I really love my sheikh but honestly, in the process of rewriting Mr Sheikhypants, he and the wretched heroine decided to go to a place I was NOT comfortable with. And no, it wasn’t Huntly (though they do go into the desert, which is also not comfortable). It skated close to a line that pushes all sorts of hot buttons and to be honest, I REALLY didn’t want to write it.

Which meant, of course, that I HAD to.

I’m always of the opinion that if it’s scary to write and you don’t want to go there, then you have to write it.  Believe me, the times I haven’t gone there and pulled the characters back, have been the times when the story gets derailed. It becomes mediocre and flat. Because you can’t trick your characters. They want what they want and if they don’t get it, they get pissy with you and just lay there like cardboard cutouts.

So, I anyway, I wrote the scene they wanted. And it was intense. And I’m scared to death of keeping it in because it could be a rejectionable offence. But it could also be the scene that sells the book. Oh and also, if I take it out, their whole relationship falls apart since they needed that scene to happen in order to fall in love.

This is why pushing those boundaries they’re always talking about is hard. Because you don’t know which side of the boundary you’re standing on and it could be the wrong one. But it’s also why you have to write those kinds of scenes and not pull back. Those scenes are the ones that can be the most emotional, the most wrenching, the ones that take your book from being ‘okay’ to ‘unputdownable’. They’re not easy scenes to write and they shouldn’t be. The best ones never are.

Of course, I don’t know what side of the boundary I’m on but I do know that the scene was intensely emotional and I cried  while writing it so at least that’s one person who likes it.

So I’m going to advise you to write the uncomfortable scene. If your characters want to go where you’re afraid to take them, take them anyway and don’t pull back. Ignore the voices that are telling you the hero/heroine can’t do that, that it’s not PC, that it’s not sympathetic. Just write it, push it as far as you can. Then see what you have. Pulling back is easier than ramping up and if you don’t go as far as you can, then you don’t know how far it actually needs to go.

It’s scary but it’s worth it.

So have you ever had characters do something that scares you? Did you let them do it?

Anyway, my excuse for this slackness is due to finishing Mr Sheikhypants. Which I now have. Yay. Of course it does mean that now I have to write the synopsis. Not yay. Synopses and I do not get on. I’d far rather immerse myself in my new idea. Because yeah, now the sheikh is done, I have to put him away and think about the next story, and in the interests of staying ahead of rejections, I’m going ahead with a new Presents/Modern.

This new idea has come together rather different to anything I’ve done before and I think it’s a good thing. Instead of coming up with a set up and charging straight into it, I’ve actually taken the time to think about it before I start writing. Isane, right? I’ve decided to do a marriage of convenience story since I haven’t done one before and they’re always popular, with an enemies to lovers slant on it. But it isn’t really the trope that’s the important bit. It’s the characters that matter most. And this time I’ve actually tried to think about who they are as people first, before I decided on their conflict.

What I find interesting about this process for me now is that it feels like the characters come together in a much more organic way rather than merely being a collection of traits and conflicts stuck together. And now I know what type of people they are, I can look back over their pasts and see what their conflict might be and how it has shaped them. All of this without writing a word of the story.

However, this is going to be a tricky story. My hero has a very dark conflict, though actually, that’s not the tricky part. The tricky part is thinking of a good reason for a marriage of convenience! Anyone read any good MOC stories lately? Was the reason for the MOC plausible?? Any hints gratefully recieved…

Angry, fighty scenes are all yummy and angsty and delicious but if there’s too many of them, you start to wonder why these two people are together if they hate each other so much and/or you just know their HEA is going to last all of five seconds. That, people, is not a romance. That is a soap opera.

Now, I’m not dissing soap operas here but if you want to write a good romance, you can’t have fights and angst all the time. You have to have some moments where the characters love being together. When they make that all important emotional connection that tells the reader that these two are made for each other and when they sort out their issues, they will be together forever. And not in a ‘eat every meal in total silence cos they can’t think of anything to say to each other’ kind of way, but a ‘still having lots of nookie way into their 80s’ kind of way.

