Tag Archive | the courageous heart

The Inner Life of Secondary Characters

Last weekend I posted a fun scene from my latest novel, Fool for Love, that highlights one of the secondary characters in the series, Jacinta Archer. I love that scene because Jacinta is such a character (no pun intended). She has a whole inner world and her mind works in definitive ways – ways that often meddle with the lives of the rest of the characters in the Montana Romance world. Oh yes, there is much more of Jacinta to come!

My favorite secondary character that I’ve written is the character of Toby Dunkirke from the Noble Hearts series. On the surface Toby is Sir Ethan’s loyal servant and Joanna’s beloved brother, but in reality he’s so much more! His loves run deep and the decisions he makes and actions he takes informs the action of the entire trilogy almost more than any of the heroes or heroines. And yet he’s still just a secondary character. Continue reading →

How to Revise Your Novel – Part Four: Seek Professional Help

Mar20

You can argue, you can justify, and you can complain all you want, but you can’t escape the truth. Your novel needs professional help! You may be the most talented writer in the world, but at some point someone else has to look at your book and tell you what needs work.

Yep, try as we may, we are not impartial judges of our own writing. How can we be? We know the plot and the characters inside and out. We’ve lived with those people and those situations for months, maybe years. Most importantly, we know the details that we may have forgotten to actually write down, and we will fill in the blanks. But when someone else reads that story, they’ll see blanks.

Honestly, I don’t get it. I’ve heard so many writers out there say that they don’t really need an editor or they can’t afford one. That statement makes absolutely no sense to me. No one, and I mean no one, is that good. Everyone needs an outside opinion in order to see the forest through the trees and to produce the best work possible.

Okay, so how exactly do you work with an editor? How do you handle all that criticism and still find the will to carry on and rewrite what you’ve already poured your heart and soul into … again?

If you’re like me, the first time you sent a novel off into the hands of a professional editor you did it while quaking in your boots. I was so afraid my editor, Alison, would trash it. I was sick for a week thinking that she would tell me my writing was horrible and that I should stick to my day job. It was terrifying.

Guess what? A good editor won’t tear you down. A good editor is there to help build you up. When I got that first edit letter from Alison it restored my faith in my own ability to pen a good story … even though it consisted of 14 pages of things I’d done wrong. A good editor will point out the flaws in your story while making you super excited to get to work on fixing them.

But how? How do you fix what isn’t working?

Well, just like the process of revising your first draft is all about honesty, the process of putting editorial suggestions into action is to listen. Drop all of your preconceived notions about how you are going to be the next bestselling author and really listen to the points your editor is bringing up. Is she telling you that your character’s motivation doesn’t ring true? Is she saying that the story lags in the middle? Listen to that. It’s better to hear it from an editor at this point of the process than it is to see it in a review down the line. Because at this point you can do something about it.

A good editor will come armed with suggestions. My favorite part about working with Alison has been that she comes armed with questions. What if the hero doesn’t show up in time to rescue the heroine? What if that minor character was actually in love with the hero? What if the hero went back to his old life? Those are all actual suggestions Alison made about my various novels.

You know what? She was right. Did it mean rewriting large chunks of my novels? Are you kidding? I rewrote the entire middle section of The Courageous Heart based on a few of Alison’s suggestions! Was it tedious? Yep. Did it make the novel better? A thousand times better!

Working with an editor is a collaborative process. You’re the writer, ultimately you have the final say, but a good editor is an idea machine that you can tap for days. It’s not cheating, it’s not betraying your own creative process, it’s called working with an editor and making changes. And it feels so good when you come up with a better twist than you had before, even if you have to go back and start the revision process again to do it.

But you have to listen. There is no place for ego in working with an editor.

Okay, so I’ve talked all this time about working with an editor, but there is actually an alternative. And I’m a very recent convert to this alternative. I only mention it with the gravest of caveats. Not everyone can settle for this alternative and you personally aren’t the one who can make the call on whether this option alone is right for you.

Let’s talk about beta-readers. Beta-readers are like lovely mini editors. They are the people you give your novel to for an opinion. Yes, in some cases you can rely on beta-readers instead of editors to help you through this phase of revisions. I cringe as I say that, because I just know someone out there is going to assume that they’re off the hook and that they don’t really need to hire a professional.

