How I start a story – Kandy Shepherd

I’m starting to write a new book—if all goes well, it will be my sixteenth for Harlequin Romance. My fourteenth is out now, Second Chance with the Single Dad and the fifteenth will be out in September.

So how do I start? I have a character from an earlier book who has been clamoring for his story. (I won’t go into any detail as who knows what might change after these preliminary thoughts!) It’s his time. I think I’ve found him the perfect woman, however neither he nor know this yet. There’ll be quite some mind changing to do to get them together!

I like to have a clear idea of what my characters look like, what they wear, where they live. I start a Pinterest board for each story and have a lot of fun with it. If you’d like to see my boards for my published stories, why not visit my Pinterest Boards?

 I have a special notebook for each book I write, to jot down ideas, try out paragraphs, keep by my bed in case I wake up at night with a brilliant idea that will be forgotten by morning if I don’t write it down.

Isn’t this notebook with the wisteria beautiful? It’s probably my favorite. I think I’ll have to include a scene with wisteria in the new story in honour of it! Yes, I do have nightmares about losing the notebook but so far that hasn’t happened. Fingers crossed it doesn’t!

 Some writers use computer programs to keep track of everything for their book. If I was writing a big book with lots of research and multiple story lines, I might try that. In the meantime, it either goes in the notebook or in a file on my computer. A timeline for a story is a must or I can get very muddled. But my version of a timeline is very simple, just a roughly sketched calendar for the months the story spans. 

 Now I’m working on the first chapter, the most important to get readers hooked into the story. It takes me forever! I might rewrite it many times until I get it right and move on to the next chapters which tend to flow more smoothly.

 So that’s where I’m at and I have to get cracking! A deadline that seems comfortably months away has a habit of sneaking up on me at a remarkable pace… So wish me luck as I set off on a new writing journey!

Second Chance with the Single Dad is a February 2019 release from Harlequin Romance in North America; Mills & Boon True Love in the UK; and Mills & Boon Forever Romance in Australia and New Zealand.

Kandy Shepherd is a multi-published, award-winning author of contemporary romance and women’s fiction. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her family and a menagerie of four-legged friends.

Visit Kandy at her website

www.kandyshepherd.com

Connect with Kandy on Facebook, Twitter,Pinterestand Instagram

Barbara Ankrum: Naming Characters

As an author, I get a lot of questions about process. How do I start? What’s the first thing I come up with? Plot? Conflict? Characters?

Yes.

That’s my answer. All of the above. Because all of those things are so interconnected, I usually have all three in my head as I’m thinking up a new book. Characters and character arcs factor in heavily, because I have to know where these two people are going and what they’re going to learn along the way. What’s in the way of that journey is the conflict.

But before I can start the actual writing, I need the H & H’s names. How characters look is often secondary. Names are essential to me to get a handle on character.  Sometimes, I just know them immediately. Other times, I go through lists. After I pick a name, I will scroll through photos and Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB—a movie geek site) for faces until I find the right look (that fits the name.) Mind you, this might seem like surface stuff, but it’s not. It’s all connected to character and conflict and back story and how I feel about the character.

This rule, however, can backfire on me. In a recent book I was forced to change the names of both characters three times, which—not coincidentally—also entailed rewriting the entire beginning as many times, because the name can essentially change how I think about a character and a character’s voice. And the characters (and story) were just not working for me. Oy!

Then there was the time, a couple of books ago, (I won’t divulge which one…) when I was about three-quarters of the way through, merrily typing away, and I looked at my hero’s name (as one does) and suddenly felt my heart sink. I’d been writing his name for a few months and never once did I recall that I’d actually used his name once before for another hero. (Wha—??) It was an old book, written a long time ago, granted, but still.  Two heroes with the same name would be…wrong.
For a whole day, I froze, horrified at the prospect that this guy I’d been writing all along would need a new name and the thought of changing it mid-stream is just…just…I can’t even. It was like giving my heroine a whole new guy! Not only that, I felt it might essentially change the tone of the story I was telling if I changed it then. Go on, you can think I’m crazy. I don’t mind.

