January 2009 Archives

I wonder how some publishers decide which excerpt to provide to the reader.  With romance, it's often a heated moment, right when the characters are about to tumble into temptation... (And of course the excerpt ends before there's any fulfillment.)

I always use the beginning of the story. The first paragraph is often the hook that inspired me to write the story in the first place, and it's an old rule among editors that the first page is the only chance to grab the reader's attention. If it isn't interesting, no one's going to keep reading long enough to get to the juicy parts.

When the excerpt is a juicy part from the middle, I usually lack the context that would make me care about the characters. Sure, it may be hot and I can get drawn in purely on the basis of well-written sexual tension, but just as often I don't see anything unique that I couldn't get from any other book.

I've been testing out text-to-speech software, which (as the name cleverly suggests) reads aloud text on your computer. It's particularly useful for folks who have issues with their vision. I'm using it because I like to read my stories out loud — it gives me a sense of the cadence of each sentence, and lets me catch pesky errors that my eye would otherwise skip over. But as long as I'm the one reading, either aloud or silently, I'm likely to miss the same mistakes.

A program doesn't skip words. Also, I get hoarse easily, which also doesn't happen to a piece of software. And I don't have to feel self-conscious reading aloud the sex scenes. Win!

However, the mechanized voice is a bit annoying. As much as I'd love to have my stories read in a deep, British accent, I'm getting something...less than that. And since I write fantasy, the names I use get mangled. Sometimes I'm so busy flinching at the way a character's name was pronounced that I miss the repeated word that comes right after. So we'll see.

Remember how I write scenes out of order?

It's perplexing to have written the beginning and the end of a story, but not see a clear path between them. I know that's the fun part of it, figuring it all out — that's the story — except in this case the two endpoints seem completely out of sync.

I may have accidentally written the beginning of one story and the end of another.

Descriptions are mandatory in romance. A lot of readers are visual, and they want to be able to see the hunk who merits all this attention from the heroine. So I was surprised to find myself writing a story that dived straight into dialogue, and then tension, without any physical description at all.

This wasn't deliberate; I think I meant to go back and fill in details. But I was a little bored, to be honest; there's a certain set of acceptable bodies for romance heroes, and I didn't want to just regurgitate another one. (I'm also curious as to whether other romance authors default to their own ideal guy's looks, or if they do throw in genuine variety. I know I tend to lean toward physiques I find attractive.)

I think I'm going to let this stand, instead of making those edits the way I planned. I like to think that all the basis for attraction can be found in what they're saying to each other.

I know that common practice is to finish a story and have it critiqued by fellow writers right away, but it seems a waste to me to get people's feedback on a first draft.

I firmly believe that all writers will be able to see where they can improve their work if they shove it in a drawer and forget about it for a few months. (Well, for the first couple of weeks at least, we'll be obsessing about it. But then the next shiny idea should hit us like a cartoon safe from the sky, and we really should get distracted by other things. Possibly the life we neglected during the rush of writing the first draft.) There's no way to look objectively at something you've just crafted; when you have the full force of the process in your short-term memory and each word is weighed on the merit of the blood/sweat/tears sacrifice instead of its value as part of an entire story.

I'm actually not convinced about the usefulness of writing workshops or critique groups, but that's to talk about another day.

Sometimes I'll do something brilliant like stop writing in the middle of a sex scene. Talk about a mood-killer.

Judging from the number of hits I get when searching for advice on writing sex scenes, a lot of people find them difficult. I'm no exception — it's always interesting for me to try to draw on my own experiences, but twist them to the characters. (You probably don't want to read details about my sex life.)

When I do something stupid like stop writing in the middle of a sex scene, I have to re-read what I've read so that there's some continuity — not only in movement and action, but in mood and tone. All the details matter, because I've got to make the sex as unique as possible.

In dialogue, I can pick up the flow immediately because I know what needs to get said, and how the conversation will wind there. There probably won't be another conversation that needs to get the same point across, so I don't have to worry about variety. In sex, we all know the end goal, but if I go straight there that's a bad experience for the characters, for one thing, and also rather boring for the reader. I don't want a sex scene to be just another sex scene; I want it to be that sex scene, the one they remember because it was the furious mating at the base of the staircase.

