Getting Ready for the Golden Heart Part 2: The Writing
- Does your scene have a goal and structure and end on a “disaster”?
- Have you begun with action/conflict/some tension between people, people and a monster, etc.
- Great first line
- Identify the characters, setting, time, season if important
- Emotion, conflict, likeability—make these things evident up front
- Character with a great desire, passion, a yearning, gutsy, resourceful, likable?
- Deep Point of View—the POV character experiencing life through her/his senses. Don’t forget smell and touch if appropriate.
- Show not tell
- Axe the backstory.
- Don’t describe things unless relevant (slows pacing) (Katie Graykowski has a really funny line that will never let you forget this here)
- Watch your dialogue tags. Replace some with body language, e.g., “”You bet,” he said, vs. “You bet. He took a long, slow pull of beer.
- Watch for too much blow by blow body language: “He grabbed the beer bottle and sat down, turning away from her. He picked up his book and walked to the kitchen She took a sip of beer then set her bottle down.”
- End your entry on a significant hook. Again, action without emotion doesn’t cut it but be sure to adjust your pages so that you’ve ended on a hook that will keep your readers wanting more!
- Chemistry, chemistry, chemistry. Important, important, important.
- Romance permeates all aspects of the story in one way or another.
- Be clear who the hero and heroine are from the beginning! This sounds ridiculous but don’t let the heroine’s best friend overshadow her or a platonic male friend of the heroine be mistaken for the hero!
- In category romance, if the hero and heroine are not together, they are apart and thinking about each other.
- The hero must have a heart of gold and act heroically even if he has issues.
- Heroine must not be petulant, self indulgent, or merely be acted upon—she must act!
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| “If she’d only listen to my ideas…” |
Getting Ready for the Golden Heart, Part 1: Your Story: Make it a Good One
Today and next Friday, November 15, I’m going to post some pointers for those of you who are planning to enter the Romance Writers of America’s Golden Heart Contest, which opens to entries on November 12. (For more information, go to rwa.org and look under “Awards” and then “Golden Heart.” Here’s the link: http://www.rwa.org/p/cm/ld/fid=536)
What does it take to final in the Golden Heart? This year, on my sixth try, I finaled in two categories and won the Contemporary Series category. (What follows is based on my own experience, so please take what helps and ignore what doesn’t.)
First off, finaling takes getting through five preliminary round judges who judge your partial manuscript (“the partial”–approximately the first 50 pages) on a fifty point scale: Plot/Story 10 Points, Romance 20 Points, Characters 10 Points, and Writing 10 Points. Entrants who final need to get 90% of the total possible score or above. (I did not find this on the RWA website, but on my score sheets, it said that final scores are calculated by dropping the high and low total scores and averaging the remaining three total scores. This helps to protect from very lenient or very harsh judging. )
Here are the three things I think you need to final:
—A Good Story that meets or exceeds the expectations of your genre and offers the reader an emotional experience that captures their hearts.
—Writing that shines and is free of amateurish mistakes.
—Luck! In a perfect universe, all judges would be impartial and fair. Well, welcome to real life, where some judges are tough, some are easy, and some will either really love or really hate your story. Luck of the draw which ones you get! Stories that are entered one year may not final while the next they do…so who knows? This is one aspect you have no control of.
So let’s talk about the first point–The Good Story. It’s not enough to write a story about nice people doing nice things. (Trust me, I know, my first four manuscripts were like this, unremarkable, low-tension stories.) It’s a feat to come up with a story idea, let alone write and polish 50 pages and submit a synopsis. Yet you must write a story that keeps tension, conflict and angst high so your reader wants more–so she/he is really sad when those fifty pages end. Not being boring for that many pages requires a lot of skill.
Good stories start off with a bang (in the middle of action, something going on) and grab the reader with emotion. But even the biggest action sequence will fail to impress if no one cares about your characters. So the action does not have to be big, Hollywood action–but it does have to be some situation where the characters are doing something besides walking through lush scenery thinking of the hot guy they just met. (Starting with description–probably not the best idea.)
End your partial with a big hook. Again, leaving your heroine dangling off the old London Bridge (as I did in one ms) is great but don’t throw in action for action’s sake. The big hook at the end can be as simple as a long awaited/forbidden/unintended kiss. It should be emotionally big, not necessarily action-packed-big. One of my finaling entries ended with a kiss that someone had second thoughts about–pretty simple. The other ended with a revelation that the long-lost love the heroine thought was dead was alive. Again, go for emotional impact not big Hollywood set piece.
