ne of my most shocking discoveries is how much writing from a character’s viewpoint warps the story.  See, the problem is that every character out there thinks that he’s the good guy (or girl).  And so when you write from her point of view, it’s hard not to make that person likable.  In fact, it’s nearly darned impossible.  The end result is that choosing to show a person’s viewpoint may shift the story–subtly or not so subtly–away from its intended axis.

I had one planned scene from the point of view of the antagonist’s sister.  I hadn’t wanted to stick the viewpoint in the antagonist’s head; I already knew it would make him look a little too likable.  What I hadn’t expected was that the sister would take over the scene.  It started oh-so-innocently, and it was a familiar story.  Widowed sister.  Quiet.  Dresses in black.  Fiercely loyal to her brother, who it turns out is a few years younger.  Wants only the best for him.
And then–and then–and then!  The next thing I knew, she was a real character, and she just wouldn’t spout the normal lines that I wanted her to spout.

Yes, I realize that I am in complete control of her.  But the truth was, when I found myself resisting delivery of her lines, it was for a reason.  She was boring as I’d written her, and I don’t like writing boring characters.  I can write about them, but by God, nobody cares about the viewpoint of a widow who’s fiercely loyal to her brother.  Fierce loyalty is fine as a motivation for a character you never get inside.  But the truth is, nobody’s motivated solely by fierce loyalty.  And why is she so fiercely loyal?  So he’s her brother.  But he’s also the Viscount.  Why can’t he look out for himself?

And what is it that she wants for herself?  The story I was trying to tell morphed drastically as I was staring up into space.  It wasn’t writer’s block, you know.  It was grappling for narrative sense.  The two aren’t the same.  Sometimes, if you’re blocked, it’s because you know better than to write what you think you need to write.  It’s not that your muse abandons you;  usually, it’s that you’ve abandoned your muse and have started walking down the wrong path.  Your muse is somewhere back on the trail, gesturing impatiently.  “This way,” she’s saying.  “THIS WAY, you dolt.”

So here we have Amelia.  She’s talking with her brother, and thinking about what she’s doing, and why.  She’s already dropped a hint as to what she wants–she wants to have a little more time to herself, so she can spend afternoons and evenings with the Ladies’ Beneficial Tea Society.  I have no idea where the conversation is going, or why Amelia cares about the Ladies’ Beneficial Tea Society, a do-gooders group.  Isn’t she tired of taking care of people?  I would be.

And so, out of the blue, Amelia thinks one word.  “Leather, thought Amelia.”  I write this on the page and stare.  And then:  “That’s what she’d ask her seamstress to create.  A gown made entirely of leather.  If she bribed her brother’s valet, perhaps she could make it gleam like her brother’s Hessians.  The Ladies’ Beneficial Tea Society would go mad.”  Within the space of a few paragraphs, my antagonist’s sister had metastasized into the real antagonist herself–and not just the antagonist, but a strong, intelligent, and even likable one.  The whole story shifted, and a number of question marks down the line filled in.  And the backstory–which, alas, will never make it into the story–just sort of fluttered down, and I understood everything.
I wonder what would have happened if I’d given her brother the viewpoint.  It’s hard for me to write weak characters.  The inevitable result is that her brother would undoubtedly have had the upper hand in the relationship, and the male head-bashing would have grown in importance.
Truthfully, I like it better this way.  I now have two antagonists: one male, one female.  They’re working at not-quite cross-purposes.  And they work in different ways.

I have far fewer question marks arising.  I’m guessing this is a good thing.  But we’ll see.  I’m not sure how my dominatrix antagonist will play in Peoria.

  went with Eve to the RWA meeting last Saturday.  They told me I should have a “high concept”–a one-sentence description of my book–and a theme.  Themes are apparently things like, “the healing power of love.”  I’ve been reading Stephen King’s “On Writing,” and apparently the theme of Carrie was “blood.”  So there’s a lot of variety available to us all.