And to get ready to write that intense staircase sex scene, I do need to be on a different writing wavelength than to write the dreamy first time between the two.

Okay. Off to try to get back into my wine-soaked, passionate on-the-rug sex scene.

An important part about writing romance is to remember that there are other characters besides your fated couple. In some books, this might be a menacing villain, or perhaps two of them will form a secondary romance (often in a sequel). Naturally they won't be as compelling as the hero and heroine, but they still need to stand strong on their own, even in the background.

I become frustrated with romance novels where you only see the two main characters. This can work great as a short story — you know, your classic trapped-in-a-stopped-elevator tales — but over the long-term, you can't provide all your conflict from just those two people. They end up having to have repeated misunderstandings, or stupid hang-ups, or something else groan-inducing. I'd like some external element to intrude, and see how the lovebirds deal with people other than each other.

I've encountered villains so tempting that I wished the girl had gone off with him, instead. That's arguably a failure to make the hero sufficiently interesting, but I have to applaud the author for investing the time in making a credible threat to the romance, one who's not just a paper doll cut-out.

I'm a huge fan of writing in cafés. People to watch, nibble-fare, caffeine, a flat surface upon which to rest your laptop (although I usually lay it on my lap, to be kinder to my wrists) — what more could one want?

How about longer hours? I'm desperate for a 24-hour café where I could wander in at any time of night and feel ensconced in that warm, be-with-others-yet-by-yourself atmosphere. My local place kicks me out around 10 or so, after which only the bars are open, and trust me when I say that beer is not conducive to writing.

One reason I'm simply posting my writing on this site is because in publishing, there's an understandable convention of ending romance stories happily. You want the hot guy to get the girl and for them to settle into a great relationship.

Occasionally, I like my stories a little darker. I want to explore that edge of sex that happens between when all is not well, but lust rises relentlessly; when people make choices because they're drawn away from what they should do, to what they want. And sometimes it won't just work out, the way things magically tend to do in romance.

That said, not all of my stories are going to end on a pensive note. But there are some tales that should be told without forcing the characters into an unrealistically chirpy resolution.

This is somewhat related, I think, to the way I write non-linearly. I confess that writerly fidelity isn't a strong point of mine, either. I almost always have multiple writing projects in progress at once.

This means that when I get stuck on one, I just open a different file and start working on something else. It lets me maintain momentum while giving my brain a chance to rest from one particular story (and hopefully madly cogitate on it in the back part of my skull.) I keep all of my in-progress works in one directory on my computer, so I can just browse that folder and decide what I feel like that day from a glance.

Something I find particularly helpful is having works of different lengths. This tends to necessitate a different pacing as well, something I get weary of much more quickly than, say, the same genre or theme.

One of my heaters decided to die, and it's cold enough that my fingers are almost too stiff to type.

I'd try writing longhand, since I can at least hold a pen when I'm wearing gloves (typing becomes problematic when your fingers are covered with a layer of yarn), except that I've long since given up on writing out stories. I don't mind that it's slower — I don't think up my stories at a fast enough pace that this would be a problem. It's the revision process that I find annoying. I've never held to the advice of writing a complete rough draft without edits, and I'm constantly tinkering with my phrasing. Also, the non-linear way of writing? It's hard to leave the right number of blank pages between scenes, whereas my word processor is more accommodating. Not sure I'll get much more written tonight. Tea is called for.

I started two new stories; snippets are up:

http://karalynnlee.com/fragments.phtml

It's tempting to post words as soon as I've written them. But that would be unfair; sometimes I think of a better way to write them the next day, and I'd feel sheepish slinking back to the site to publicly admit that I hadn't expressed myself perfectly the first time.

Also, I don't write a story sequentially from beginning to end. If I have a general sense of the trajectory of the plot, then I'll write up different parts of it. (This lets me skip straight to — or over, depending on my mood — the sex scenes.) I can only imagine how confusing it would be to read unordered snippets — like tearing out the pages from a novel, throwing them in the air, collecting them again, and then reading them.

The Fragments page on my site is a sort of compromise: it's my way of proving that I'm working on something, but I only post the beginning, which should be more or less static.