Anyway, the reason I’ve been thinking about this is because I’ve hauled out my chess ms with the idea of submitting in a contest and am wrestling with the beginning of it. I’ve rewritten the first three chapters of this wretched thing 50 million times already and it still isn’t right. Why? Because it’s a one night stand story and I just have NOT been able to nail down the emotional connection. When you find yourself writing paragraphs of justification and reasons for the heroine to sleep with the hero, you know something isn’t going right. In fact, I figured that if couldn’t write down her motivation in one sentence then I needed to stop writing until I could!

Now, I reckon emotional ONS stories are very difficult to get right. It’s easy to get them to have the sex but to get two complete strangers to connect on an emotional level? Nup. Because what has to happen, in order to get that emotional connection going, is that both your characters have to drop – at least momentarily – their armour and be who they truly are with each other. You know that Michael Hauge thing about essence and identity? That essentially characters hide who they truly are behind a mask? What I mean is that in order for them to connect, each of them has to drop that mask. But because a ONS happens usually at the beginning of the book, it’s actually very difficult for them to do that because as far they’re concerned, they don’t wear a mask. Their identity IS their true self (and I’m not talking dropping it all the way, I’m talking glimpses here. Flashes that intrigue and fascinate the other character enough that their emotions are engaged). Grrrr!

The other thing you have to get right in order to get that emotional connection is motivation. There is debate about whether guys need less motivation – it probably depends on the hero – but like it or not, the heroine has to have it (I know, I know, double standards). And it has to stem from something emotional, something to do with her conflict, because otherwise it’ll end up being ‘woohoo, sex!’ which isn’t bad if you’re writing for Blaze. But it is if you’re writing for some of the other categories (and hey, I know, I’ve got the Rs to prove it).

The reason this particular story has been difficult is partly because of the type of people my hero and heroine are, and partly because earlier, I didn’t actually know them well enough. I knew their identities, but not the people they were inside. And without knowing that, I couldn’t get them to connect on a deeper level. It was a bit like I’d taken two random strangers, put them in a room together and told them that they were hot for each other and could they make love now please. So not happening in other words.
It didn’t help that my hero is not wanting sex at this particular time in his life and he’s also EXTREMELY guarded so getting him to drop his mask for a bit (not to mention his trousers) was very, very difficult. Weird, I know. I eventually had to change the setup so he met the heroine at a moment in his life where those guards were perhaps lower than they would be normally. And then, because he wasn’t into casual sex at that particular moment, I had to figure out what it was about the heroine in particular that affected him because mere sexual attraction was not enough for him (yes, he’s a pain in the butt). But in order to know those things, I had to know him.

All in all, it was a very tricky business and no wonder I had difficulties at the start. Because what I was trying to do was make two people who would walk through boiling lava rather than admit to an emotional connection, have a bloody emotional connection!

But then isn’t that what makes writing fun? Making our characters worst nightmares come true in the nicest possible way.

So, what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever made your characters do? And when I mean, ‘you made’ I mean that they did it themselves because of course you would never, ever, make your characters do anything…

But before all that, I need to start contemplating the essence of my hero in the story I am going to pitch Lucy Gilmour. Why? Well, at our most recent chapter group meeting, the very wonderful Sandra Hyatt gave us a talk about the Micheal Hague workshop she did and part of it really resonated with me.

Our characters wear two faces – the face they show to the world, and the face they keep to themselves. The face they show to the world is their identity, the face they keep to themselves is their essence (the people they truly are). Now in the story, the characters should conflict at the level of identity, but they should connect at the level of essence.

I thought that was a very simple way of making sure there is conflict in a story, but also some real romance. Because it’s the moments where the two characters connect that show the reader that these two are meant for each other. Of course what it means is that I need to figure out who my characters actually are, as opposed to the face they show to the real world. Tricky. I know the faces they show to the world but working backwards to find their essence is another thing.