Some people in certain circumstances will do fine having their novel edited by beta-readers alone. Which people? Those who have worked with an editor before and have proven their skills and been given the okay by a professional. Who should they ask to beta-read their books? Trusted, proven author-friends who know what they’re doing and who are not afraid to point out the broccoli in your teeth. That or friends or family members who are avid readers.

I recently read that Eloisa James has her sister read everything she writes early on (just like I have my sister-in-law/best friend read everything I write). I know of a couple of NYT bestsellers who are buddies and swap manuscripts. I was asked by an awesome writer friend who just landed an agent to beta-read her first novel (and I hope this second one too eventually – hint, hint) and I’m about to give her my latest. Can I put the two of us in the same category as NYT bestsellers? Absolutely! Because we’re both going to hold that title someday, aren’t we.

So embrace the edits, folks! Seek out the opinion of trusted professionals. Foster those relationships and make them last. You want to publish the best book possible, right? It starts with listening to the opinion of those who are in a position to know what the best looks like and to follow their advice. Because once you’ve done everything you can to make your novel the best it can be, it’s time to put it out there in the world.

2013 Book #8 – Seduced by a Pirate, by Eloisa James

Feb24

Switching gears entirely from the last book…. Seduced by a Pirate, by Eloisa James! You’ve gotta love a title like that. I broke my teeth in the romance world by reading pirate romance novels, so this was a blast from the past for me. Except that I don’t remember the characters in the novels back then being quite like this.

First off, Seduced by a Pirate was a novella. Now, I’m not as familiar with the novella format, but it seems to be growing in popularity by leaps and bounds. A lot of authors, like Eloisa James, are putting out novellas in e-format only as a companion to a larger novel. Seduced by a Pirate is the companion novella to The Ugly Duchess. I think this is sort of a cool idea, and in fact it’s made me want to write a few novellas for my Noble Hearts series to cover some of the events that happen after The Courageous Heart ends.

But I digress.

Novellas are, as I understand it, 40,000 words or less. Whoa. That’s actually a huge challenge for someone who writes the way I do. The trick to a novella is to dilute all of the action of a full plot into a compact story. That includes the full character arc and all of the backstory. I get the impression that people think novellas are easier to write than novels, but actually, I think they must be harder. There are so many balls to keep in the air in a short period of time.

Eloisa James handles the balls expertly. Yes I said that. In particular, she incorporates some pretty complex backstory into the action of the present. In fact, the backstory is the plot motivator, you could say. But she doesn’t ever just spill it all out on the page. She weaves it into the misunderstandings of the present.

Here’s what I mean….

Our hero, Griffin, the notorious pirate captain of the Flying Poppy, a ship he named after his wife, returns to land after 14 years to hang up his pirate hat because he’s been injured and knows he’d be dead in six months if he kept pirating. So he goes home to his wife, who he hasn’t seen since their wedding night. Why hasn’t he seen her since their wedding night? Because that night he, a skinny and nervous lad of 17, was freaked the heck out by his older and more sophisticated wife of 20 who tore off her own clothes and bid him to “have at!”. 17-year old Griffin did not rise to the challenge and jumped out the window to flee in terror. He went to the local pub and got ragingly drunk … and was pressed into service on the sea. Not only has he not been home in 14 years, he doesn’t even remember his wife’s name correctly. It’s Phoebe, not Poppy. Oh, and when he arrives home his wife has three children.

Phoebe was devastated when her young groom ditched her on her wedding night. She believed that he didn’t want to be married to her because she was middle-class (though rich) and he was a lord. For 14 years she’s been receiving the monetary results of his piracy, but believes he doesn’t want anything to do with her. She suffered alone for 7 years, then put her big-girl panties on and made a life for herself. Yes, she has three children, but I don’t want to give away how she got them, because that’s one of the big questions at the heart of the novella.

So right out of the gate you have two people who already have a connection, the problems are laid out in simple elegance, and all that’s left is to untangle the knot. Of course, Griffin isn’t a skinny, nervous 17-year old anymore, and Phoebe takes one look at him, and he takes one look at her, and out pops the insta-lust. Usually I roll my eyes at insta-lust, but Eloisa sets it up perfectly with just enough detail about the character of these two people to make it credible. And as you would expect, the course of true lust never does run smooth.

I think the key to writing an effective novella and making things like insta-lust and heavy backstory – things that usually drag a novel down – work is to set things up just so. Every detail has to fit perfectly and serve a purpose. Novellas, like a Regency virgin, have to be tight. (Sorry, I had to)

I’d actually be interested to hear from anyone who has written novellas or who likes to read them particularly to hear your take on the form. Like I said, I have two novellas in mind that take place after The Courageous Heart that I’d like to write, and a few that take place in between books in my forthcoming A Duke and A Pirate series.