I don’t have a one-sentence description of my book, but just for kicks, I’ve written a hook which I’m going to be submitting to Miss Snark.  She doesn’t do romance, so she’ll probably hate me, but what the hell.  I’ll toss up a link to the hook when it goes up, and we can see how I get shredded.
Theme, theme, theme.  My theme is, to put it coarsely, “nobody fucks you up like family.”  Let’s face it.  Love has some healing powers.  So does spit, but that doesn’t mean you want it tossed in your face.  The fact that you love people does not necessarily mean that you will be healed by them.  This is because many of the people you love may themselves be screwed up, and love sometimes just attaches you to the millstone that drags you down to the bottom of the lake.  (Note that I am going to be the Greatest Romance Author Evar with that attitude–yay love!)  But the other half of my theme is about healing.  But it’s not about the healing power of love.  It’s about the healing power of geometry.

I’m still working on high concept.  I think my high concept is, “Geeks kick ass, even in Regency times.”

s I mentioned, I write nonconsecutively.  I’ve now finished:

• The first three chapters
• The first kiss
• The first time they have sex
• And a bit of the epilogue.

All things considered, this is about 25% of the novel.  It’s not 25% of the word count;  knowing how I write, my revision passes will probably increase the word-count by at least 20% or so.  Incidentally, in case you’re curious, this means that about 8% of the novel, so far, is spent on sex and foreplay.
The next thing, I think, to work on is the chapter after the first time they have sex.  It’s a tricky chapter for me to write.  Also, I’ve been having difficulties writing Chapter 4 (hence all that other work on other chapters).  Then I realized:  bingo, it’s because nothing happens in chapter four except:  they meet, and one person doesn’t say anything.  Easy solution:  They don’t meet.  He still doesn’t say anything.  Far superior, and probably advances that storyline more than anything else.

But I’m inordinately proud of myself for having finished a sex scene.  Not that it’s particuarly good, mind you.   But it’s a sex scene, and I wrote it.  I wasn’t sure I could.  There are obvious problems with the scene–she starts off wearing very little clothing–and I’m not even sure the premise is entirely believable.  But some of the unbelievability, I think, stems from the problem of writing regency-set historical romances in the modern day and age.  Here is a comprehensive list of impossibilities in romance novels acceded to by virtually every romance author:

• It’s always good.  She’s a virgin?  There may be a little pain, and a bit of blood.  Luckily, she rides horses, and so…  He’s a virgin?  He’s a natural.  There’s no fumbling, no embarrassing lack of appropriate lubrication (not even in the era before they started manufacturing substitutes), no difficulties finding a rhythm, no premature ejaculation.
• Except if it’s sex with someone not the hero.  Then the sex is bad.
• He’s a rubber octopus.  I don’t know how many times I’ve read about heroes banging the girl at just the right angle, while sucking her nipples, kissing her, and rubbing her clitorus with their fingers.  Don’t these guys need leverage?  Support?  And where do their fingers fit if they’re pounding away so hard?
• Corollary:  direct pressure on the clitorus in a romance novel makes her come.  Instantly.
• Clothing.  It comes off easily.  Nobody ever curses at the bra strap or the stays.  Instead, they press the magic button and everything slips off.  Amazing.
• Exception:  there may be a great many buttons.  If a romance author shows a dress done up with a hundred buttons in the back, it is guaranteed that said dress will lose 20% of those buttons as he shreds it.
• Leverage.  Friction.
• Nobody’s arms ever get tired.  Not even after doing push-ups for hours in a row.
• And then there’s the Lake Wobegon effect for penises.  Everyone’s above average.