Anyone have some handy tips??

BTW, a big shout-out to my chapter-mate Louise George who has recently sold to Medicals!! Awesome, Louise!! Her first book is out in March!

What do I mean? Well, for example, whenever I am introducing a bit of conflict and find myself writing the same thing over and over again without really capturing what it is I want to get across, it’s usually because I don’t know what it is I’m trying to say! A specific example may be: ‘He reminded her of her parents. Their lies, their judgements, the way they made her feel small’.
This does tell you something about her conflict. She had issues with her parents, they lied and judged her and made her feel small. But there are some questions unanswered: what did he do to make her think of her parents? What lies did her parents tell and did they tell them to her or to each other? What about their judgements? Did they judge her or each other? And what made her feel small? The lies or the judgements or both? And why did that make her feel small?
Obviously you don’t answer all those questions immediately, they are revealed as the book goes along, but what you have to do as a writer is know the answers to the questions. And what I think really builds the characters, and what I have NOT been doing, is having an example to illustrate the answer.

So if her parents had lied to her, thinking about a specific lie at a specific time by a specific person, can tell you so much more about a character and their conflict that some vague generalisations. Example: When she was ten, her beloved cat went missing and her mother told her that the animal ran away from home. However that night, when she was supposed to be a asleep, she got up to get a glass of water and spotted her father in the backgarden digging a hole, her cat lying dead on the grass next to it.
Doesn’t that tell us so much more about her and her parents and their relationship? And also gives us insight into the motivations of her parents too. It tells us she had a pet she loved. That her mother lied (to protect her maybe?) to her about what happened to it. That her father was in on it. And that by burying it at night when they knew she was alseep, they were trying to hide the cat’s death from her. Perhaps this is a terrible moment for the heroine. Perhaps finding out that her parents are not always truthful causes her to subconsciously be suspicious of anything they might say. What is certain is that it gives us more information than ‘her reminded her of her parents. Their lies, their judgements….etc’.

It’s those little snapshots of pivotal moments in the characters lives that really – for me at least – build up a great picture of who that person is and what in their past might had led them to think the way they do. Of course, what I’m missing from that example and what it is just as important as the situation itself, is how the heroine acts in response to it. Did she not say anything to her parents about her cat or did she confront them?

So what helps you build character? Anyone got any useful examples?

Anyway, got some great thinking time in. Have come to the conclusion that I need to change my process. Yep, the way I write has been great for twenty years but if I want to write something for publication, I need to do things differently. Not radically so, I hasten to add. I’m still a pantser at heart and probably always will be. But the thing I need to do is concentrate on my characters before I begin to write. Normally I have a scene in mind and I dive right in, only to come up against the ‘what would he/she/it do now?’. And I stop right there because I don’t know my characters well enough to know what they would do. For months I’ve been thinking that it’s the conflict I haven’t sorted but it’s not, it’s the characters. I know who they are in the present – when the story starts – but I don’t know their pasts, what made them the people that they are. And when you’re writing character driven stories, you kind of need to know those details.

The ways you can get to know your characters are many and varied – character sheets and interviews and writing out scenes from their lives – but I’ve tried them before and they’ve never actually worked for me. Thinking does though. When I’m in the shower or folding the washing or just tidying up, I’ve found that thinking about my characters, their childhoods, their relationships with others, the kind of people they are, really works. For example, I’m rewriting a story I wrote two years ago but the conflict never gelled and neither did the characters. But I spent a lot of Easter thinking about the hero and heroine, trying to figure out what their conflict was and whether it fitted with who they were at the beginning of the book. Normally once I’d got one aspect right, I’d quickly whip onto the pc and start writing. But I couldn’t this time round and it’s a good thing, because I thought I had it all sorted and then realised I hadn’t considered another aspect of their backstory which then didn’t fit with the actual premise of the book. Sigh.

