Annie Burrows's Blog - Posts Tagged "harlequin"

D is for...Discipline

I get a variety of responses from people when I tell them what I do for a living. From those who are thrilled, saying they have never met an author before, to those who roll their eyes and say, "Oh really? I wouldn't mind writing a book, if only I had the time."
My answer - If you want to write a book you have to make the time.
It isn't easy. When I first decided to write, I had to start making difficult choices about how to spend my time. Not only "free" time, either. I deliberately chose jobs that wouldn't tax me too much, so that when I did have "free" time I wasn't so drained that my mind wouldn't function.
This meant taking reception work, cleaning jobs, or driving jobs, so that even when I was on the clock for someone else, my mind could still keep working over plot points. Then, when I did get home, and had fed the family, and generally tidied up after them, I could go and write down what I'd been dreaming up all day (when I should have been answering the phone/unloading cartons of sweets/stocking up shelves with greetings cards). Some of my best ideas have come to me while I've been stuck in traffic jams on the M56 with nothing to look at but the tailgate of the lorry in front of me.
(Trucks to the right of me, trucks to the left...here I am stuck in the middle of the queue...with apologies to Stealer's Wheel)

D also stands for determination. It took me over ten years from deciding I could write a book (ok - rather in the manner of those people who annoy me so much now by assuming it is easy) to actually getting a publishing contract. And during those years I went through a huge spectrum of feelings about my ambition. From belief and hope, to despair and self-loathing. There were times I couldn't even walk into a bookshop, and see all those titles sneering at me from the shelves by people who'd managed to do what I couldn't. It simply hurt too much.
Eventually, I went on a writing course (what - didn't I do that first? No. I was just as deluded as all those other people who assume they could just sit down and write a bestseller without any training at all.) By then I was starting to wonder if I was flogging a dead horse. What if I really didn't have what it took to be a published author? Was there a good reason why all I was getting was rejection slips? I finally decided to fork out some of the money I'd earned delivering sweets to village post offices, to go along to my local college and see if I could learn anything from a qualified teacher of writing.

And then, if I got yet another rejection I decided I would send my next manuscript to the Romantic Novelists Association New Writer's Scheme. Because I discovered that they would have a published novelist read my work and actually tell me what they thought of it (unlike publishers, who were just sending back standard rejection letters which gave me no clue where I was going wrong.)

You can see where I'm going with this - even after ten years I just wasn't prepared to give up. I was going to do whatever it took to see one of my own books on the shelves of W.H.Smith with all those others.


Well - going on the writing course did the trick (so my tutor said). Mid way through my second term, Mills & Boon finally showed some interest in a manuscript they'd had so long I was sure they must have forgotten all about it. Eventually it got accepted.
So I never needed to send anything to the New Writers Scheme after all.
But at least I had a plan B.
And if plan B had failed, you can be sure I'd have thought up a plan C, then a D, then...

Every month I've been blogging about a writer's life, dealing with various topics in alphabetical order. If you're wondering what has happened to "G", then I'll just explain that it stood for "Gladrags". My post was all about the glamorous author parties I go to, and was full of pictures of me with other authors, as well as a lot of shameless namedropping. I can't post pictures on my Goodreads blog. So, if you want to read it and look at the pictures, the post appeared at the http://novelistasink.blogspot.co.uk/ (you'll have to go to archived 2014 blog posts and scroll down to older posts. By then you'll feel like an archeologist!)

Anyway, this month I've reached H - for heroes. (And heroines) I've recently handed in a book that is going to be part two of a historical trilogy. The three stories deal with the loves of three officers in the same regiment, who fight at the battle of Waterloo. And about the first thing my co-continuity authors wanted to know about my episode was "What does your hero look like?"
Sarah Mallory and Louise Allen had already put pictures in our joint files of actors who'd inspired them when it came to imagining their heroes. Sarah Mallory chose Peter O'Toole for the Colonel of our fictitious regiment, and Louise Allen picked Sean Bean for her Major Flint.

