C is for Charley

Paula’s secondary character re-invented herself as the main character in the next novel.

While I was writing the first chapter of Irish Inheritance, the heroine, Jenna, makes a brief reference to Charley on the second page. Maybe Charley would lend her the money for a quick trip to Dublin. When I wrote that line, even I didn’t know whether Charley was male or female! By the time I got to the second chapter I’d decided that Charley was female – short for Charlotte, but only my grandmother calls me that – as she explains later. During the story, Charley developed her own personality, often giving Jenna advice in a straightforward matter-of-fact manner. She also met assistant hotel manager Steve, and at the end, she and Steve joined Jenna and Guy in Ireland, ready to establish a Living History group at Mist Na Mara house.

As far as I was concerned, that was the end of it, as I had no plans to write a sequel or series. By the time Irish Inheritance was published, I’d already started another novel, set in England’s Lake District. Then I had an email from Rebecca, my publisher, saying, ‘You have an opportunity here for a spin-off story about Charley.’

My first reaction was, ‘Okay, I’ll think about that once I’ve sorted out the story I’m writing at present.’ In fact, I’d been having problems with that story, having got to Chapter 12 or 13 twice, deciding it wasn’t working, and going back to start it again.

The day after Rebecca’s email, I suddenly thought, ‘What if I move this story to Ireland?’

I thought about it for a few more days. Changing the location to Clifden in Connemara involved far more than renaming places or giving the heroine a different name. It meant changing the original heroine’s backstory, and her personality too. The heroine in the original story had been less assertive than Charley, so I needed to change her whole approach. I soon found that this was easier than I had anticipated, as Charley was already a ‘real person’ to me. In that sense, I didn’t have to wait to get to know her as I wrote her story.

I also found that the new story that developed didn't give me the same problems as the original story had done! Maybe Charley knew all along that this was her story, and not that other heroine's!

Irish Intrigue

Charley Hunter returns unwillingly to Ireland to complete the filming of a TV drama series. She still hasn't come to terms with the tragic loss of her husband there two years previously, and the last thing she expects is an instant attraction to an Irish veterinary surgeon.

Luke Sullivan's life is full as he tries to balance caring for his two young children with his busy rural veterinary practice. After the break-up of his marriage, he vowed to leave women well alone, but finds himself drawn to Charley.

While Charley struggles with the re-awakening of her emotions, Luke faces a series of unexplained crises at his clinic, as well as an impending custody battle with his ex-wife.

How can an English actress and an Irish vet reconcile their different worlds? And will their relationship survive when Luke believes Charley has endangered his children's lives – and then betrayed him?

C Is For Children

Jennifer talks about children as secondary characters...

I love writing children. They’re fun to create and they’re extremely useful.

They can be instigators. In A Heart of Little Faith, my heroine has to work late and she needs someone to watch her daughter, Claire. The neighbor steps up and the neighbor’s brother, the hero, entertains her with a board game until my heroine arrives:

Even before she entered, Lily could hear Claire’s giggle, and the telltale popping sound of “Trouble.” Wondering who Samantha had subjected to her mercenary daughter, Lily frowned and walked into the living room. The sight stopped her dead in her tracks. Gideon.

“Claire,” she whispered, but neither Claire nor Gideon heard her. Claire was too busy giggling uncontrollably. Her brown curly hair bobbed as she bounced around in excitement. Lily observed with wonder Claire’s ease around Gideon. Since her father died, Claire’s contact with men had been limited. Lily rarely dated and Claire tended to be shy around strange men. Not so with this man.

He turned around and nodded at Lily. “Hello.”

The sound of his voice, even that one little word, made Lily’s stomach go all jiggly inside and she swallowed as she watched his eyes rove from her wet, raggedy hair to her water-sloshed shoes.

Oftentimes, I use them as a way to explain things to readers. Because young children, especially, don’t know about certain things, they can ask questions that a main character can answer, thus providing the reader with information they wouldn’t otherwise necessarily know. For example, in TheSeduction of Esther, I needed to explain a few Jewish terms to non-Jewish readers:

“Shabbat Shalom and welcome to Temple Beth Am. I’m Dave.”