I’m totally okay with all that.  Why?  Because it’s fantasy, and the fantasy is that the sex is hot. Nobody wants to read about the small-dicked guy that gets laid despite his poor sexual performance.
Also, it’s really hard to refer to the guy’s penis.  If you’re writing sex, he kinda has to use it.  In the romance vernacular, however, “penis” is usually referred to as “his turgid” something.  His turgid staff.  His turgid rod.  His turgid woman-lover.  You get the idea.  I find the word “turgid” to be every unsexy.  Turgid makes me think “turgid prose.”  Which, um, is often the case as well.  So there are some issues referring to penises.  And vaginas.
Part of what made writing my sex scene so fun, though, is that I really felt it worked with my characters.  I really hate the novels that have beautiful characterization right up until the hero and heroine start macking, at which point you can throw bags over their heads and change them for any two other hot people in the universe.  I’m a big believer in individualized sex.  And so I managed to cook up some foreplay that was more fun to write than anything I’ve done so far in this story.  Does it fly?  I’m not sure.  But maybe, just maybe, it levitates.

rior to starting my Untitled Work of Ornithological Unmarketableness–a bit of a misnomer, now, since it has gone through two tentative titles, one of which sounds like it’s a Houdini self-help book, and the other of which sounds like the fluffy romance it is–so much so, that the title has been given to more than one other book–I read voraciously. I probably went through four, five romance novels a week. And that’s now, during a time period when I have maybe two hours a day for myself.

After I starting writing Ornithology, my desire to read other romance fell through the floor. Don’t get me wrong. I still read Pleasure for Pleasure in the first instant that I got it. But I’m no longer reading to occupy my mind. My mind, when free, naturally shifts to Claire and Gareth. It gets annoyed when I try to shove other romance characters, nowhere near as interesting to me as my own, down its throat. The book has to be damned good to grab my attention.
At the end of Fanlit, I hated Patience and Damien with a passion. I figured it was just long exposure, and since I wrote all of, well, maybe 18,000 words about them, it didn’t seem to bode well. But I’ve now passed the 18,000 word mark in my work in progress, and I can’t get enough of them. I just adore them.
Do my characters ever do anything that surprises me? Well, yes. They’ve ended up being far cleverer than I had imagined. And my initial thought about Gareth just didn’t work. I couldn’t write him the way I imagined. He ended up becoming less methodical and … well, more like me. They’ve both ended up far more proactive than I imagined. The big picture view of things hasn’t changed much, but the details constantly shock me. And sometimes, the details metastasize…
The biggest shock for me came when Claire sat down to breakfast with her father and brother. Originally, it was going to be a simple scene that sets the way for one of the subplots that blossoms into the main plot about three-fourths of the way through the book. And it still is. But suddenly, amidst the bickering, her brother wished that their mother was still around. This scene came out of nowhere–how the mother died, and how everyone around her saw it. About five percent of the scene made it onto the paper, but it’s there, encoded.

At the time I wrote it, my mother was in the hospital. She’d rushed there after the abrupt onset of a life-threatening condition. I had never thought about her as mortal, and truth be told, I hadn’t really yet comprehended what it meant. She’s much recovered now, but it wasn’t until I saw the indelible print that Claire’s mother left on her family–and the wounds her death had inflicted–that I came to grips with my own situation, and really understood what it would mean if my mother died.

There’s a lot of me in what I’m writing. There’s a lot more than I had imagined. My characters can have no fears but my own, transfigured though they may be; no cleverness except what I endow them with; no love except what I experience. I have no life to breathe into my characters except my own. And so writing gives me another excuse to live life fully, that I might have more to breathe.

  write nonconsecutively. I always have, starting with my first FanLit entry. I usually write the beginning. Then I write the end. Then I write a good bit in the middle that I have planned. Gradually, the whole swells.

I haven’t been able to write a whole chapter linearly either. I know what needs to happen, and I skip about like a crazed drop of water on a greased skillet.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I can’t write a book in order, either. It turns out that I wrote chapter 1. And then I wrote what I thought was going to be chapter 17. It turns out, after much plotting, and after much discarding of really stupid ideas (anguish: why oh why did I think that it was good to write a hero who has difficulty talking to women? This leads to crap dialogue), I realized I had really written chapter 7. Okay. So I wrote chapter 2, and then chapter 3. I started writing chapter 4. I know exactly what needs to happen in the chapter.