My problem was that although I had a clear image in my head of my own hero, I hadn't based him on an actor. I just can't do that. Because for me, what the hero is like inside, as a person, is far more important than what he looks like. I always start with the personality, and work outward. And if I start picturing a specific actor when I write about my hero, I'm always worried that the actor's personality traits might sneak in.

However, Sarah and Louise - who write much faster than me - were already writing scenes where my hero would have to stride across their pages, and really, really wanted to know what my hero looked like.

Fortunately (for them!) about that time I found an image of Tom Hiddleston in a cravat, from when he'd been playing a nineteenth century gentleman. That was about the nearest I could come to explaining what my hero would look like. And it wasn't about his features. It was about the cleverness you could see in his features. The potential for wickedness beneath the charming smile.

Posting an image of Tom certainly inspired their imaginations. Whenever they sent me a scene in which he appeared in one of their books, they had my Artillery Major off to a "T". He was a flirt. A charmer. And devilishly good-looking.

Thinking about Tom Hiddleston kept them happy for a while. Well, he seems to make a lot of ladies happy, as you can tell from this buzzfeed post:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jennaguillaum...

That was, until they wanted to know what my hero's name was. I had to explain that he hadn't told me yet. In my defence, I explained that I was only on about chapter 3 by then, and he was only just waking up after having sustained a head injury. He was confused, and concussed, and couldn't everyone just call him "Sir."

I can't remember exactly when, during the course of the emails pinging back and forth as we created our fictional regiment, we started referring to him as Tom. And then, when I couldn't come up with a surname, Louise Allen coined the nickname Tom Cat, which really, really suited him.

This kind of procedure is how it usually goes for me when naming my heroes. I know that some authors can't start writing their heroes until they have a name, but I find that mine don't tell me what it is until I have got to know them pretty well. My secondary characters had to speak of one of my heroes as Lord Rakey Rakerson well into my second draft of his adventure!

And it's the same with the book I am currently writing. I know quite a lot about my hero's childhood, and naval career. At the time he meets my heroine, he's reached the rank of Captain. He is also an Earl to an almost bankrupt Scottish estate. So naturally, the heroine has been having to call him Captain Lord Scotsman.
But only a few days ago, his sister (who is a minor character in the story) bounced up to him calling him Alec. Which is short for Alexander. And since I knew her name was Lizzie Dunbar (because it's always much, much easier to name minor characters) that meant his family name had to be Dunbar too.

Which is just right, and sums him up perfectly. Alec has a sort of cautious ring to it, somehow. He is a solid, dependable sort of chap. He is also the Earl of Auchentay (a Scottish area I invented several books ago, which has come in very handy)

And yes, I have the same slow process when it comes to naming my heroines. I think it is because it is so important that they get a name that really, really conjures up an aspect of their character - something that will help them to come to life on the page. I can't just pluck any old name out of a baby book, or something similar. The name has to have a resonance. Tom was a good name for my military hero - there's nothing stuffy about a Tom, is there? And you can imagine a Tom being brave on the battlefield, insubordinate to his officers, and lethal with the ladies. And once we started calling him Tom Cat, well...

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know."
Donald Rumsfeld

When you first start writing people advise you to write what you know. The argument goes that you cannot write a convincing story unless you know your subject inside out and upside down. The trouble is, I wanted to write fiction set in Regency England, which is a place I have never been, and never can go to. All my knowledge of the era comes from books.

However, when I started attempting to get a publishing deal, I felt fairly confident that I knew enough to be able to create a convincing fictional Regency world. I've read stacks of Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen and the like. And whatever I didn't know enough about, I could look up, right?

So I bought loads of books about every subject I thought I might need to know about - fashion, the army, the navy and biograpies of people who actually lived in the time which would hopefully give me an idea of the mindset of people living back then.

I even go round stately homes to get an extra "feel" for the era, especially ones where I can dress up in period costume, or have a ride in a carriage.

All the little details of dress, manners, and so forth, help to create a world that strikes a reader as "real".
For example, an author sets the scene by having the hero check his cravat in the mirror. The heroine curtsies to him. Instantly we're in an age where manners are more formal than today, and the costumes easily dateable. The hero asks the lady to dance the waltz. She refuses lest she be thought "fast". We're very firmly in Regency territory. So far, so good.

