Tag Archives: novel

Writing Templates

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 2 Comments

For as long as I can remember I’ve always modeled the characters in my stories after particular actors or actresses that struck my fancy.  Sometimes an entire story would suggest itself to me when I watched a given performance of my favorite actors.  Not exactly a retelling of the thing I saw them in, but a variation.

Quilting: The Ultimate Template

For some reason a little voice at the back of my head has always considered this cheating.  Are you really creating an original character if you’re modeling them off of somebody else?

Imagine my surprise the other week when I finished reading Eloisa James’ novella Winning the Wallflower and there in her notes after the story she mentioned that some of her characters in this latest series were based off of House and Forest Gump!  Wait a minute, maybe I’m not the only person who does this.

In fact, I already knew that I wasn’t.  Last year while attending a writing workshop taught by Jenni Holbrook she mentioned that she uses what she called “templates” to create her characters.

I love this idea of templates.  Templates exist everywhere, from Word documents to architecture to fashion design.  All sorts of industries start with one thing and make it into something else.  I’ve always worried that there is a sort of plagiarism in the way I have become enamored of a character and then taken them out of their original setting and made them into something else.

Take, for example, the character Danny in my Grace’s Moon sci-fi series.  I’m not gonna lie.  That character started out as Ben Linus from Lost.  Yes, creepy Ben Linus.  But I love Ben.  I loved Ben from the moment he first appeared on the screen.  Probably because Michael Emerson is an amazing actor and as someone with a master’s degree in theater I know acting and I appreciate it when I see someone who does it well.

But those of you who watched Lost know that Ben was a nasty little man, manipulating things behind the scenes, ruthless in his pursuit of what he wanted, dedicated to The Island, and at the same time tragic in everything that life had thrown his way.  There is no way that character is ever going to be considered a hero.  But as I said, I love him and I wanted him to get his moment in the sun.

I wanted it so badly that I created Danny.

Now Danny is not Ben.  There are some fundamental differences in everything they stand for and the way they act on it.  But the essence of what spawned Danny began in Ben Linus.  That’s what a template means to me.  I saw something I liked in a package I found attractive and morphed it into a whole new character.

I did the same thing with Crispin from my novel The Loyal Heart.  Crispin started off as Richard Armitage.  I saw a couple of episodes of the BBC Robin Hood TV series he was in and spun it out in my imagination in an entirely different way.  Throw in about four other versions of the Robin Hood legend and the actual history of the time period and voila!  An entire Medieval trilogy.  But it all started because I think Richard Armitage is the sexiest man on the planet.

I think people do this with more than just characters.  We’ve all heard that old saying that there are no original stories.  So in essence every story out there is based off of a template.  In Romance these days there seems to be a trend of basing stories off of fairy tales.  And why not?  There is very little difference between a fairy tale and a romance novel.  Girl meets boy, obstacle gets in the way, girl marries boy.  It’s a template.

I do like to use celebrities and other well-known people (and a few people I know in real life) as my character templates though.  It’s fun to throw together really odd pairings.  I think I mentioned before in a post about Character Pics that the aforementioned Michael Emerson has been the template for more heroes in my novels than any other man (with Richard Armitage a close second – now how’s that for two entirely different men!).  Well, in my very soon to be published novel Our Little Secrets Michael Emerson is indeed the template for the character Michael.  And as you can see, I am not at all subtle about it.  And guess who the template for my heroine is?  Zooey Deschanel.  Now seriously.  Who in their right mind would ever think of putting those two together in a romantic situation?  That would be me.

So who else here uses templates for their characters?  And who do you use?  I’m dying to know which celebs out there are getting the most action in the imaginations of the writers of the world.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Developmental Editing and Copy Editing: What’s the Difference?

Posted on April 17, 2012 | 5 Comments

There are so many writers out there these days.  Now that the world of publishing has been blown wide open and anyone can publish a book a heck of a lot more people than ever before are calling themselves writers.  And that’s great!  But I’ve been lurking around the Kindle boards and other reader hang-outs lately and let me tell you, it’s not so great to them.  Because there is a lot of half-baked material being served up as if it’s a feast.

What’s the problem?  Editing.

Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how important editing is.  If writing a book is like throwing all the ingredients together and mixing then editing is like checking the recipe to make sure you’ve put the right ingredients in at the right amount.

I’ve heard a very large number of self-published writers out there say that they can make due without an editor.

Well you can’t.