So why is it that I’m writing chapter 17–something that really is chapter 17–instead? I’ll probably write chapter 9 after this, just for the heck of it. The real problem, of course, is that projecting that far in advance will necessitate more revisions. I do not need to spend more time rewriting. If nothing else, I’ll probably have changed my hero’s last name by the time I slog through another few chapters. In fact, I know I will have done so.

  now have three chapters.  It’s true what they say.  You just have to sit your butt in a chair and write.  Well, it turns out that my butt is nearly always in a chair, but I don’t nearly always have time to write, and often, what I want to do when I don’t have to do other things is stare vacantly into space.

Nonetheless, I have three chapters, amounting to some 14,000 words at present.  This is not counting chapter seventeen, which it turns out, is not chapter seventeen, but will likely be chapter six or seven.

I use the word “finally” a great deal.  This is because I have a number of characters who think for long periods of time before saying anything.  There are a lot of pauses.  Finally–see, I’m doing it!–someone speaks.  Oh dear.

‘m not going to say I don’t write to market. I mean, I do, to some extent. I’m writing historicals set in Great Britain among the upper-class for a reason. Personally, I think that lower-class romances could be seriously fun, especially criminal-class. (If I ever write an alpha-male, he’s going to be some kind of an Upright Man–a mob boss or something.) But I’m well aware that most books focus on the ton, and so that’s what I want to deliver.

But the discussion about what the market requires–wealth, titles–on my previous post got me to thinking about what really does appeal to the masses.

My WIP has a theme. It is, to put it ungrammatically: Live Deep. I think the message is fundamentally incompatible with the rich-as-Croesus Duke. I think that we yearn–I admit that I yearn–for wealth, social status, and continuity all for the same reason. It’s about security, and about settling down. There’s something about settling down to squalor that just doesn’t sit right with romance. You just don’t do it. You don’t end your book with the heroine saying, “Gosh, I’m not sure how we’ll squeak out our mortgage payments, and I don’t think we can fund our retirement by the time we hit seventy-five, let alone sixty, but I love you and I’m gonna go for it, and somehow, we’re going to squeeze kids in here, too.” Even though that’s what the majority of us do. And so the wealthy, titled gentleman glorifies certainty and security. It’s not an accident that this has been the dominant strain: marriage,in general, is about securing future.
Let’s face it: Some themes just wouldn’t fly in today’s romance novel market. For instance, I don’t think I could write a marketable polyamorous novel. No way. Maybe someday, but the theme “you can love more than one person” just won’t fly in today’s mainstream romance market. Likewise, the theme “you can’t get anyone better, so you might as well suck it up” is probably not a huge seller. And some themes which sell in other genres won’t work in romance–things like “life sucks and then you die” and “power corrupts” may be compelling, but let’s face it. We are not Van Gogh and Mahler. We write happy novels.
My theme does not predominate on the market. But I’m not convinced it’s unmarketable. It is, fundamentally, a happy ending. And I do have proof that it can market: Titanic, the movie. The hero is a happy-go-lucky artist. He has no money, and no family to fall back on. She’s engaged to a wealthy man who will provide all the security there can be. But it’s soulless; the wealth of her life is seen at the end of the movie, when you realize that (a) the security the original fiance provided was spurious and (b) that she’s had the opportunity to do everything, and to be someone, that she’d never otherwise have been.
I’d prefer that my hero not die in the end, of course, and since they aren’t likely to be put in life-threatening situations, I think the odds are low. But that’s what I want for my two: I want them to make a partnership, and I want them to say at the ends of their life, “My life would never have been this rich without the other.” It’s not just about sacrifice or giving things up or not giving things up for each other. It’s about finding who you are, and pushing yourself past your limits, because the other person leads you there. In short, it’s about partnership, not marriage.
So I’m writing away from security, rather than towards it. I’m curious how this will turn out.

t turns out my WIP has an incredibly handsome, wealthy alpha-male who falls in love with the heroine.