Next up, an actual paper-bound book that a friend from church gave me, Welcome to Temptation, by Jennifer Cruise. Yes, a fellow parishioner gave me a book called Welcome to Temptation to read. It’s a progressive church.

Writing With “What If?”

Jan30

So last week I read Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card for the first time and loved it. As I mentioned in my review on Sunday, it was one of the best character books I’ve ever read. Card is just so good at creating characters with depth and emotion and breathing life into them. So yes, it is possible for a Romance writer to learn about the craft of characters through reading Science Fiction.

But there was another aspect to Ender’s Game that proved to be invaluable to my writing craft: the introduction. I was lucky in that the version of the book that I read had a long introduction by Card that talked about how he came up with the story and characters of Ender’s Game and the response that he has received to the book.

I love reading writers’ stories of how they engage in their craft, be it Stephen King’s On Writing or C.S. Forester’s book that he wrote about his experience of penning the Horatio Hornblower novels. So of course I devoured Card’s introduction eagerly. And I recommend that any time a writer includes an introduction with their book, anyone calling themselves a writer on any level should read it and take note.

What struck me the most about Card’s explanation of how he came up with the idea for Ender’s Game is his use of the question “What if?”. As Card explains, he was a major fan of Asimov as a youngster and devoured all of his books. He knew all along he wanted to write, but he grew (and apparently grows) increasingly impatient with authors who are only trying to recycle Asimov or Tolkien, retelling the same story with different characters and settings. This is not, he says, the point of writing.

Card came to the idea of Ender’s Game by focusing on tiny aspects of Asimov’s work and asking “What if x, y, or z had happened differently?” This seems so simple, and yet it forms the basis of all really great writing.

We have to start with the assumption that there are no original stories. At the same time, we can’t be like those writers Card loses patience with who tell the same story over and over. The key is to take some well-known aspect of a genre or a particular story and riff on the idea of “What if this happened instead?”

I think that the Romance genre is ripe for this kind of riffing. In Romance we’re working with a known set of parameters. In order to be defined as Romance the story must be about the development of the relationship between the hero and heroine and the hero and heroine must get together at the end with an emotionally satisfying conclusion. Anything else and it’s not Romance.

You might think that those parameters preclude any originality of thought, but I definitely don’t believe that. Romance is criticized because everyone knows going into it that they hero and heroine will end up together in the end. Yes they will. But it’s how they get there that truly matters, and there are a thousand different ways to reach an HEA.

I am particularly fond of this idea of “what if?” because that’s what launched my career as a writer. I’m grateful to Card for talking about it openly, because I’ve received a wee bit of criticism for my what-if-ing. My first novel, The Loyal Heart, has been compared favorably and unfavorably to the Robin Hood legend. That was both deliberate and unintentional.

The Loyal Heart started with two big What If’s. The first was “What if the Robin Hood story were told with the actual history of the time period instead of the propagandized version that most people think they know?” The second What If was “What if the heroine fell in love with the bad guy?” The first question was a direct riff on Robin Hood, the second was a riff on just about every one of the many Romance novels I’ve ever read.

Incidentally, The Faithful Heart started with the What If of “What if the goofy side-kick had to man-up and be a hero?” and The Courageous Heart began with “What if you woke up one day and realized you were an asshole who had ruined everyone’s lives?”

I know of a few people who encourage writers to begin their query letter for a given novel with that What If question. I’m not actually in favor with that, but I am in favor of beginning the whole novel-writing process by asking “What if?” When you hit the ground running, when you start the whole thing with a question that you are burning to find out, you’re going to have an easier writing experience. You’re going to go places that you wouldn’t otherwise have thought to go. Most importantly, you’re going to have a good time doing it.

Asking questions leads you to answers. Asking “What if?” leads you to realms of imagination that will keep you busy for weeks asking and answering even more questions. The beauty of it all is that no two people will come up with the same answers. Card could start with Asimov and ask “what if?” to take him to someplace entirely new.

I personally think that just because you start with a known story, like Robin Hood, “what if” will quickly take you out of the known and into the unknown, into the original and personal. I’ve been asking myself “What if Sarah didn’t remember the words to the poem at the end of Labyrinth and lost the bet with the Goblin King?” since I was a pre-teen. I’ve got a whole fantasy world of spells and tricks that has nothing remotely to do with Labyrinth now. There are a million ways you can answer a single question about a single story.