*ducks*

At least I’m in the school of thought that says you absolutely must have your work edited by a professional before you can let it see the light of day.  There are more things that need looking at in a novel than most writers setting out on the journey realize.  And based on the comments I’ve seen here and there, there is also a misunderstanding about just what it is that an editor does.  So let’s take a look at that, shall we?

First, there are two kinds of editors.  You can’t do without either of them.

When a lot of people think “editor” they think of the person who reads through your manuscript looking for bad grammar, misspelled words, and typos.  This is a Copy Editor.  Copy editing is like making sure you don’t have broccoli in your teeth.  I, for example, am terrible at punctuating dialog.  I can’t keep it straight in my head which bits of dialog should end with a comma and which should end with a period, which bit after the dialog should be capitalized as a new sentence and which is a dialog tag.  It’s obvious when you point it out to me, but when I’m just reading through I write it all wrong.

A good copy editor knows the rules of grammar and uses them mercilessly against your manuscript.  I should have had someone copy edit The Loyal Heart a little more intensely before I published it because I had a serious ‘smirk’ problem.  Copy editors are also there to catch overuse of words.  Thankfully, self-publishing allows you to discreetly swap out a more thoroughly edited version of a novel without anyone being the wiser.  *shifty look*

Yes, copy editing is obvious and oh-so necessary.

But even more essential, in my humble opinion, is developmental editing.

A Developmental Editor is a writer’s best friend, but I bet most writers are terrified of the prospect.  I know I was before I had my first manuscript developmentally edited.  A Developmental Editor reads your manuscript and asks questions.  They peel away the layers to figure out what makes your story tick.  Or more importantly, what stops your story from ticking.  A Developmental Editor not only points out the broccoli in your teeth but asks you why you needed to have broccoli in the first place.  Maybe kale would work better?

Like I said, I was terrified when I sent my first manuscript to a Developmental Editor.  I loved that story.  I was passionate about it.  The very last thing in the world that I wanted was for someone to pick it apart and tell me everything that was wrong about it.  I chewed my nails for weeks, wondering what my editor, Alison, would say about the story.  I was terrified that she would tell me I was a horrible writer and should stick to my day job.

Well, she didn’t.  Why?  Because Alison is an excellent editor!

A good Developmental Editor, like Alison, is there to work with you.  Because there are all sorts of things that you, as a writer, can’t see when you’re so close to your work.  Think of a Developmental Editor as the sharpest reader your story is ever going to have.  If something doesn’t make sense, they will tell you.  If they think you didn’t lift a character or situation to its fullest potential, they will tell you.  If they have an idea for a different direction your story or backstory could go in, they will tell you.

LISTEN TO THEM!

Case in point:  I’m working on a western Romance, Our Little Secrets, right now.  I wrote it, and rewrote it, and revised that.  But something still wasn’t right.  I knew something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was … or wasn’t.  The time came and I sent it off to Alison.  And I waited in dread because I knew something wasn’t right.  I knew a serious critique was in the mail.

And then came my edit letter.  And yep, the story has some problems.  But guess what?  I may have known that there were issues, but Alison had a much clearer idea of what the issues were.  Her long, long, long letter of critiques read like the pieces of a complex puzzle fitting into place.  Oh!  Of course my heroine seems a little too perfect and a little too capable of handling things.  I didn’t really define what she was afraid of well enough.  And of course that potentially awesome scene fell flat.  I only depicted my hero’s shock over the turn of events, not all of the other emotions he would be feeling.  Oh!  That’s what was missing!

I don’t care how good of a writer you are, if you don’t have someone else, someone professional working with you to process your story it’s not going to be as good as it could be.  Do you know which of the Harry Potter books is J.K. Rowling’s least favorite?  The Goblet of Fire.  Why?  Because she felt as though her publishers rushed her and she didn’t have a chance to edit it as much as she wanted to.  Yes folks, even the master herself doesn’t get it right on the first draft and needs the help of editors to bring a story to its full potential.

So please, please, please do yourself and your readers a favor.  Bite the bullet, hold a bake sale, wash cars, break the piggy-bank, max out your credit cards and hire an editor.  A Developmental Editor and a Copy Editor.  You need them.  Everybody needs them.  If J.K. Rowling can do it, you can too.

