So, without further ado, here’s Allie!

If you write category fiction–or aspire to–chances are at least once in your career you will meet up with the literary phenomenon known as the continuity mini series.  A publisher-initiated series of 3-5 books that run over a specified story arc, these turn the usual creative process a bit on its ear.  You want to think through this opportunity, if offered, because there are definite upsides and downsides:

So why say “yes”?

You were asked, and that’s a good thing.   You can’t sign up to do one of these, you have to be invited.  While I might argue there’s not too many reasons to turn down a paying offer of any kind from your publisher (particularly in this market), there are some implied confidences of quality and reliability in such an offer.

It’s an opportunity to collaborate. Yes, it’s going to mean hundreds of emails or even its own Yahoo group, but it may be a chance to exercise new collaborative muscles.  It’s frustrating in some respects–writing by committee is never a smooth business–but a valuable education.

You may get to play with the big dogs. Every continuity usually has one or two big name authors as an anchor, the same way anthologies do.  A continuity gives you the best possible introduction to another writer’s fans: a place in a story they already care about.

If you hate coming up with book ideas, that part is done for you. Yes, your job is to flush out the story arc in ways that reflect your voice and give life to the characters, but the basic plot line is laid out in advance.

Sounds great.  Why wouldn’t you do a continuity?

It’s not your idea. And that may really bug you.  This is, essentially, work for hire, which also means you don’t own the copyright.  Still, work for hire is work, and these days it may not be wise to look a work horse in the mouth, if you know what I mean.

It may not be your editor. If you love your longtime editor, chances are he or she will not be the person handling this project.  You’ll most likely have to work with someone new, or at the very least add a third partner to your team.

It’s hard. The books are sequential, but are written nearly simultaneously.  That means you’re writing off an ending someone else hasn’t even written yet.  Details have to match up on the fly, which can make for massive confusion and no small amount of rewriting.   You’ll be given a “bible,” a detailed synopsis and character descriptions for both your book and the entire series, but it doesn’t cover everything.  And should you attempt to deviate, the ramifications can be whopping.

It’s a team sport. Collaborations aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.  If you like to write your first draft all at the last minute in a frenzy of procrastination, you’ll make yourself and your continuity partners crazy.  If you finish too early, you might have to go back repeatedly to make adjustments based on what your partners have written.  And you’ll most likely have to share your work before it’s finished, so if that makes you cringe this might not be for you.

Am I glad I worked on the Alaskan Brides series?  Yes, but I’ll be the first to admit it was tough.  I would never have looked to the Gold Rush on my own, so I was introduced to a fascinating culture and subject I might never have otherwise discovered.  I stretched new creative muscles, and that is never a bad thing.   I put another tool in my toolbox, another avenue for work from my publisher, and that’s never a bad thing.  And I had the opportunity to work with two wonderful authors, Linda Ford and Dorothy Clark.  All in all, not a bad deal.  Not a bad deal at all.

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Thanks, Allie!

RU Writers, Would you write a story for a continuity series, if asked?

RU Readers, Do you love reading continuity series? Did you realize so much was going on behind the scenes to bring you a great read(s)?

Be sure to stop back tomorrow for our Ask an Editor column, brought to you by the lovely and crazy-talented Theresa Stevens.

Allie’s bio:

An avid knitter, coffee junkie, and devoted chocoholic, Allie Pleiter writes both fiction and non-fiction.  The enthusiastic but slightly untidy mother of two, Allie spends her days writing books, buying yarn, and finding new ways to avoid housework.  Allie hails from Connecticut, moved to the midwest to attend Northwestern University, and currently lives outside Chicago, Illinois.  The “dare from a friend” to begin writing has produced two parenting books, fourteen novels, and various national speaking engagements on faith, women’s issues, and writing.  Visit her website at www.alliepleiter.com or her knitting blog at www.DestiKNITions.blogspot.com.