So thank you, Orson Scott Card, for helping me to see that daydreaming about someone else’s story is not only okay, it can lead to a whole world. Anything is possible when you ask “What if?”

What are your favorite “what if?” ideas? Are there any stories you’ve told or would like to tell that started with “what if?”

2012 Year in Review

Dec31

As a Historian, I’m always a sucker for those year in review things that people do at the closing of each year. And since 2012 was an exceptionally eventful year for me, here’s my own personal version. And so I give you, 2012, a year I will be happy to see the back of!

January started out deceptively quiet. Not too much going on. But 2012 hit me upside the head with a brick on February 1st at 9:15 am when the company I work for did layoffs. And since I’m not allowed to talk about that or the mess of incriminations and back-stabbing by coworkers that happened later in February and in March because they now spy on my blog from time to time…. Heh heh heh….

Moving right along.

After all that I still had a job, but things were about to get a lot worse. Worse? Really? Yes.

My goofy, vibrant brother Kelly

My older brother Brian Kelly Farmer passed away very suddenly of cancer in early May. We got the call in mid-April that he had been diagnosed, and once we were told how bad it was, my younger brother Stewart and I rushed out to Ohio to be with Kelly. Well, what we discovered was not only a brother suddenly dying, but a family in dire distress. I’m not sure I can even talk about the week of pure insanity – literally – that we experienced. Between my mentally ill sister-in-law making poor medical decisions on my brother’s behalf, Kelly’s obvious pain and eventual decline into a coma, and my beautiful and brilliant but also belligerent 16 year old niece and a trip that ended with my sister-in-law threatening to call the cops on me if I didn’t leave my brother’s house where I had been taking care of my niece and nephew for a week … it was bad.

I still don’t think I’ve recovered from that nightmare. I may never recover. But things did start to look up again. I had a book to write.

First, in June I published Our Little Secrets, which I had worked on and finished way back in January before things got crazy. I had started The Courageous Heart early in the year too, but I had stopped when the rollercoaster ride began. By June I knew my deadline with my editor was looming and I had to get serious about writing. So I went into a focus mode the likes of which I have never seen. I was diligent about writing the first draft of that book. I have never worked so hard in my life. But lo and behold, I pulled it out by the end of July. And it was terrible. But there were still revisions to do.

Then came my personal high moment for the year – out of nowhere, I might add. On a whim I decided to offer The Loyal Heart for free for my birthday. Long story short, about two weeks later I had had over 50,000 copies of the book downloaded! And I proceeded to sell more when it went back to regular price and to sell several copies of the sequel, The Faithful Heart. Huzzah!

Add to that the fact that my brother Stewart FINALLY proposed to his girlfriend, my best friend, Kristine, on June 23rd, and the summer was pretty good.

Of course, my awful car threw a spanner in the works in September by breaking down and costing me $3000 to replace the transmission. And then two and a half weeks later it wouldn’t start and I had to spend another $300 on starter sensors or whatever that was. And two weeks or so after that it had another issue, although I can’t remember exactly what that one was, just that it cost me. Throw into that a car-induced incident in October that was one of my major low points for the year but that I won’t talk about because it’s still too painful that involved a family member I thought was close MAJORLY letting me down and showing their true colors….

But the end of the year was redeemed by preparations for Stewart and Kristine’s wedding. The wedding was just this past weekend, on Saturday the 29th, and it was fantastic! Kristine was beautiful, Stewart was awesome, and everything went off without a hitch. It really was the best wedding I have ever gone to.

Granted, I hate what I look like in all of the wedding pictures I’ve seen so far and I think that when I smile like that my teeth take over my face and my face looks five times as fat and wide as it actually is, but hey, you can’t win them all.

So that was 2012. Aside from the good book stuff and the wedding, I’m happy to see it go! Too much loss and too much trauma. I am ready for 2013. My horoscope says that things will be much, much better in 2013 because of something having to do with where Jupiter will be and the fact that Pluto is no longer conjuncted with something? All I know is that I could use a break. I’m supposed to have romance in 2013 too. Okay, I could deal with that, although I have the worst romantic luck in the history of the universe. But we’ll see.

Here’s to 2013! May it be full of new beginnings and easier times.

Merry Farmer

An Historical Romance