I don’t find this easy. I’m a very impatient sort. I want to get to the good stuff, the real, emotionally wrenching stuff. I love the torture and the black moments. The joy and despair. I don’t want to write the set-up and introduce the characters and their conflict. But of course that part is almost the most important part of it because if you don’t do it properly, how are your readers ever going to be invested in these characters? How are they ever going to care about what happens to them and their story if they’re not fully realised people?

Dr Jax has a great saying that he is fond of when he’s building or preparing something:
“It’s not a Rolls Royce.” This basically means not to sweat the details, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

I’ve always really liked this saying – it suits my impatient personality. But I think that if I want my stories to be good ones, I’m going to have to change my thinking around them because when it comes to writing, the details do matter. And when it comes down to it, I want to write Rolls Royces not Daihatsu Miras.

Anyone else ever changed their process? Did it work for you?

Easiest thing in the world. Not.

So, the problem of my heroine was this – I kind of knew bits of her, but there was an element that I was missing that would have solidified her on the page and in my head. Do you know what I mean? It’s hard to describe. But the essence was that I realised that all she was doing was reacting to the hero. He’d do something, she’d react. And the problem with that is she wasn’t actually taking charge of the plot. It was all being driven by him. Why by him? It’s not just because he’s an alpha. It’s because I knew him. I know what he’d do in a situation, I know his conflict, I know his feelings about things. And so because I didn’t really know her, he was taking over, the dear, sweet, darling man (yeah, baby, it’s all about the hero).

Now, normally when this happens, I push through and finish the thing and then go back and fix the problem, but this time I figured I really had to stop and do something about my heroine. My black moment wasn’t going to work, let alone the HEA, if I didn’t know who the hell she was. So I had to figure her out which – as you all know – is not easy.

After much hair pulling, I think the reason why I couldn’t get a handle on her is that my initial idea of her was actually too difficult pull off. She was a drifter, someone without any idea of what she wanted to do. She was goalless. The problem with a heroine like that is if she doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life or what she wants, then neither does the reader. And that’s not particularly aspirational or sympathetic. It also plays merry hell with the pace. I’m not saying you can’t have a character like this, it’s just hard work. And God knows, getting this stuff right is hard enough without giving yourself a difficult character to pull off. Keep it simple stupid.

So, figuring out characters… For me, I have write the whole first draft before I know them. Character interviews, all that kind of stuff doesn’t work. It’s not until I’m writing that I figure it out. Oh and discussing ideas with the CPs helps a treat too. And all it’ll take for me is one suggestion and then suddenly it’ll come right (like it did in this instance).

What about you guys? How do you figure out yours? Do you have to write the whole thing first and get to know them as you go along? Or do you know everything before you write?

Oh and my heroine? Yep, figured her out finally. She’s a passionate artist who draws graphic novels. And no, they are NOT cartoons…

And I am moving right along to a little epiphany I had while having coffee with an awesome writing friend last week. There I was, moaning about my R and generally having a good vent, and the conversation moved on – as it does with writers – to our latest WIPs. Well, I don’t know about you but I could bore for New Zealand on the subject of my WIP. My poor friend probably couldn’t get a word in edgeways about hers, I was too busy hogging the conversation with mine. Anyway, I digress…

This is my chess player WIP I’m talking about and it’s a holiday fling/unexpected baby story. Now, the problem with these is that in order for the baby to happen you have to get the h&h together early (duh). And I could not get my h&h together. Lots of sexual tension but they just weren’t feeling it – she wasn’t feeling it actually. So my friend asked me a very sensible question. “Why would she sleep with him?” Simple huh? And you know what? All I could think of was ‘because he’s hot’. Can anyone see the dreaded ‘sex without emotion’ trap opening up to swallow me??

So, what I had to do was to think of a reason she would sleep with him. Why him, out of all the other hot guys in the world? Why is he the one who really floats her boat? What is it about him? And in thinking about this guy, I suddenly realised a problem that I have got into in the past year or so. I couldn’t think of why the heroine would sleep with this guy because I hadn’t defined him enough. He was hot, he was cerebral, he liked playing chess but that was about it. And that wasn’t enough to make him special to the heroine.