YUKON WEDDING

Publisher:
Harlequin Love Inspired Historical
April 2011
ISBN #978-0373828630

A gold-rush town is no place for a single mother. But widow Lana Bristow won’t abandon the only home her son has ever known. She’ll fight to remain in Treasure Creek, Alaska—even if it means wedding Mack Tanner, the man she blames for her husband’s death. Mack sees marriage as his duty, the only way to protect his former business partner’s family. Yet what starts as an obligation changes as his spoiled socialite bride proves to be a woman of strength and grace. A woman who shows Mack the only treasure he needs is her heart.

Hello, Tracy!

Dialogue…love writing it or hate it, dialogue is one of the first thing editors look for when reading a submission.

Great.  More pressure to have the right words come out of our characters’ mouths—to make our heroes’ and heroines’ personalities come alive. Or not.

Writing dialogue is hard work. So hard that we sometimes use the avoidance tactic of substituting big blocks of more easily written narrative, telling what was said instead of having characters speak. More often, we resort to dreaded mechanical tricks to ease the pain of writing dialogue that effectively conveys character and emotion.

Warning: AVOID THOSE TRICKS. That was my outdoor voice!

We want our dialogue to sound professional, to sing to that editor like Susan Boyle dreaming her dream on Britain’s Got Talent. So we have to identify the faulty mechanics that may seem to make dialogue strong, but only make it weaker. Editors know these tricks. They have e-mail outboxes full of rejections to prove it.

What tricks, what tricks?

Explaining Dialogue to Readers

“I can’t believe it,” she said in astonishment.

Telling the reader how our heroine feels does them a favor, right? Saves them the energy of having to figure it out for themselves. But our readers want to engage, they want to figure it out. If our dialogue is well-written, there’s no need to patronize readers by explaining the obvious. “I can’t believe it” conveys astonishment without explanation.

Pushing an Emotion on Readers

“It’s dark in there,” she said, frightened.

So our heroine is frightened. It says so. But we want the reader to feel the emotion, to be as frightened as she is. But “It’s dark in there” doesn’t convey fright.  If the dialogue doesn’t show the emotion, there is tension between the dialogue and the explanation. Readers may not notice this, but editors sure will. And readers will have a niggling idea that something is wrong.

Using Adverbs to Explain Dialogue

“Come here,” she said lovingly.

We’re smuggling emotions into our dialogue here. Our best bet is to keep the –ly adverbs to a minimum—seriously!

But wait, if giving up the –lys sounds worse than giving up a daily 2pm Diet Coke fix, there are exceptions! If your adverbs modify the verb said, you can keep them. Think “she said softly.” Softly is how she said the words—a dialogue cue. Lovingly, above, is how she felt when she said, “Come here.” We need to show her lovingness through word choice, body language and context, not with an –ly adverb.

Slipping Explanations into Speaker Attributions

The only reason we need speaker attributions is so our readers know who is talking. One dreaded trick is using speaker attributions to slip in explanations of dialogue. “She purred.”  “He growled.” While animal sounds have their place (usually at a zoo), using verbs like these for attributions task our characters with an action that is physically impossible. Have you ever purred or growled a sentence? Go ahead, make that purring sound with your tongue and try to speak!

Avoiding ‘Said’

As afraid as we may be to see too many saids threading through our pages, for speaker attributions, said is almost always the right verb. We love variety—demanded, inquired, replied. But the reason those verbs don’t work is that they draw attention away from the dialogue, jumping out at readers and distracting them with writing mechanics.

Well-renowned editors Renni Browne and Dave King make the best argument in their book Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. “Said isn’t even read the way other verbs are read. It is, and should be, an almost purely mechanical device—more like a punctuation mark than a verb. It’s absolutely transparent, which makes it graceful and elegant. Which, actually, is another reason to avoid explanations and adverbs. Even when you use them with said (we said sternly), they tend to entangle your readers in your technique rather than leaving them free to concentrate on your dialogue.”

Behold our new favorite attribution: SAID. I wish I knew how to type a halo over top of it! I’m depending on your imagination to help me out here.

So there you have it. The so-called rules. Yet we all have seen these rules blatantly broken in published works by best-selling authors. So why not by us? Are you a rule-breaker? If so, which ones and why? I’m a said girl and I crack up every time I read an animal-sound speaker attribution—but that’s just me. Maybe your story is set in a zoo, and that’s okay too!