Next week:  How to listen to your editor, critiques, and reviews without whining or losing your temper and becoming a better writer for it.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Writing

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

The Rules of Romance

Posted on March 22, 2012 | 9 Comments

Your story has a love story.  It has characters feeling a powerful attraction.  That attraction effects the plot.  The characters may even fall into bed together at some point.  But are you writing a Romance?

courtesy of favim.com

I’ve had some interesting discussions with fellow writers recently who feel that their work could be considered a Romance.  I tend to be of the school of thought that says Romance as a genre is pretty darn specific, but that other genres can have Romantic Elements to them.

So, to avoid confusion and answer a few questions about whether you’re writing Romance or not, here are The Rules of Romance.

Rule Number One:  The story is about the Characters.

There are plot-driven stories and character-driven stories.  The Da Vinci Code is a classic example of a plot-driven story.  It’s about what happens.  The characters are relatively weak by comparison and react to the plot.  Lots of mysteries, thrillers, and crime novels are plot-driven.

courtesy of valentinesdayclipart.net

Romance is character-driven.  Sure, there’s an external plot, something is happening that is effecting the lives of the characters.  But the story is about the characters.  In fact, the story IS the characters.  More specifically, the story is about the hero and the heroine falling in love and coming together.  Everything else that happens informs that internal plot.

Rule Number Two:  From the moment the hero and heroine meet, they are exclusive.

That doesn’t mean that they are instantly a couple.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other influences working to tear them apart or bring them together.  It means that from the moment they meet neither one has intimate relations with anyone else.

Now before you argue with me, yes, there are exceptions.  Erotica is an exception.  Erotica is a sub-genre of Romance in which the characters can have multiple partners (among other things).  There are other exceptions on a story-to-story basis too, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Granted, this can be a fine line.  I read a Romance novel recently, Notorious Pleasures, by Elizabeth Hoyt, where the hero is actively *cough* interacting with another woman when the heroine meets him.  It’s pretty funny, actually.  But from that point on, nope.  He’s met the heroine so all other activities are off-limits.

Actually, as I think about that I might be wrong.  The hero might actually pop off to entertain another lady at some point (it’s kind of his thing).  But Elizabeth Hoyt is a RITA Award-winning, NY Times best-selling novelist.  She can get away with it.  Chances are you can’t.  But again, I’ll get to the rule-breaking in a second.

Rule Number Three:  The hero and heroine must get together at the end and it must be a happy, emotionally satisfying ending.

One complaint that I hear a lot about Romance is that you know what’s going to happen before you even start reading.  Boy meets girl, boy and girl are kept apart, boy and girl get together in the end.  Yeah.  Duh.  It’s a Romance novel.  Of course that’s how the story goes.  The key to a good romance novel is to create characters that are compelling enough that even though you know the truth, your emotions are taken on a journey where you worry for them, you get swept along with them, and you experience relief and joy at the end when the pay-off comes.

One of my favorite examples of this is Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  Of course you know from page one that Fanny Price is going to end up with Edmund.  But for a while there it looks like she might actually choose Henry Crawford instead.  And personally, I happen to think he’s the better choice.  But I’m not Jane Austen.

In my novel, The Loyal Heart, this rule is followed, but you might not realize who the hero is when you first start reading.  I did that on purpose.  But sure enough, the hero and the heroine do get together in the end and it’s an emotionally satisfying ending for the reader.  Not necessarily for some of the other characters, but that’s why it’s a trilogy.

Happy ending.  ‘Nuff said.

 

Breaking the Rules:  Yes you can.

Rules are meant to be broken … to a certain extent.  But as I have been told time and time again, and as I pass along to you, you have to know the rules of the game really, really well before you can break them.  Writers at the top of the genre can get away with breaking the rules much more than those of us just starting out.  But keep in mind, if you break the rules too much then you’re not writing a Romance anymore.  If the plot suddenly becomes more important than the relationship, you’re not writing a Romance.  If the hero and heroine don’t get together in the end, you’re not writing a Romance.

I have experience of this first-hand … and someday I’m going to infuriate a lot of people because of it.  The couple in one of my novels does not have a happy ending, ultimately.  The heroine dies in childbirth.  The hero has to move on as a single dad.  His story becomes one of grief and redemption and learning to love again.  But I’m not going to tell you which story it is until it’s good and written.

So there you have it.  The Rules of Romance.  So are you writing a Romance after all?

But don’t take my word for it.  Here is the official explanation of the genre from the Romance Writers of America (of which I am a member).

→ 9 Comments

Posted in Writing

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Note to Self

Posted on March 15, 2012 | 11 Comments

I’ve been really happy to see that other people use character pictures and mood music to help them write.  Writing is serious hard work and you need the right tools for the job.  But here’s something that I wonder if I’m the only person out there that does it.