Nathaniel shook the older man’s hand and looked into kind brown eyes. “Shabbat Shalom. I’m Nathaniel and this is my daughter, Zoe. We’re new members.”

“I thought you might be. Hello, Zoe.”

“Hi, I’m seven and I go to school downstairs. Why did you say Shabbat Shalom?”

Dave smiled. “It means peaceful Sabbath and we say it to each other on Shabbat. Why don’t you and your dad go inside and sit down. Join us at the oneg afterwards for snacks. We have cookies,” he said, with a wink at Zoe.

Children also provide a way to demonstrate a main character’s traits. For example, in Skin Deep, I used Valerie’s niece to show the type of person Valerie is:

Back at the house, John disappeared upstairs, while Valerie searched for Sarah. She followed the noise of children laughing into the basement. Her nieces and nephews played board games, and their laughter, whining and arguing filtered up the stairs and through the rest of the house. Valerie stood on the bottom step and waited for Sarah to see her. When Sarah looked up, Valerie caught her eye, and Sarah ran over.

“Will you do my makeup now?” Sarah asked as she bounced up and down.

Valerie smiled at the endless energy. After her own hike, and the tension caused by dealing with John, she just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep. But she’d made a promise to her niece. And, as John had said, she was a good aunt.

Children are funny. They see things differently than adults. They’re often much more literal. At the same time, their imaginations are usually bigger and they’re more open to new things. So putting them into a situation and watching them handle it is often amusing.

How do you deal with these issues?

C is for Characters' Introductions

Ana goes back for gems of advice for introducing characters in "Self-Editing for Fiction Writers"

"Once you understand a character well enough to bring him or her to life, we don't have to know where the character came from."

"When you defined your characters the minute you introduce them. you may be setting boundary lines that your readers will use to interpret your characters' actions through the rest of the book. But if you allow your readers to get to know your characters gradually, each reader will interpret them in his or her own way, thus getting a deeper sense of who your characters are than you could ever convey in a summary.

"Sketching out your characters for your readers is just plain intrusive. It's a form of telling that is almost certain to make your readers aware that you the writer are hard at work."


"It's often a good idea to introduce a new character with enough physical description for your readers to picture him or her. As with describing your settings, all you need are a few concrete, idiomatic details to jump-start your readers' imaginations."

B is for Back story

 

Margaret talks about writing back stories

 

Back story is an essential in almost all novels, something that happened weeks or months or even years before the story begins. Something that tells the reader a little bit about the hero/heroine’s character, but not too much all at once. To be effective it needs to be fed in gradually, usually through dialogue or each character’s thoughts.

 I develop complete back stories for my two main characters before I begin to write, then add and improve as I go. It’s amazing how their identities begin to emerge - until they eventually become real people in my mind. Real live people whose story I’m telling!

I don’t use every tiny detail that I’ve written down. Back story is simply an aid, put in where necessary as a flashback in the character’s mind, or in dialogue. Of the two options I find dialogue works better because the reader becomes more involved.

And of course everything needs to be woven in seamlessly so that the reader doesn’t see it as pure back story, simply an interesting and necessary part of the book. I actually find it equally as interesting delving in to what’s gone on before I ‘met’ my characters as I do writing about them.

 

 

 

B is for Ben O'Connor

Ben is a secondary character in Debra's This Can't Be Love.

Secondary characters are hugely important in a story. Most of the time, unless we're talking stranded in the wilderness or snowed in by a storm type of scenarios, our characters are interacting with other people throughout the course of their stories. Secondary characters often help us provide depth to our characters. They can act as a sounding board or a shoulder to cry on. They might be part of the back story. We don't want our background characters to take over the story, but more often than not, they are vital to it.

Ben O'Connor is the grandfather of Jessica Hart, the heroine in This Can't Be Love. Ben only has about eight total pages (if that) of face to face interaction with Jessica or Zach, but his role is vitally important. It's his absence in the story that sets up two conflicts between Zach and Jessica.