The trouble is, there are things about the Regency world that I never knew I didn't know. I didn't know, for example - until it was mentioned on an author loop I belong to - that a girl couldn't waltz in public until she'd been granted permission, by one of the patronesses of Almack's, within those hallowed walls, to do so with an approved partner. I'd had no idea how close I'd come to the brink of writing one of my heroines into committing such a social gaffe.

And a lot of authors fall into the same trap. As a resident of the UK, I cringe whenever I read of Regency bucks going down to Dorsetshire to sample the local whiskey. Or having to banish their dogs to the stables after an encounter with a skunk on the South Downs. For me, such slips of the pen ruin my belief in the Regency world the author is trying to create. Though I don't suppose it has any effect on readers who don't know that in Dorset the local brew would most likely be cider, and that the only way a skunk would wander onto the South Downs was if it had escaped from some local eccentric's private collection of rare species.

Which brings me back to the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, who has been soundly mocked for warning the world about the danger of the "unknown unknowns". As an author, I can vouch for the peril of those pesky facts that hamper us in our creative endeavours. I have had my own heroes and heroines unwittingly do and say things that a person living in 1815 would not have done. I have had them use the word "hello" - which was not in common use until the 1880's except on the hunting field. I have also had them perform a twentieth century waltz, having had no idea that in the Regency era, the waltz was nothing like the rather tame dance performed today.
A Mistress for Major Bartlett
However, if I was now to describe the dance with complete accuracy, I suspect that editors and readers alike would find it hard to believe in it if my hero performed an acrobatic leap while the heroine hopped to one side. It would strike them all as bizarre, and would ruin their belief in my Regency world just as surely as it would had they arrived at the ball in question in a porsche 911.

So - I'll probably need to disguise what I actually know, so that a reader will be convinced I do know what I'm talking about.
Donald Rumsfeld might have fared better with the world's press if he'd done the same.

"But hold onto your loneliness and your silence. They are part of what make you a writer."

I've got this quote pinned up in my study. I cut it out of The Author magazine some time ago - I think it's by Terence Black. Whenever I start wondering if I'm in danger of becoming agoraphobic, I read it and take heart. I'm not abnormally antisocial, no - I'm just a writer.

Because, you see, I could quite easily be a hermit. (Apart from the growing a beard thing - whenever you see a picture of a hermit it's always a man with a huge bushy beard. I suppose I could throw away my tweezers...) For example, when I go to put the bins out on a Friday morning, I sometimes realize that it's the first time I've been outside all week - and I'm not bothered.

I don't even like going out shopping. The thought of wandering around, browsing has always seemed to me like a huge waste of time. If I have to go into town, I try and get as many things done as I possibly can while I'm out. I write a list, get everything done as fast as I can and get home. And thanks to internet shopping I can have life's necessities, like groceries and books, delivered. Nor do I have to visit an actual library very often. I do most of my research online nowadays.

About the only time I really look forward to getting out of the house is to meet up with other writers, to discuss...yes, you've guessed it, writing. It's only when I'm in the company of other writers that I don't feel odd. They totally get that I have several stories drifting through my head at any one time, and that I would rather spend my day writing down the adventures of my imaginary friends, than going out for coffee with real ones. I don't have much of a social life, apart from having lunch with other writers, or attending writers conferences. But I'm not lonely. Not at all.
What I am, is a bit of a loner.

I think to be a writer you have to be. You have to be content with your own company. Prepared to set your own goals and reach targets nobody else cares about.

And only a writer would completely empathise with Oscar Wilde when he said: "I'm exhausted. I spent all morning putting in a comma and all afternoon taking it out."
That's pretty much my life!
A Mistress for Major Bartlett

While I was trying to get my first book published, I read a very helpful "how to" book called "The 1st 5 pages", by Noah Lukeman, which contained a piece of writing advice that stunned me. It suggested that before I even started my story, I ought to decide from whose viewpoint I was going to tell it, and whether to do so in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.
Er...what?
What is a viewpoint character, I wondered, and what is the difference between first, second or third person narration?