I knew it would be easier for my readers to accept a different name for my hero (from the start) than it would for me to change it, mid-stream, so I decided to finish the book using the original name rather than try to change it as I was just getting to the black moment. That would allow me to continue with him emotionally without disruption. So when I finished the book, I did a soul search for a name I could fall for and after a long day of rejecting possibilities, I found one. I did a global search and replaced his name.

Moral of the story: everyone loved his name. No one thought he was weird or wrong. I even loved his name in the end and felt it added something unique to him. But I was glad I didn’t mess with him in the telling of the story. Who knows what might have happened?

But that just goes to show how delicate the process of creation is. Or the craziness of the creators! (Eh-hem…speaking only for myself, of course.)

I can still remember the names some of my favorite heroes and heroines from books I read years ago. My keepers. What are some of your all time faves?


Barbara Ankrum’s brand new historical romance, THE RUINATION OF ESSIE SPARKS—Book #2 of her Wild Western Rogues Series—hits the stands April 2, 2016!

The Writing Process Spectrum by Michelle Styles

When discussing writing, people often divide writers into plotters v pantsters. I will confess to never having liked the terminology. For one thing, it implies that writers who primarily use intuition are not as good or competent at achieving a cohesive storyline as those who outline obsessively. This is blatantly not the case. There are  a myriad ways of writing a novel and most writers are somewhere on the spectrum of the two. The terminology is also clunky as it is hard to visualise a pantster and people can look at you strangely until you explain. Equally a plotter can make a writer sound Machiavellian or vaguely sinister.

This weekend, I watched a talk given by GRR Martin (the author of Game of Thrones). While he writes in the fantasy/Science fiction genre, much of what he had to say holds true for all writing.

For example, he gave a quote from William Faulkner about the human heart in conflict with itself is the only thing that matters in writing a good story. This is probably more true of the romance/woman’s fiction genre than the fantasy genre. The human heart in conflict is the core of all romance. It is why romance is a character driven genre and why it is the most popular genre. It is the characters.

What first drew me to his talk however, was his description of writers  as on the architects or gardener spectrum. An architect makes a plan first and knows precisely where all the wiring, the load bearing walls, the pipes for the plumbing will go before the spade full of earth is dug. There is little to no deviation from the plan. A gardener on the other hand may know  what type of seed  he has planted but he doesn’t  actually know what precisely that plant will look like and how strongly  it will grow or the precise shape of its flowers. Good gardeners do have a broad design in mind when they plant but it is a far broader design than the detailed one that architects use.  Martin pointed out that with writers, that seed is watered with blood. And boy, do I know that feeling!

I believe the concept of an architect-gardener spectrum more fully encompasses how writers write. It is also ore easily understood than pnasterv plotter. Personally I would love to be an architect in many ways but there again the times I have attempted to fully plan a novel in advance are the times when I have had the biggest revisions or found myself the most bored. For me, I have to want to tell the story and if I have planned it down to the last detail, and simply have to churn out write the words, where is the enjoyment? I like discovering motivations and little twists. I like being able to improve on the original idea. I may not know everything about my characters before I put the first word down but I certainly know them thoroughly by the end. I do like use my intuition and instinct, rather than being slavishly devoted to a plan.  And yet, I know there are other writers who draw great comfort from their plans and details.

There is no right way to write a book or tell a story and everyone needs to respect their own individual process. I have learnt the hard way that I am far more of a gardener than an architect and I need to stop fighting it.

You can see the full interview here. It is rather long and he does cover the pitfalls and pleasures of being an author. The bit about the writing process is about halfway in.

Michelle Styles writes warm, witty and intimate historical romance in a wide range of time periods. She is currently hard at work on her next Viking set romance for Harlequin Historical and is embracing her inner gardener. Her last one Summer of the Viking was published in June 2015. You find out more about Michelle and her books on www.michellestyles.co.uk