I write notes.

I mean, a lot of notes.

These are the notes for my work in progress ... so far.

Writing notes is something that came out of a silly high school writing class years and years ago.  The point of that exercise was to free-write to come up with ideas.  You put your pen on the paper and when the teacher said go you had to write constantly, without stopping, for two or three or five minutes, depending on the length of the exercise.  If you got stuck or ran out of things to say you were supposed to write whatever came into your head, whether that was song lyrics or your name or one word over and over.

I never had any problem filling my page with relevant material.  I was the kind of person who would come up with eleven other story ideas while trying to write about one.  I still do that, unfortunately.  It makes concentration really difficult sometimes.

Nowadays I use note-writing as a sort of compass.  I’m not sure if I can explain this effectively to non-writers, but my brain thinks from a different place when I’m writing, either by hand or typing.  It’s not the same place I speak or just randomly think from.  I have always felt like that part of me that pours directly onto the paper knows more than my conscious mind or my mouth does.  And believe you me, this was one really useful skill to have in college and grad school while taking essay tests!  I would routinely write down things I didn’t even know that I knew.  I always aced essay exams.

But I digress.

These days I use notes for two purposes.  The first is to record the myriad story ideas that pop into my head on a daily basis.  Whenever they come I’ll whip out one of my numerous and ever-present pads of lined paper and write down as much of the idea or synopsis or character sketches as I have.  It’s a great way to not forget things.

More importantly though, I use notes to work through blocks and to set my stories in order.

More often than not I’ll start like this….

“So in the last chapter the hero realized that he was in love with the heroine and panicked.  He jumped on his horse and galloped ten miles away into the forest to hide.  But he forgot that the heroine’s grandmother lived in the forest and when he dismounted, finally thinking he was safe, she was waiting right there with a scarf she’d knit for him.  In this chapter I’m about to write the heroine will be really annoyed that the hero is smothering her and will try to sneak out on him while he’s crying to his horse about something.  The heroine doesn’t realize that the hero wants space as much as she does.  The hero thinks that the heroine is like every other girl he knows who has to be around their hero 24-7”

Well, that’s an infinitely shorter version of what I do, but it gets the point across.  I always start with a summary of what I’ve just written.  Think of it as “Last time, on Work in Progress”.  It’s always a good idea for me to remind myself where I’ve been.  It helps me to recapture the mood of what I’m writing and to bring up anything important that I want to carry through to the next bit.  Sometimes I also remember points that I was going to talk about but had forgotten.

My file of notes

The next thing I do is to tell the story of what is about to happen.  If I know what that is.  I write about the actions that will immediately take place.  This is where the writing exercise from high school comes in handy.  I write and keep writing, even if I’m not sure.  Sometimes I’ll write sentences that start with “Maybe she’ll do a, b, c.  Or maybe she would do x, y, z instead.”  This isn’t the story itself, this is just thinking about the story.  It can and usually does change at some point.

Perhaps most importantly for me, I write about what the characters are thinking and feeling and how their backstory effects the immediate action.  This helps me get a strong handle on who these people are, what makes them tick, and how they would approach any given situation.  Most of the stuff I write in this section never makes it to the story itself.  Sometimes I come up with incredibly specific things that I would never, EVER include in the story.

For example, in my current work in progress I realized that the hero actually slept with one of the women who becomes a friend of the heroine, but it happened six years before the heroine ever showed up in town.  This friend knows far more about the hero than she’ll ever let on, because she’s a good woman.  She also knows the hero’s secret, but she would never tell.  Why is it important to know this?  It informs what kind of a man the hero is and how the tragedy in his past lead him to do something impulsive that he feels uncomfortable with.  Because in the present day of my story the hero once again has done something impulsive that he’s uncomfortable with.  So this story-creating action isn’t out of the blue for him.  He has a history of making impulsive decisions.

Voila!  Backstory!  But it will never be spoken of in the work itself.  Having my characters tell me about this aspect of themselves while I wrote notes did, however, help me to understand how to write the actions that take place during the story.

The long and the short of it is that I feel like I can think my way out of certain writing corners when I scribble notes freestyle.  And when I take a pen to paper and riff about my characters and the plot I feel like I bring more life to them than if I just let them exist within the boundaries of the part of their lives that the reader will see.

I’d be really curious to know if anyone else does this.  Or if you don’t, give it a try and let me know how it feels.