And this is my problem. I’ve learned a lot of craft in the past year and to be honest, sometimes it paralyzes me. I’ve got my conflict simmering away in the back of my mind because I’m now deciding this before I write, and when I’m writing that vital first chapter I’m thinking ‘now, here’s this character’s conflict, how does that make him the person he is today? How does he act? What does he think?’. So off I go, writing away, and then I write something down like ‘He always hated people who were late’. Nice and definitive and – more importantly – character defining. But then, Jackie thinks ‘hmmm, would his conflict make him hate people who are late? Or wouldn’t he mind? I don’t know’. And so I delete it so I can keep my options open, just in case it turns out that in fact, he doesn’t mind people who are late. Can you see my problem here? Every one of these little sentences that define character and I am deleting them because I don’t know whether that’s how they would act or not. Which is why, when I’m halfway through, I run into the heinous problem of not knowing how my characters would act in a certain situation because I haven’t defined them enough! Nightmare.

I like to keep my options open, that’s why I’ve been doing it. What if I need the character to not mind someone being late? If I don’t define it, then I can adjust it later. But you know what I’m doing? Dr Jax pointed it out to me – I am tweaking the character to suit the conflict. Making them be who I want them to be and not who they are. And in what are supposed to be character driven stories this is not a particularly good thing to do.

Another part of my worry is that perhaps the reader/editor won’t accept a character’s beliefs given their particular conflict. Thing is, at this point, I know everything about the character but the reader doesn’t. All they know is what you choose to tell them. Hey, if your hero hates people being late then as far as they’re concerned he does. They’re not thinking ‘hmmmm, not sure about that given his conflict.’ As long as you give him a good enough reason for hating people who are late, then that’s all good as far as the reader goes.

Which brings me to the part that I am hoping will go much better for me. If I define who my characters are – or at least signpost – in that first chapter, authoritatively and with confidence (not ‘sometimes he didn’t like people being late’ or ‘he kind of got annoyed with people being late’. Try ‘he hated it when people were late’) then I will know how they act in certain situations later on. I don’t need to go ‘wow, what would he do here?’ and get stressed about the hundred different ways he could act because I left my options open. There is only one way he would act. The heroine is late and so the hero, because I told people in that first chapter that he hates people who are late, is annoyed with her. I don’t need to think ‘now, will he be annoyed? Or wouldn’t he mind?’. Nope, he’s annoyed.

Now, I do think about the mss that did well a lot. What did I do right that time and not in all the others? For the Hammer Pants that won that contest, I’m pretty sure part of it was because I defined the hero and heroine very strongly in those first five pages. Now I wrote that not caring about conflict, not worrying about keeping my options open. And clearly that worked. Of course, I ran into huge problems in chapter two because I hadn’t got the conflict right but hey, I had two great characters in those first five pages!

So, what I need to do is find the happy medium. Have an idea of the conflict, but start with the characters. And when conflict and character meet up, tweak the conflict not fiddle with the character!

Dr Jax gave me this little thing piece of advice that probably many of you know already from school/university etc but I think it’s great for writing. It serves as a good reminder to me that my job is to tell the reader about my characters right from the get go, so they will then want to read on, and do it in as clear and obvious a way as possible:

Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you’ve told them.

You see, here are my problems:

1. I have been writing romances since I was 12. Now these were only for myself, not for publication. So I have had over 20 years of writing stories where I could do whatever the hell I wanted and that seemed to mostly be concerned with piling as much angst as I could into it. Hey, I didn’t have to please anyone but myself so why not? Flashforward 28 years and I’m still trying to stop myself from piling on the angst. Fear of failure? Sure. Why not add fear of being vulnerable too? Oh yes, and also fear of not being wanted, hating to be protected and stick an unplanned pregnancy in there too. Enough conflict for ya?