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Thanks, Tracy!!

RU CREW, what do you do to keep your dialogue fresh? Do you have any dialogue quirks?

Please join us again on Monday for C.J. Redwine’s latest query letter critique.

Tracy’s Bio:

Tracy March writes about ethical dilemmas in unethical times. As a former pharmaceutical sales executive, Tracy draws inspiration from her experiences and encounters in the medical field and her love/hate relationship with politics.

Tracy is a member of International Thriller Writers, a contributing editor to The Big Thrill webzine, and a member of ITW Debut Authors Program Social Media Team. She is also a member of Romance Writers of America.

Tracy’s debut thriller, Girl Three, set in Washington, D.C., will be released in June 2011. Girl Three placed in several contests in 2010 including First Place in Chicago-North RWA Chapter’s Fire and Ice Contest, First Place in Valley Forge RWA Chapter’s Sheila Contest, and Second Place in Orange County RWA Chapter’s Orange Rose Contest.

Tracy lives in Yorktown, Virginia, with her superhero husband who works for NASA. They recently experienced two years living in Washington, D.C, where they discovered enough drama to inspire a lifetime of stories. Visit Tracy at www.TracyMarch.com.

In addition to providing a wonderful, informative lecture, Anne’s giving away her cherished, out-of-print book NIGHTFALL. Plus, her alter-ego, Kristina Douglas, is including her debut THE FALLEN: RAZIEL. So, two fabulous books for two wonderful commenters!

The class is yours, Anne! Be gentle.

One of the things people say about my books is that they’re not for everyone.  In fact, what they’re saying is dark romances aren’t for everyone.  Some people like froth, some like snark, some like family-oriented trauma, some like intense emotion.

Actually I like all those things, and a touch of most of them can make a dark romance richer and fuller.  What appeals to me and other readers (and writers) of dark romance is the ultimate redemption.  The darker the romance, the sweeter the redemption, the more powerful the pay-off.  For some people that darkness is too high a price to pay.  For me it makes it worthwhile.

There are common elements to writing a dark love story.  In general I start with a hero, though a dark heroine can be the center just as effectively.

Here are the major building blocks:

The hero – central to the hero is his inner rage.  It needs a believable source — usually the old “I’ve been hurt once I’ll never love again” is much too weak, though occasionally it can still work.  You need to consider whether he’ll take it out on innocents, including the heroine, and what can make him let go of it.

His level of violence is also an issue.  Does he kill, and if so, is it in self-defense, as part of a job, as revenge.  Just what kind of rules is he willing to break?

You’ve got to consider whether he’s alone or with a posse (mentor, best friend, ally, traitor).  I’m personally fond of some sort of betrayal by a trusted source.  My heroines tend to be betrayed by their parents – you can infer what you want from my own difficult childhood.

In the end you have to consider his character arc.  No character should be the same at the end of the a book as he was at the beginning.  Key to that is considering his Goal, Motivation and Conflict (check out Debra Dixon’s excellent work on the subject).  Bottom line, what is the hero’s goal, what motivates that goal, and what in his life or character gets in the way of that goal?  You can do this externally and internally, and these can change over the course of the book, in reaction to what life (or the author) has thrown at him.

Having a character or actor stand-in at the very beginning can make things easier.  I’ve used Alan Rickman for a good half-dozen novels and novellas, Daniel Day-Lewis’s Hawkeye persona for another six, Japanese rock stars for English spies, Brad Pitt as a romantic hero and an idiot comical subplot.  Recently I’ve used as disparate choices as Richard Armitage and the animated Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle.  The thing is, by the time you’re halfway through the book the character takes on a life of his own, and even the physical resemblance disappears.

