Michelle Styles:Polishing the Clock Face

Writing a historical romance can feel like juggling three balls with one hand while simultaneously keeping three plates spinning in the air with the other and balancing a few objects on your head for good matter. Yes, it is your circus and those are your monkeys and you can lose your focus very quickly and end up writing a different sort of story than the one you had planned. The more you know about the majestic craft of writing, the more you realise that part of its appeal is that it can never be fully tamed and there is always something more to learn.

There are plot points, character conflicts, world building, and writing into the mist. There is learning to revise while still believing in the essence of your story. Your ultimate aim is to create an emotionally satisfying story which has the reader turning pages at great rate.

It took me a long time to realize that I write for the readers who get my writing. I can’t write for my eldest son, the recent recipient of a history Phd who considers historical romance beneath him (the poor dear – we all have our crosses to bear and one of his is having me for a mother). Neither do I write for my husband who prefers angsty detective stories with disillusioned male protagonists. Or indeed my youngest son who prefers fantasy and natural history but knows when to keep quiet about his mother’s work.

 I write in part for myself but mostly for readers who enjoy the sort of historical story I tell – ones with a strong female protagonists who eventually find love and an equal partnership with a strong male. It took me a long time to realise who I wrote for and that I didn’t have to change the way I write for anyone (not even my eldest whom I love dearly).  The realisation made bad reviews easier to take and I didn’t have to retreat to my bedroom with a bottle of gin (or indeed listen to helpful suggestions about my manuscripts or my career path for the male members of my household).

However, one of the compacts  I make with my readers is that I strive to get them the possible Michelle Styles I can produce at any given time. And this means that I always have to keep working on my craft. Craft is such a big topic that I prefer to concentrate on little pieces and work my way around. Thus sometimes, I feel like I am rusty on plot or character and at others on setting. Sometimes it is emotional response. Sometimes it is creativity as a general topic (aka refilling the well). (Have I mentioned that I love books about writing?) Twyla Tharp in The Creative Habit  suggested the clock face metaphors as a way for dancers to concentrate on their craft. I feel it is also a metaphor which works for authors.

I am self-taught author – basically I have a degree in Economics (with an emphasis on historical econ) and have never taken a course in writing. A friend is currently doing her Masters in Creative Writing – we have been talking. I lent her one of my favourite books on Point of View and Character (Orson Scott Card’s Characters and Viewpoint). I think she was pleasantly surprised that it was actually very good and full of useful tips.

Because I am waiting on my agent to get me her notes about how I can improve  my latest Viking before submitting it to my editor, one of the things I have been doing is reading Donald Maass’s latest  The Emotional Craft of Fiction about  creating emotional responses in the reader. It plows the same trench as Orson Scott Card and Karl Igleias Writing for Emotional Impact but approaches in a typical Maass sort of way (including a few snide remarks about romance authors). Like any writing craft book, there are parts which speak to me and parts which don’t.  I have tried out some of the exercises and it is interesting to look at my manuscript in a different way (currently I think something does not quite work – among other things, it keeps hitting the same note) But what is interesting is that some of the exercises I go to do them and then think – hey I have already done that because it is good practice to have your reader engaged with your protagonist. Backing myself and my writing ability is something I should do more often – even when I am trying to polish the clock face.

IN OTHER NEWS:

This last month has brought my cover for The Warrior’s Viking Bride – both the Harlequin Historical version and the Mills and Boon one. I love them both. The new look Mills and Boon covers are utterly fab, particularly for historicals. The ampersand between Mills and Boon is the combination of a heart and a kiss.

Harlequin Historical version

MIlls and Boon version

I am really proud of this book and am so hoping that my readers enjoy it. (I have not bothered asking the peanut gallery of the male members of my household for their opinion – my daughter approves of the cover though…)

Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romance in a wide range of time periods for Harlequin Historical. Her latest The Warrior’s Viking Bride will be published in March 2018. You can learn more about Michelle and her books on www.michellestyles.co.uk

Anne McAllister : : Remember High School?

Remember your high school days?

Well, I don't suppose -- unless you're under the age of 14 -- that you can really forget it.

For some it might have been the best of times. And for others it might have been the worst. It was neither to me. There are great gaps in my memories of it.