If your 50 pages as it currently stands does not end on a hook, what should you do? My answer: manipulate your pages so that for the GH it does.
Is Your Story Big Enough to Sustain 200-300 pages of conflict? If you’re writing Category Romance, study Romance Tropes. These are plot devices like enemies to lovers, mistaken identity, fake engagement, revenge, redemption, boss-employee, reunited lovers, etc. Typically for category, you need three tropes per story. Reading extensively in the genre you are targeting will give you a feel for this.
If you’re writing Single Title, you need a High Concept idea. This is the kind of idea that makes you exclaim Wow! Why didn’t I think of that?! or I’ve got to read this! when you read a back-cover blurb. It’s original, emotional, compelling, and clever. If you don’t know what this is, check out Lori Wilde’s Got High Concept? workbook available from her website. High Concept is the idea that makes your story stand out from the rest.
The point is, if you are writing romance, you must know the kind of book you are writing. You must target your market by doing research. It’s not enough to simply write the book of your heart. If your book does not have the tension to sustain an entire book, no one is going to judge it well in contests no matter how great your writing is and no one is going to publish it. The idea and the characters must hook your reader from the beginning–from Paragraph 1.
Remember the Essence of a Romance. Your main goal in writing a romance is to tell an emotionally powerful story about people whose flaws get in the way of their leading the fullest life they could and how love for another person gives them the impetus to overcome these flaws by making choices under pressure so they can become the people they were always meant to be. Characters must be pushed to grow and change so they are not the same people at the end as they were at the beginning.
Check your story: does it have external conflict keeping the hero and heroine apart? Does it have internal conflict keeping them apart? Is there a romance? I’ve judged contest entries where the entry is all romance and no external situation at all. And others where the hero doesn’t show up until page 40.
Force yourself to share your work. My recommendation is that at least three people besides yourself should read your pages before you submit. I think this is truly hard for some of us, especially when we are just starting out. It’s scary to share something so close to your heart!
Why, you say, is finding reading friends/critique partners so important? Because we burn out. We become overfamiliar with our story and our words. We cannot be objective about our own work. If you have time, putting your entry away for a week or two and looking at it again helps a lot, but having somebody else’s eyeballs besides your own is crucial. But remember the bottom line: trust your own judgment. Your best friend may unintentionally crucify your voice. A good rule is, if more than one person points something out in your manuscript as not quite right, look hard at those things. It’s tricky–knowing when to trust your gut and when to believe what a reader tells you.
So there you have it, my take on Story. Hope this helped. Next week, I’m going to talk about writing tips and a first page checklist to help polish your entry. Any questions…ask away! And keep polishing!
Writer Burnout as You Approach The End
Yeah, yeah, I know, writing a book is a marathon. Don’t remind me, because I’m feeling the burn, baby! Here are Seven Signs you may be utterly toxic from struggling to the end of that elusive finish line:
–Coffee, ordinarily delicious and comforting and an aid to your muse, tastes bitter and disgusting and you never want another cup again.
–Your husband arrives home to find you in tears. Mumbling how you are in the last 50 pages and your book makes no sense and you think you have to delete the whole thing and start over.
–To take a break, you read a great, fabulous author because you only read the best when you are finishing your best draft, but instead of inspiring you, you start to cry. “I can never write like that! Why bother?” (This time it’s Kristan Higgins, The Best Man. So wonderful!)
–Your ass hurts from BICHOK (Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard). And your hamstrings, and your calves, and all the tendons in your hands.
–You know that this, your “final” draft, is almost done. You pray for it to be done. All you want is relief. Your characters are suffering, heading right into that blackest of moments, and you are contemplating heading out the window. You are laughing, weeping, mumbling to yourself, and in total despair. And just to tip yourself over the edge, you know this will not be THE final draft. Beta readers, agent will say no no no and you will have to wash and repeat. Probably multiple more times.
–You appear in public in sweats. Your deepest darkest secret is sometimes you don’t even dress until just before your kids come home from school.
–You keep saying, “I’ll clean [insert something appropriate here]______ when I’m done,” a task you despise. But right now it’s looking pretty good as a diversion. Scary!
I don’t know how this marathon will end. All I want is to muscle through and be done. I pound my head against the keyboard and drink my bitter coffee (better than eating through the fridge). I’m not a believer in waiting for inspiration to strike. Every day I sit here and slog it out, and every day I fix the slog from the day before. And most days I do this with a kind of joy I’ve never experienced before.