Once you’ve got the hero fully focused in your mind you can turn to the heroine. Many of her questions are the same, but first and most importantly you have to decide on her basic role.  Is she the protagonist, which, if so, you should have started with her.  If not, you have many choices, but the most obvious are a) the antagonist, b) a helpless victim,  c) a victim who fights back,  d) a peacemaker,  e) an ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances, or f) an extraordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances (dark love stories almost always involve extraordinary circumstances).  And of course these roles can be combined, like a peacemaker who’s an ordinary woman, who fights against the hero, etc.

You decide on her looks – is she plain or pretty.  Her own level of violence is particularly interesting.  Is she capable of killing?  Is there violence with the hero?  Is she unable to use violence, even for the best of reasons?  (If so, you’d better come up with a reason that will eventually make her pick up that gun or weapon of choice by the end).

You’ll need to consider her posse – most often my heroines are isolated.  If she has support then her situation isn’t as dire.  Total isolation can be fun, but adding someone can make it richer.  Is there a best friend, a child, a dog?  Jenny Crusie has the opposite problem – her cast of characters is always growing, and she ends up having to cut back.  That’s because her love stories are often about community, about snark and delight.  Mine are often about death and sex.

Speaking of which.  Now that we’ve got death and our main characters dealt with, it’s time to put them together.  SEX.

How important is it?  For me it’s central, because we’re talking about a romance, and the physical manifestation of that romance is sex.  Closed bedroom doors keep us in the dark about one of the most important aspects of a relationship.  I want to know how it works, who is generally the aggressor (i.e. who is the kisser and who is the kissed).  I want to know if the sex is violent (and if it is, there most definitely needs to be a follow-up occasion with tenderness).  If the sex is sweet it can make an interesting contrast to the darkness that surrounds the story, but in general sweet sex doesn’t go with a dark love story, unless it’s the response to earlier, aggressive sex.

You need to know what initiates the sex.  There can be many reasons: anger, reaction to danger, deliberate seduction for nefarious reasons, sheer, mutual lust, or it can emerge out of the need to comfort someone.  Frankly I love sex in a strong love story, and the more good reasons the better.

You’ll need a maguffin, but plenty of people have written about maguffins and their uses.  It’s what everyone wants.  Even more important is your villain, your source of evil.  It can be a man (kidnapper, serial killer), an organization (big business, the Republican Party), a disease, an army.  On occasion my villain is also my hero.  When it comes to creating villains you have to look out for one very real danger.  If your villain is a charismatic individual make sure he’s not more interesting than the hero (case in point – Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham versus Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood.  Who would you rather sleep with?

You tie it all up with a happy ending.  You have to decide whether  to resolve the romance or the mystery first.  Since we’re talking about dark romances, I tend to go with resolving the mystery/force of evil first and saving the more important for last.  It’s always convenient to leave a few things hanging, just in case you feel like revisiting that world later on.  I like terse ending rather than flowery ones (Crusie would scream at the thought but you can always add an epilogue if needed), Slobbery “I adore you” endings can undercut the power of the story.

In the end, you have one more question to decide.  How dark do you want to go? I believe in risking it all, being willing to face commercial suicide if the book calls for it.  Great triumph usually comes with great risk, and if you’re not going to risk it all, why bother writing it in the first place.

Of course this barely touches on the richness and depth of writing dark love stories.  With crib sheet in hand, go back and read some classics, see how they’re constructed, what works for you and what doesn’t.  Or hell, just go ahead and write it, then go back and make sure you’ve got your basics covered.  Either way, be prepared for a long, dark ride for the writer.  You live in a very dark place while you’re creating these people, and it’s just as well to be prepared.

* * *

Thanks, Anne!!

RU CREW, are you ready to try writing a darker love story? If you already write darker material, can you apply some of Anne’s techniques? Readers, what do you enjoy most about dark love stories? Don’t forget to comment for your chance to win a book from Anne or Kristina!

Be sure to stop back on Wednesday to hear what author Keena Kincaid has to say about picking the right workshop for you to present!

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Anne’s Bio:

Anne Stuart has been writing since the dawn of time, winning lots of awards, making the NYT extended list, causing trouble and writing Very Dark Books. For more information on Anne’s books, please visit her website at http://www.anne-stuart.com/home.html. If you’re curious about Kristina Douglas’s new debut series, you can check out her website at http://www.kristinadouglas.com.