In a nutshell, in case you didn't know either, the viewpoint character is the person through whose eyes a reader will experience the story. The person whose story it is. If it is written in 1st person, it will be "I" did this that or the other. I'm currently reading a fabulous thriller by Dick Francis, who always seems to tell his story in the first person, and comes up with some amazing opening lines because of it. Because he uses the first person, you always feel as if you are experiencing the story alongside someone who has only just gone through it themselves, and is telling you all about it.

2nd person is "you" did it. Apparently this is the hardest of all to write and is rarely used. I can't think of a single example to give you - sorry! 3rd person is "she/he" did this that or the other, and is the most commonly used.

I knew that writing a story is a kind of world-building exercise. I'd always thought of it as painting a picture with words. But this chapter likened it to playing a piece of music, in which any inconsistency with the viewpoint would sound like a clashing, crashing discord, shattering the harmony.

So I read the single chapter dealing with viewpoint very carefully, and then looked at my own current manuscript, as recommended. Firstly, I discovered that I had been writing from my heroine's viewpoint (mostly) in 3rd person all along. Which, coincidentally, turned out to be what Mills & Boon recommended in their guidelines at the time. And since Mills & Boon was the publisher I was targeting, it was a jolly good job too.

I also learnt about the various ways I could make mistakes with handling viewpoint. I could change from the viewpoint of one character to another with bewildering rapidity, I could tell sections of the story from the viewpoint of characters who really didn't matter, and shouldn't have come to the fore, or I could fumble it altogether by having a character say or think something she couldn't possibly have known.

I'd thought my writing was pretty good, before then, but after reading the chapter on viewpoint, that story suddenly seemed full of discordant notes. I had indeed switched viewpoint so quickly any reader would have had trouble keeping up with who was the main player in a scene. I had also written substantial chunks from the point of view of characters who shouldn't have been speaking directly to my reader.

Those errors wouldn't have been errors at all if I was writing the kind of story where it is fine to have several people giving their account of the story. In crime novels, for example, one incident can be related by several witnesses. I've also read family sagas
where the thread gets taken up by someone from the next generation. So long as the change from one character's viewpoint to another is made clear and doesn't confuse the reader, that method can suit certain types of story.

However, since I'm writing romance, and I want to create an intense emotional experience for my reader, it is far better to get right inside my heroine's head, and stay there (unless I need to let people know what the hero is thinking). When the reader knows what my heroine knows, understand what motivates her to act the way she does, it creates empathy. Even if the heroine acts badly, the readers should know why she did what she did, and will therefore still keep rooting for her. Same goes for the hero.

But if I introduce scenes from anyone else's point of view, and take the focus off the main characters, it dilutes the intense emotion I want my reader to feel. There was no need for the woman my heroine (Amity) met in the dressmaker to suddenly start talking to the reader. It was Amity's story, not Mrs Kirkham's. Similarly, I shouldn't have written anything from Amity's brother's point of view, particularly since he was going to die in chapter 4.

Nor should I have had Amity knowing exactly what her brother was thinking, no matter how close they'd been as children, except by reading his body language and taking her best guess.

In fact the only viewpoint mistake I hadn't made was switching from first (which I'd never used) to second or third.

So, once I'd learned about the various types of viewpoint, I then began to think a bit harder about whose viewpoint to use in any scene. To create the most impact for the reader, it's best to think about which character will have the most invested at the time. Who has the most to lose or gain? Since I write romance, I really only have the choice between the hero or the heroine, but it is a point that still needs careful consideration. Do I focus on the heroine's determination to resist the hero, whose rakish reputation has already made her turn down his proposal of marriage more than once, in spite of the almost overwhelming attraction she feels for him? Or do I get inside the hero's head, and let the reader know that this time, he has really fallen in love, and his devil-may-care smile hides his fear of rejection?

Once I'd got the hang of considering point of view, it made a huge difference to my writing. Once I stopped digressing into the mind of the heroine's brother, his commanding officer, a woman Amity met in the dressmaker, or anyone else, the story focussed more closely on my heroine, and her journey of discovery, and therefore became more interesting.

Amity still hasn't found a publisher - but I'm working on it!