-street character?  Not at all.

She has to be relatable in some small way, so the reader can feel an affinity with her.

In my first book, DOUBLE DARE, Audra was a bad girl in every way.  She was super-sex, with spiked black hair, wore leather and had multiple piercings.  She was wild, ambitious and overly-confident in herself.  She wasn’t the average woman at all.  But I received so much mail about her from readers who said they didn’t think, when they started reading, that they’d understand or relate to her at all. But to their surprise, she was just like them.  Not in any of the ways I’ve already described, but in her deepest fear.  Her need to be accepted and fear of chasing her dreams at the expense of the status quo.

Because really, everything else is just surface.  It’s the emotions that we capture our readers with.  It’s the character’s emotional journey that they’re interested in.

And what if you, as the writer, are nothing like the heroine you’re writing?  I can’t speak for all writers, but for myself, it’s all about finding that emotional connection. What does the heroine fear?  What does she dream of?  These are powerful motivations that both drive her, and that in the heroines I’ve written, I can relate to.  In many ways, their fears and dreams are universal.  They are the same fears and dreams that I have, that many of my friends have, that I’ve seen played out over and over again. It’s finding that emotional connection, as a writer and as a reader, which makes our heroines so wonderful to take that romantic journey with.

An example would be my current heroine, Rita Mae Cole, in A BABE IN TOYLAND, a novella in the December Harlequin Blaze MUST HAVE BEEN THE MISTLETOE anthology.  She’s a bad girl (I have to say, I do love to write the bad girls, and even more those sexy bad boys).   She’s making her way home for the holidays by selling misfit sex toys, has no problem seducing the guy her family has the hates for, and is so flighty she’s never been able to hold down a job for more than six months.  None of this spells relatable, although it does make for some fun writing and reading *g*

It was her emotions, though, that readers can connect with, even if they’d could never-EVER imagine themselves selling the Tyrannosaurus Sex of dildos out of the back of a pickup truck to make enough money to buy their parent’s a gift.

Rita Mae is the youngest of three sisters, and has always felt like the biggest loser in her family.    No matter what she’s done, one of her sisters already did it better.  They are more talented, smarter, better.  She loves her family, but she seriously wonders if someone made a mistake at the hospital, because she has none of their gifts.   It’s her dedication to her family, and her fears and self-doubts, that make her relatable.  And because the reader can connect with that, they are able to laugh about the way she packages fur-lined handcuffs and edible body paint into Christmas stockings instead of cringe.

Rita Mae’s story, A BABE IN TOYLAND, is out now in the MUST HAVE BEEN THE MISTLETOE Blaze anthology.   I hope people will check it out and let me know what they think… did they relate to Rita?  I’d also love to invite readers to stop by and check out the contest I’m holding to celebrate the holidays and the release of my novella, A BABE IN TOYLAND.  I’ll be giving away the sweetest chocolate truffle ornament – it looks good enough to eat – and a copy of one of my books.  Details are on my website contest page.

***

RU Crew, have you ever had a tough time writing about a particular heroine? What gives you fits about character development? Tawny will drop by to answer question. And don’t forget she’ll give away a book from her backlist to one lucky commenter!

Join us Friday when Harlequin Super Romance author Liz Talley will talk about taking your readers for an emotional roller coaster ride!

Tawny’s Bio:

Tawny Weber is usually found dreaming up stories in her California home, surrounded by dogs, cats and kids.  When she’s not writing hot, spicy stories for Harlequin Blaze, she’s shopping for the perfect pair of boots or drooling over Johnny Depp pictures (when her husband isn’t looking, of course).  In December 2010, her ninth Blaze, A BABE IN TOYLAND hits the bookshelves.  Come by and visit her on the web at www.tawnyweber.com.