This month, we’re taking a question from the mailbag. This one was sent in by Pauline Allen.

Regarding POV, do publishers prefer two person POV or is singular deep POV acceptable?

Pauline, although most romance publishers want scenes in the hero’s viewpoint, the proportions of hero POV to heroine POV vary somewhat depending on your target market. So let’s use this question as an opportunity to take a closer look at submission guidelines.

When a publisher is concerned about the number of scenes from the hero’s viewpoint, the guidelines will reflect that. For example, let’s take a look at the guidelines for the Silhouette Desire line, found at:

http://www.eharlequin.com/articlepage.html?articleId=553&chapter=0

Buried in the paragraph about the ideal Desire hero, we see a clue about POV proportions. “The Desire hero often has fewer scenes from his point of view, but in many ways, he owns the story.” How do we interpret this? Let’s break it down.

1. The hero has scenes from his POV.
2. But the heroine has more POV scenes.
3. This means we need more than 50% from the heroine’s POV, and fewer than 50% from the hero’s POV.
4. This is important enough to rate mention in the guidelines.
5. Scenes from the hero’s POV should be strong and purposeful. (He “owns the story.”) Don’t just switch because it might be time to switch.

So now you know, if you’re targeting Silhouette Desire, one possible interpretation of those guidelines. For contrast, let’s take a look at the submissions guidelines at Avon, found at:

http://www.avonromance.com/2010/03/19/avon-romance-submission-guideline/

You can search this page a long time and never find any tips about point of view. Does this mean they don’t care about the hero’s POV and you can safely skip it? Not necessarily. It just means they don’t feel so strongly about it that they’ll make it a formal guideline. But keep in mind that there are real people with preferences and opinions going through the submissions inbox. They’re highly trained and sensitive to market preferences. They know what they want, and they know what works for their readers, even if it’s not carved into the guidelines.

So how do you determine what their preferences might be? Check the line. If you’re targeting their historical line, scan some of the titles and look at the range of POVs. For example, Stephanie Laurens, a bestselling Avon author, sometimes has more than half the scenes in the hero’s POV. So we know that Avon historicals will at least consider a hero-heavy book. Will they consider a book with a single POV? Look through their current titles and recent backlist, and you’ll get some idea of that.

I think that your study of guidelines and current titles will show you that most romance publishers release books with scenes in both hero and heroine POVs, and few release books in single POVs. Why is that? Because it takes two (or more) to make a match. These stories aren’t about the adventures of one person, but about the formation of a bond between two people (or more – I keep adding that “or more” because of the popularity of polyamorous erotic romances). Readers don’t want to worry that a character is alone in the relationship. They want to see the bond develop from all sides.

But if the story has more to do with one character’s personal mission – some women’s romance or chick lit would fit this pattern – then a single POV is more appropriate. In that case, though, the story is probably not a romance even if it has romantic themes or threads.

All of which is to say: know your book. Know what you’re writing, your target market, your potential audience, and your potential publishers. And then you’ll know if you need to slant your story in any particular way, whether with POV choices or with changes to some other element.

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RU Crew, have you ever scratched your head over submission guidelines? Feel free to pick Theresa’s brain today!

Be sure to stop by Monday when the one-of-a-kind Anne Stuart will join us!

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.

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. =)

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

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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.”

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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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!

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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.”

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!

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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!

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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.

Very commonly, writers want to know what separates the publishable-but-ordinary book from the publishable-and-great one. The answer is that there are many markers which separates an almost-great from a great. Point of view, tension, voice – give any two writers the same set of story elements to work from, and the better scene will come from the author with better control over those elements. And it’s not exactly a secret. We talk about these things pretty frequently.

One marker of excellence which we talk about less often, though, is setting. Your choice of setting and the way you manipulate it can have a powerful impact on the way the scene reads. Here are my top tips for writing a well-set story.