But burn out is burn out and when it reaches this level, sometimes you have to cave in to it and replete the muse by taking a damn day off. Maybe even two. Because you simply cannot write if you are insane. So today…I’m outa here!
Combating burnout…suggestions welcome!
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| South Carolina beach, a more tranquil place than my mind today! |
Writers: So Maybe Hearing Voices Isn’t That Crazy After All
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| One confused little violet who thinks it’s May instead of October. |
I had this crazy idea to ask everyone, well, my writer friends anyway, why they write. I don’t know why, maybe (make that probably) to understand why I write. If you really stop and think about it, we spend months writing a story, living with the characters we create talking in our heads, waking us up at night and forcing us to write their words on sticky notes before we forget them.
Does this sound familiar?
More importantly, is this normal?
The mission of understanding why we (I) write with regard to our (my) mission in life is a really big topic that can’t be tackled all at once, but I read something recently that helped me understand something really intrinsic about myself…like, maybe I’m not so crazy after all.
The great writer and activist George Orwell (1903-1950), whom we all know from his classic novels Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, wrote an essay in 1946 called Why I Write. Here’s one of many parts that caught my eye (It’s a little long but I’ve bolded what I thought was fascinating):
“But side by side with all this [writing activities he describes], I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted onto the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across tot he window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years. Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside. The ‘story’ must, I suppose, have reflected the styles of the various writers I admired at different ages, but so far as I remember it always had the same meticulous descriptive quality.”
This just bowled me over. The description of an inner narrative that reads like a book…does anybody else’s brain do this? Well, mind does and that is scary, but to have it described, well…it’s very validating! Like, it might just be almost normal to hear voices in your head (if you’re a writer, anyway).
So do you hear voices in your head? Have you for a long time? Do you know why you write? Do you see yourself in this passage? Feel free to share. (I’m going to share the thoughts I’ve been collecting next week.)
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| Everyone stopped to take pics of this fabulous rainbow yesterday. |
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| No impatiens in Ohio this year–they all got killed by a fungus last year. But somehow found this one single flower in my garden! |
Crawling Inside Your Characters’ Heads: from Robert McKee’s Story
Hi Everyone!
The kids are back in school and my house is SILENT…except for the soft snores of my pooch who is passed out on her back with her legs up in the air.
I’m reading the classic screenwriting book Story by Robert McKee and I wanted to share one little tidbit that may help you to crawl into your characters’ heads and extract the perfect essence of truth and honesty that we strive every day to find to make our characters come alive.
As writers, we seek to put truth on the page. Meaning we want our characters to act honestly, in ways that only they can act. We don’t want to create cliche. We don’t want to moralize. We don’t want to write over-the-top unbelievable characters.
So how do you write an honest, breathing character that makes your reader laugh, cry, and get moody and unhappy when they are unhappy?
The answer is partially–do they make YOU laugh, cry, and feel miserable (and I’m not talking about just when the writing’s going badly!)
Have you done that–gotten nervous, laughed, cried, started sweating, gotten pains in your stomach when you are writing a scene? Or even long after you’re done writing a scene?
Well, if you haven’t, maybe Robert McKee can help you out.
McKee says that we must write from the inside out–meaning that in each scene, we must not be impartial observers of our characters but actually crawl into their heads and experience the scene from their point of view.
How to do this?
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| Flowers that finally recovered from the torrential rains this summer and are blooming like crazy now! |
Well, here’s how he says NOT to do this:
–Don’t ask, “How should my character take this action?”–that leads to moralizing.
–Don’t ask, “How might someone do this?”–that leads to writing cute and clever but dishonestly.
–Don’t ask, “If my character were in these circumstances, what would she do?”–that puts you at a distance from the character’s emotions, makes you guess at them, and leads to cliche
–Don’t ask, “If I were there, what would I do?”–guess what, no one cares what you would do. They care about your character (or that’s the point–you want them to!)
So what should you ask? McKee says “If I were this character in these circumstances what would I do?
(italics mine)
And here’s his grand explanation:
“Writers are improvisationalists who perform sitting at their word processors, pacing their rooms, acting all their characters: man, woman, child, monster. We act in our imaginations until honest, character-specific emotions flow in our blood. When a scene is emotionally meaningful to us, we can trust that it’ll be meaningful to the audience. By creating work that moves us, we move them.”
From Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee, Regan Books, 1998, pages 153-154