It also turns out that the alpha-male is not the hero.  Nor a villain.  And I like it.  In fact, I adore it.  I spit in the face of the alpha-male!  Ha ha ha ha ha!

Have I gone mad?

erry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors of all time. Not when he first starts writing. His first few books are amusing and fun and light, and that’s about it. They’re fun to read, and they pass the time without comment.

But at some point–I don’t entirely know exactly when–Discworld went myffic. He’s a hilarious writer–always has been, in that delightfully understated British way. But Pratchett’s jokes–you start off thinking that they’re just funny lines, throwaway comments that won’t come back. He weaves them in so skillfully, you don’t really notice he’s done it. But it turns out that he’s strewn the bones of salvation in his throwaway lines, the ones that are so good you can’t forget them. And then they come back, and they’re still funny, but this time around, they take your breath away.
Take, for instance, the villains of one book:

They were the observers of the operation of the universe, its clerks, its auditors. They saw to it that things spun and rocks fell.

And they believed that for a thing to exist it had to have a position in time and space. Humanity had arrived as a nasty shock. Humanity practically was things that didn’t have a position in time and space, things such as imagination, pity, hope, history, and belief. Take those away and all you had was an ape that fell out of trees a lot.

Intelligent life was, therefore, an anomaly. It made the filing untidy. The Auditors hated things like that. Periodically, they tried to tidy things up a little.

It’s funny. It’s true. And you never know when you read it exactly how much it matters. Structurally, if I had to choose to become any writer, I think I’d want to be Terry Pratchett. Myffic. With, as Nanny Ogg would say, extra myff.

Structurally–I’m not talking about the bits and pieces of grit, like dialogue and description, but overall, structurally–which authors do you admire? Which authors make you feel the resolution of the books, rather than just live through the scenes?

  have written chapter one (mostly). I have also written chapter—um, maybe seventeen. Mostly.

There is a school of thought that says that one shouldn’t revise chapter one until well after one was written chapter two, and likely chapters two, three, four, five and six. And to some extent, I imagine that major revisions will likely wait until I have a full manuscript draft. But I can’t help but feel that this chapter one doesn’t quite do it. There are some bits that are left wanting, and for some reason, I can’t adequately draft on computer. I need to print off a copy and make changes by hand.

Do I ignore the advice of what seems like every author there is and do so? Or do I doggedly do things my way, and continue to spin my wheels on my as-yet incomplete chapter one? I think that I doggedly do things my way.
The other thing is this: I am afraid that in order to do chapter one effectively, I’m going to have to make a few jumps between heads. I am trying to mark out those jumps as explicitly as I can, so that there can be no question about what I’ve done. But will that be horrendously confusing? My other alternatives appear to be:

1. Overlapping times: Start with heroine, until about two minutes after she meets hero; jump to hero’s head, about two minutes before he meets the heroine. This has one jump, but I think that the time-jumping might well be more confusing. And I’m simplifying here; I’d have to head-and-time jump a few times.
2. Don’t let you see what’s going on in the heroine’s head when they both meet. But the problem with that is that what’s going on in her head—or, specifically, the connection between what she’s thinking and what comes out of her mouth—is a major theme.
3. Don’t let you see what’s going on in the hero’s head when they first meet. Again, if I don’t show his initial reaction—and his initial assessment of her—the conflict that crops up the next time they meet will seem rather unbelievable. He thinks she’s something other than what she is, and it’s that initial misapprehension that leads him to talk to her as he does.
4. I can’t solve problem two or three by having the hero and heroine mention their thoughts in the course of conversation. The heroine is acting … not out of character, shall we say, but out of her normal mode of things, and wouldn’t want to give that away. And the hero wouldn’t share anything so personal or embarrassing, particularly when he wouldn’t think it relevant (because of aforementioned mistaken initial assessment).

Other interesting discoveries: I prefer names that start with hard consonants and contain Rs and Ls.