Don’t Use Block Descriptions

A character walks into a room and describes the furniture and walls and windows for a five-sentence clump of text. The entire story comes to a dead stop for this description. Nothing happens. The cast is frozen on the stage while the spotlight moves from the couch to the draperies. This kind of description is a pace-killer, and what’s more, it’s almost always unnecessary. Instead of block descriptions, drop in setting details when they become relevant to the scene action. The couch doesn’t matter until someone sits on it, and that’s when you can safely reference it.

Don’t Narrate Ordinary Details

They’re in the bedroom, so you describe the bed. They’re in the dining room, so you describe the table. Why? It’s probably a safe assumption that bedrooms have beds in them and dining rooms have tables in them. Is there any need to elaborate? Probably not, and if you spend page space on unsurprising details like this, you’re at risk of boring the reader.

But Do Describe the Unusual Details

Now, if that dining room table is built from the bones and skins of the villain’s victims, then it might be worth a mention. Don’t think of the ways your character’s rooms are typical – a blue sofa in the living room, a roller shade over the bedroom windows – unless the point is that your character is so ordinary as to avoid particular notice. Instead, look for the unique personal details that would act like conversation pieces in real life. These are the things that stick out in an ordinary environment, and they can be described in your book without a loss of tension or reader interest.

And Do Show When the Environment Changes

Your character is ordinarily as tidy as a surgeon, but on this occasion, his desk is a litter of paper, pens, clips, and there’s even a plate with a dried-up half sandwich in one corner. Sure, we expect to see desk items on a desk, so the paper and pens, at least, ordinarily wouldn’t rate a mention. But in this specific case, they’re worth describing because they create tension. “Something is different. Something has changed. Something might be wrong here.” Throw in the nasty leftovers, and we know it’s more serious than just a busy day. He’s so busy that he’s distracted. Forgetting to eat. Willing to attract vermin rather than clean up his lunch. And we instantly want to know why.

This trick works best when character has already been established, but it can also be used with minor and new characters. Just make sure you communicate to the reader that this setting detail is unusual, or build in other contextual details that connect to the emotion you’re trying to raise.

Do Opt for Unusual Settings

Sex in the bedroom? There are times when a bedroom setting is necessary and says something about the plot and characters. Think, for example, of the couple in an erotic romance that sneaks sex everywhere and anywhere but pretends they’re not emotionally invested in each other. Doing it in a bed for the first time might signal an emotional acceptance of the true nature of their relationship. In that case, the ordinary setting advances the internal plot and becomes meaningful.

But in ordinary cases, don’t just automatically put the sex scene in the bedroom, the dinner scene in the dining room, the picnic in the park, and so on. Take a moment to question why the scene is set in this location. Brainstorm a list of possible settings – they don’t have to be logical or even likely, but taking a moment to think through the geography of the characters’ world will soon show you that there are almost infinite setting possibilities. The simple act of picking an unexpected setting can make a reader more alert and engaged, even when the setting isn’t particularly important to the plot.

Do Let Characters Interact With Setting

They kick at rocks in the street. They fuss with decorative items on the coffee table. They fiddle with the radio dial in the car. When we say, “Give your characters something to do in this scene,” we’re not always talking about turning them into gardeners and chefs while they have important conversations with other characters. Sometimes, the solution is to have the character signal his internal state with the way she moves through the world around her. Keep the main focus on the character interaction, but incorporate setting details with action and emotion.

An added benefit of this technique is that it will help you avoid cliched gestures. A hand through the hair when frustrated? Or shredding a tissue into careful squares? Which feels more fresh? The second, I think. Don’t you agree?

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What other setting tricks do you use? Do you have any examples of a setting which was particularly interesting or well-written?

Join us on Monday when Mills and Boons New Voices contest finalists Leah Ashton and Heidi Hormel share their after the contest stories.

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.

I love dialogue. Any kind of dialogue.  My husband will testify to that on a personal level, but today we’re here to talk about dialogue within scenes and don’t need his opinion.  

Please welcome author and scriptwriter Cindy Carroll back to RU for another great lecture.

Take it away, Cindy!