→ 11 Comments

Posted in Writing

Tagged , , , ,

Tips from the Writers Coffeehouse

Posted on February 28, 2012 | 8 Comments

On Sunday I attended the Philadelphia Writers Coffeehouse.  For those who don’t know, this is a group of writers of all levels who meet once a month at a local Barnes & Noble.  It’s a neat way to spend some time with fellow crazies … I mean writers.  We talk about everything from what’s going on in the publishing world to creating author platforms and marketing to tips and techniques to improve your craft as a writer.

The actual Philly Writers Coffehouse

I tend to tune out the social networking discussions because, well, as you can see, I think I’ve got that aspect of the whole thing well in hand.  I also get impatient with discussions about the publishing industry, which I really shouldn’t.  But whenever I hear about the crazy, desperate, creepy, ethically questionable, or just plain tedious things that the traditional publishing world is up to I remember why I am so happy as an indie author.

But the tips for improving your craft?  Oh man did they have some good suggestions!

Here are some of my favorites.  And if anyone out there has tried these things, please let us all know what you think of them.

The coolest and most obvious piece of advice that someone brought up was something we’ve all heard before.  Good writers are voracious readers.  Yup.  But the twist that someone put on this bedrock of writing improvement was that, as writers, we have to be incredibly selective about what we read.  You only improve your own craft by reading the very, very best.  Yes, there’s a lot to be gained from reading things that don’t work so that you can see what to avoid, but the key is to read the very best.

The leader of the coffeehouse asked us all to think about who within the genre we write in do we consider the best.  (Me = Historical Romance = Elizabeth Hoyt, Elizabeth Boyle, Eloisa James, and Lisa Kleypas)  They stressed that we should read and really study the works of the great ones.

Then an exercise was suggested that I just think is cool.

Take the work of one of your favorite top-of-the-line authors.  Find a really good section or paragraph.  Then get out a pad of paper and a pen and copy out the passage word for word.

Apparently the benefit of this is that it helps you to get a feeling for the flow of words, the sentence structure, and the vocabulary that these top-notch writers use.  Writing it out forces you to slow down and focus on each word, each phrase, and how they all fit together.  See what it feels like to write those words in that way.  Pay attention to how paragraphs are started and ended.  If you’re doing a huge long section, or even if you’re just reading it, pay attention to the last sentence or two before section breaks.  If a sentence is set apart on a line all by itself, pay attention to how that feels.

The theory is that if you do more than just read those words you think are great, if you retrace them, you can get a sense for the craft that goes beyond its overall impact.  The suggestion was also made to then try to rewrite a bit of your work in progress in the style of the writer you’ve been studying.  Just to see how it feels, you know.  Another suggestion was to try to rewrite what your favorite writer was saying in their selection in your own words and to compare that.

Kinda cool, eh?  I think I might try that sometime.

The other suggestion that seriously intrigues me that I haven’t tried yet has to do with social networking.

Has anyone used Google Alerts?  Apparently you can track when people are searching for certain terms and where they go.  The suggestion was made that you should do a Google Alert for your own name and for the keywords that describe what you write.  So for me I would look into a Google alert for Merry Farmer, but also for medieval romance or something similar like that.

I haven’t done the Google Alert thing yet, but I think now I’ll have to give it a try.

The other piece of advice that I think is golden that I’d like to share with you today was the importance of having a writers group of some sort.  People talked about their critique groups.  They mentioned that if you want to actually get something out of a critique group you need to let them be brutal with you.  Asking someone to be gentle with your manuscript isn’t going to do you any good.  At the same time, people mentioned that you need to take what people say with a grain of salt and ignore it if it doesn’t feel right.

The importance of groups goes further than critique groups.  Several people mentioned the importance of groups like the Coffeehouse.  Writing can be a difficult, lonely business.  You need back-up.  Even though the room was packed to the gills with more people than should have been there, it was still worthwhile hanging out for a couple of hours with other nutty people who sit in front of a computer for hours for fun.  Some of the writers there are multi-published and relatively famous.  Some have never written a word but are plagued with an idea they just have to write.  Most of us are in the middle.  It doesn’t matter.  Birds of a feather need to flock together.

So there you have it.  Wisdom from the Philadelphia Writer’s Coffeehouse.  We meet every last Sunday of the month at the Barnes & Noble in Willow Grove at noon.  Come and join us next month!

[I was just a little sad this month because Greg Frost wasn't there, and I have such a huge crush on him. =D]

→ 8 Comments

Posted in Writing

Tagged , , , , , ,