2. I HATE being hit over the head with the obvious as a reader. QED, as a writer I am not obvious enough. This combined with a fear of my characters being too self aware, means sometimes the conflict isn’t obvious in the first chapter. And neither is their motivation.

3. I came late to reading romance. I only started reading a lot of it 3 years ago. Up till then, the only romance I read was an M&B binge every 6 months or so. I’ve been trying to catch up on the genre but up until 3 years ago, I didn’t even know a romance had to have an HEA, let alone heroic, aspirational, sympathetic characters.

So these three little problems of mine have all conspired against me. Not only do I over complicate my conflicts so it’s not clear, I am also not obvious about them so readers (and editors!) don’t know what motivates them. Ergo this makes them unsympathetic because if you don’t know what motivates them, you can’t relate to them. Add to that a tendency to want to break the ‘romance’ mould with my characters because I want to do something different (and not knowing what’s ‘acceptable’ and what’s not), and you have a recipe for disaster. And rejection.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it’s taking me a VERY long time to both be aware of these problems and to overcome them. My latest sub I have tried hard to stick to one conflict for both my characters, made sure it’s clear and have tried to follow it to its conclusion in the synop. I have also tried to make it more obvious in the first chapter. The thing I’m most worried about is my heroine. I’ve – again! – tried to make her different. I hope I haven’t overstepped the mark. She’s spiky and prickly, and kind of rude. There is a reason for this and I’d really like to think I got it across in that first chapter but…

Who knows? Only time will tell I guess. Anyway, it’s back to NTAI for me! Where’s everyone else at?

Anyway, on the writing front, after a great virtual coversation with the talented Lacey, I got to thinking about characters and character sheets. Now, the ed I’m working with sent me quite a good one that provided me with a great starting point. And not just favourite foods and things but questions like; Why is the hero the best person for the heroine? Why is he the worst? What’s good about him? What’s bad? What does the heroine like about him? What doesn’t she like? etc etc. All good material. But there can be a problem with character sheets in that if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with a character who is just a bunch of traits, not an actual person.

For example, you might have given your heroine a shy trait but decided she’s also going to be an actor. Now this may be what you’d plotted out for your story, but would a shy person really choose acting as a profession? And here’s where you have to think deeper – perhaps they would, perhaps she’s very shy and by choosing acting, she’s trying to prove something to herself. What is she trying to prove? Who is she trying to prove it to? How does her shyness impact on the story? In other words, is it part of her character or have you given her that trait because it makes a scene work better?

In essence, every trait you give them is a building block constructing the kind of person they are. And all the building blocks work together, you can’t treat them in isolation. I’ve done the old ‘quick, my heroine needs to be stroppy in this scene’ trick where I suddenly give my previously quiet, shy heroine a ‘take no crap’ trait. And then find that to get her to act like this, I have to add a whole lot of things in order to get the desired response from her. Can you say ‘making my characters move to fit the plot’? This is where consistency comes into it because you can’t just add a character trait for one scene and then never have it appear again. For the shy heroine, you have to ask yourself is shyness part of who she is? Is it central to the story? Is it part of what she needs to change about herself? Is it really necessary for her to be shy?

I think that while character sheets are a good place to start, there comes a time when you need to look at all the traits, likes/dislikes, family background etc, and figure how they all work together in order to make this person come alive. Have you added things just for the sake of it? How will an impatient heroine act? Does this affect your story? How has her impatience affected her life? Is her impatience a flaw that may cost her the hero? Does she overcome it or learn to deal with it? Or have you just added it so she catches the bus an hour earlier and so meets the hero?

Anyway, the character sheets have been great in that they get me thinking about the character before I start writing and now I’m much better at constructing an actual person with a background instead of the cardboard cutouts I used write. But now I don’t use them so much as writing a brief bio that I add to as I get to know the character better. Anyone else find them useful?

BTW: If you’re wanting more insight into conflict, Kate Walker is doing a great Q&A on her blog.