Sometimes the best part about a movie is the dialogue.  But what about books?  Most of the time you remember the description.  You remember the characters.  You don’t usually come away from reading a book thinking – Wow, that dialogue was awesome.  So why not?  Dialogue is tough to get right.  Great dialogue is even tougher.  Dialogue has a big job in a book.

Dialogue should serve one or more purpose:  move the plot forward, develop character, illuminate the theme, take the story in a new direction, give the reader information.  There are other purposes of course but those are the ones I aim for.  It can also reveal how characters feel about each other, foreshadow events, provide conflict.  And as long as you do it right, dialogue is showing.

How do you do it right?  How much do you need?  I would say every scene needs dialogue.  Writing good dialogue is hard.  People say some writers just have a talent for it. And that may be true but I think writing good dialogue can be learned.  One tip writers are given is to listen to conversations around them.  Good advice, just don’t write dialogue exactly as you would hear it in the real world.  Real conversations are full of things that you don’t want in your dialogue.  You wouldn’t include the ums, the ahs, the yeses, the nos, the person’s name etc.

For example:  “Gee, Bob, remember the last time your cousin showed up?  We all ended up in jail because Hank, the town Sheriff , had a grudge against him.”

Another example of bad dialogue:

“Betty, are you going to the wedding?”

“No.”

Wouldn’t it better if Betty said something like “I’ll be washing my hair.”  Or “I’d rather have a root canal without any freezing.”  Her answer is still no but it reveals so much more about Betty and the story.

One more example:

“John, what are you doing?’

“Well, um, I’m, ah, nothing really.  Just watching TV.”

Dialogue should be crisp.  Clean.  Serve at least one purpose not just to add word count.  One thing I would highly recommend is watching movies.  Listen to the dialogue.  Listen to the subtext.  Don’t have characters say something they wouldn’t normally say because you the author need to get the information out there.  Try closing your eyes and just listen to the dialogue.  How much of the story do you get?  By the end of the movie do you know all the important parts?  Do you know what happened?  You’ll miss the visuals yes, movies are a visual medium, but do you get the gist of the story?  Is the important information revealed in dialogue? Can you tell who is talking without seeing them?  If you take the dialogue tags out of your manuscript do you know who is speaking?  You should. Each character should have a unique voice.  All of your characters shouldn’t sound the same.

I love subtext.  The deeper meaning in the actions or the dialogue.  Knowing what the person means without them having to actually say it.  I saw a perfect example of subtext in X2 (X Men 2).  Jean Grey tells Logan he’s a bad boy.  Women don’t bring the bad boy home.  They marry the good guy.  Logan tells her he could be a good guy.  This speaks volumes.  He didn’t say straight out that he wanted to marry her.  But he did tell her he wanted to marry her. 

Why is dialogue so important?  White space.  It helps quicken the pace.  A lot of readers don’t like lots of narrative.  They look for those dialogue passages.  There should be a good balance of dialogue and narrative in your story.  I try to make sure I have at least some dialogue on every page.  After all your characters need to talk to each other.  Sometimes that’s the only way you can realistically get information across.  Just remember to make sure it doesn’t sound forced. 

Now get your characters talking.

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RU Readers, do you have a favorite line of dialogue you would like to share?  We’d love to hear it!

Thank you to Cindy for joining us today.

BIO:Cindy Carroll joined RWA in 1992 and started out writing novels but turned to scripts when an idea for one of her favorite television shows wouldn’t leave her alone. That first attempt, and her second teleplay for the same show, garnered her honorable mention in the Writer’s Digest 76th Annual Writing Competition in the screenplay category.  She graduated from Hal Croasmun’s screenwriting ProSeries intensive in June of 2008.  Her interview with David Rambo, writer/producer for CSI appeared in the summer special edition of The Rewrit, the newsletter for Scriptscene, Romance Writers of America’s screenwriting chapter.  Currently working on the rewrite of her second feature, Cindy is also developing two new television pilots. www.CindyCarroll.com

Join us on Friday when author Zoe Winters tells us what she wishes she would have known before jumping into the self-publishing pool.

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?

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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.