Since I moved away and never went back to live in the area once I left, except for a few brief weeks during the summer after my freshman and sophomore years of college, I have had little occasion to even think about it.

But I've just been friended on Facebook by someone from my high school.

And then another. And then a third -- and I'm suddenly seeing pictures from when I was fifteen and reliving things I didn't even remember that I remembered!

Weird. Very weird.

What I realized -- when I realized that I remembered at all -- is that while I don't have stored up in the brain cells a lot of detailed specifics about the particular events that went on (was I in a coma, I wonder?), apparently I internalized every conceivable emotion that it is possible for a teenager to feel.

And I've been drawing on them now for years in my books!

What I mean is that those were the years when I really began to understand about relationships and emotions and the connections between the two. And because those experiences were so powerful emotionally then, I unconsciously go back to them often when I'm writing. I remember so well how I felt in those days.

I just had an email from a writer friend asking me about where I'd gone to research the sailing bits I used in an upcoming book because, God knows, I am not a sailor. I am a hanger-over-the-side sort of person, even though I wish I had better sea legs. But I seem to write about characters who sail a lot.

And I pointed her in the direction of several possibilities because I try my best to be accurate. And I do my research and I learned about sailing from books and from people I know who sail a lot.

As a writer I can always learn about things and activities I don't know first-hand -- like racing sailing and being a lawyer or a chaos-theory teaching physicist.

But it's impossible to learn emotions out of a book. And no one can tell you how to convey feelings. The emotions my characters feel have to come naturally.

I have to have felt them myself. They rise out of some personal well of deep joy and profound anguish. They derive from of the elation that comes from believing everything is going to be perfect and the despair of knowing you're an idiot and everyone knows it even better than you do.

They come from first love, heartbreak, laughing until you can't catch your breath, and the deep quiet joy of knowing you've done the right thing even though no one else knows it. All those emotions?

They come from high school.

The most profound well of emotional knowledge that I -- and pretty much everyone else -- have ever been given is high school.

That's where we were when we began to experience many of the emotions that get us through the day and keep us up at night.

Those years frequently contain the moments against which we measure other life experiences and how we feel about them.

We may not even know it. I certainly didn't consciously even think about it until these past few days. Then I remembered -- and I felt them all again. Emotional overload.

So, to all my new/0ld Facebook friends -- in my 'real life' -- thank you for providing me with such a deep and enduring well.

Thank you for inviting me to be your friend again -- or for the first time. And please say yes if I ask to be your friend because I don't want to have to learn about being crushed first hand all over again. High school? Been there, done that. Once was plenty. But I'm grateful for it.

How was high school for you? The best? The worst? Anything memorable? AnyONE memorable? And are you friends on Facebook with them now? C'mon, tell . . .

Emotion - Laura Drewry

I had a whole blog written last night about authors who have the incredible talent of making me feel every emotion - good or bad - that their characters feel. I think we can all have favourite authors who have the ability to pull those emotions from us, leaving us feeling elated, or devastated or furious.

It's a goal I continue to strive toward with my own writing.

However. . . as I was finishing up the post last night, someone sent me the link to this video and I immediately shelved what I'd written for another day.

This is something everyone should see. I don't usually ike to cry before my first cup of coffee, but this woman makes it all worth it. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

So while I'm sorry I don't have an informative blog post to share this morning, I'm not sorry to sharing this with all of you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Using It All Up - Anne McAllister

One of the things I love about writing is that anything you do -- in fact anything you've ever done (so don't sit home!) -- is there to use. Grist for the mill. Ore to be mined.

If you think of your whole life as 'source material' you've just about got the idea. Nothing is sacred -- for better or worse.

I mean, sure, you can deliberately go out and research a topic for a book. Why do you think I went to bull-riding school?

But equally, I find myself digging back into all sorts of boxes in the attic of my mind for just the right detail, experience, moment, emotion that will allow me to tell the story. They are there -- the fleeting memories, the glimpses of details, feelings, thoughts -- and I'm continually astonished, and delighted, how often I get to tap into them.

I dug into my days on sand and in surf at Manhattan Beach for quite a few early books and, amazingly (to me at least), I'm right back there again on the one I'm working on now.

I have found inspiration, not to mention detail, in a couple of Bahamian jaunts that occurred 15-20 years ago, in a trip to Vienna when my children were small, the horseback riding I did when I was eight and the chicken pox I got when I was seven.

If any character of mine ever picks the landlord's peach tree bare, you will have caught me mining the summer when I was four.

And it isn't just the details that find their way into books. It's the emotions.

Some of them are, frankly, emotions I would rather forget. They weren't always the happiest times of my life. But I remember pain, I remember loss. I remember fear.

Even if my characters are nothing like me and, admittedly, most of them aren't, they still hurt, they regret, they are afraid. And I can give them those feelings because I've experienced them. The same, of course, goes for the happier emotions. And, truth to tell, I much prefer writing them.

A former editor of mine refers to some of this process as "writing out of one's emotional landscape."

She says that the strongest books come from those parts of a writer's emotional landscape that are of deepest significance. They are the ones that writers return to again and again, to explore in different ways, to look at from different perspectives.

From the standpoint of having written now 61 books, I completely agree with her. While I am going to Cannes in October to get some 'on site' research of detail and such -- to get hangers to put my story on, as it were -- the emotional landscape is one I am familiar with.

It's a story I find worth exploring again and again: duty and responsibility to oneself and one's family and, at the same time two people finding they are more themselves in relation to another, that they ultimately bring out the best in each other.

What makes this my emotional landscape? I'm not entirely sure. Experiences I've had, no doubt, play their part. Hopes and dreams for the future, maybe. And, of course, a strong desire to make it all come right in the end. It's an emotional landscape based on hope, not justice (which is more of a mystery writer's landscape) or one based on "you're damned if you do and damned if you don't" (which to me often seems a more literary writer's landscape).

If you're a writer, do you find yourself exploring a particular emotional landscape from a variety of angles? Or do you go someplace new emotionally every time?

If you're a reader, do your favorite authors tend to explore the same emotional landscape you like to explore? Or do you go wherever they take you? What attracts you to favorite authors -- and who are they?

Inside the Writing Life for Lucy Monroe

Is there anything sexier than a super studly, oh so stubborn Scottish laird? I sure didn't think so when I was writing Annabelle's Courtship. (Well, okay, *maybe* dh, but that's it! LOL) The thing is I had so much fun with this book, writing it just for me. Not for a deadline, not for a particular publisher, just because I'd dreamt up these characters and could no more hold back from telling their story than I could from breathing. Writing is like that for me, absolutely necessary.

I never realized how much so until this past year when some health issues made it difficult to concentrate on my stories. I'm not a super nice person when I don't write and I've got a husband and houseful of teenagers who will verify that for you without blinking an eye. :) They will also verify that to interrupt me when I'm writing the black moment is a very bad thing, but dh doesn't mind the consequences of certain types of scenes and I'm sure you know what they are. Yikes...did I really say that? I guess I did. LOL

And there were times writing Deal With This (Nov 27th release) that I laughed out loud and man, my family appreciated that mood. :) Dh also got some special time 'cuz you know Alan and Jillian are a bit flamboyant and theories have to be tested and all that. But I'm not just talking about gasp...can I say it? SEX...I'm talking about EMOTION too.You've no idea how many discussions I've had with my own wonderful alpha hubby over a hero's motivations and actions. Ian from Annabelle's Courtship and Alan from Deal With This are no exceptions. I won't tell you which one he identified with most easily, but I will say that many things may change over history, but certain truths about alpha men are not on that list. :)

I've got a question for you all though, Annabelle's Courtship came out first as an eBook (it'll be in print in the Fall of 08) and Deal With This will naturally come out in print first and electronic format shortly thereafter. What I want to know is, do you read eBooks and if so, do you read them when available by print authors, or do you have certain authors you buy exclusively in electronic format? I know that I tend to buy a whole set of autobuy authors in eBook and another set in print and then there's a group I insist on having both editions of - for different types of reading (in bed at night versus in the hot tub, you know...lol).

Hugs,

Lucy

P.S. I love to give away prizes, so one winner randomly drawn from the comments on this post will receive a personalized signed ARC for DEAL WITH THIS.