Jessica arrives at her grandfather's secluded cabin needing to get away from the emotional fallout of a failed relationship. She craves the peace she'll find there, but also knows spending time with Pops (as she calls Ben) will help her regain some equilibrium and put things into perspective. Instead, she finds Zach has taken up residence because Pops has gone on a month-long trip to trace his roots in Ireland. Jessica quickly lets Zach know in no uncertain terms that his service as a house-sitter is no longer required and the door shouldn't hit him on the way out. Zach, however has made a promise to Ben to take care of the place while he's gone, and he doesn't take that likely. Not to mention that he's sublet his apartment for the duration and doesn't have any place else to go. Jessica also comes to quickly realize that she wouldn't be able to handle everything that Zach is able to in Ben's absence. So, although neither is really comfortable with the idea, they wind up calling an uneasy truce and decide both will stay at the cabin.

As they get to know one another, an attraction grows. Zach is reluctant to act on it, however, because he doesn't want to betray Ben's trust in him by hooking up with his granddaughter. For her part, and for very personal, emotional reasons, Jessica is desperate to hook up with Zach before Pops gets home.

Ben doesn't make a physical appearance until page 188 in the book, but his specter 'haunts' both characters for most of the story. When he finally does make an appearance on his arrival back from Ireland, we still don't hear much from him, aside from now its his presence back home that's now keeping Jessica and Zach apart since they're no longer living in the same place, until almost the end of the story, where he provides the much needed shoulder to cry on and some sage advice that helps Jessica put her feelings for Zach in perspective.

I never knew either of my grandfathers, so it was fun to create and live vicariously through this imaginary character. And for a guy who wasn't around a lot in the story, he certainly played a huge role in it.

Until next time,

Happy Reading!

Debra
www.debrastjohnromance.com

B is for Ballet

Paula’s new heroine is a ballet dancer.

Write what you know, “they” say. So sometimes I despair of myself. I’ve had heroes who are archaeologists, veterinarians, undercover cops, and even a volcano expert. All of which required lengthy research (especially about volcanoes!). Each time I’ve wondered why I didn’t choose occupations for my characters that I already knew something about.

In IRISH DECEPTIONS, my current ‘work in progress’, my heroine is a ballet dancer. What do I know about ballet? In a word, nothing. I never had ballet lessons as a child (or indeed any dancing lessons), and I’ve never even watched a ballet on the stage, apart from a few scenes in musical shows.

So why did I choose this occupation for my heroine?

The answer to that is for a purely practical reason. I needed my heroine’s career to be cut short by a car accident that badly injured her knee. Not enough to disable her seriously, but enough to end her professional career. Okay, so she could have been an athlete of some kind e.g. a gymnast, or swimmer, or tennis player – but at the same time, I needed her occupation to be something that would bring her to the Mist Na Mara Arts Centre in Ireland (which has featured in all my Irish novels), so dancing seemed to be the obvious choice.

Could she still teach dancing even if she was unable to perform? Preliminary research showed that this was a career transition made by many dancers, even after injury may have halted their performing careers. So far, so good.

Then came the finer details. Yes, I know the names of the famous ballets, I even know what ‘up to 5th’ means (not sure how I know that!) – but the more complex movements in ballet? Not a clue! Google and YouTube proved useful, of course, but I needed some reassurance that I had got things right. And in this situation, it was not a case of ‘write what you know’ but rather ‘find someone who knows about what you want to write’. Fortunately I didn’t have to look very far, as I remembered a friend’s daughter has been a dance teacher for about 20 years. As a result, she and I have had several phone conversations, and even more email conversations. She is so excited about my heroine being a ballet dancer, and hopefully, with her help, I will get my facts and ballet terminology right.

B Is For Beginnings

Jennifer talks about how you begin a story...

Beginning a story is not as simple as it sounds. You don’t just sit down and write. Well, maybe you do, depending on whether or not you like to plot ahead of time, but ultimately, some amount of editing is required in order to make sure you are beginning your story in the right place.

Surprisingly, at least to me, is that one of the ways agents and editors can easily spot an inexperienced writer is because they start their story in the wrong place. Just because the story in your head starts at a particular point doesn’t mean the story should actually begin there.

Oftentimes, the place you originally start the story is actually backstory, information that should be sprinkled through the rest of the story that tells the reader what happened prior to their meeting your characters. That part isn’t essential to the progression of the story.

Additionally, you want the beginning of your story to hook the reader enough so that they want to continue reading. While scenery is pretty and sets the stage, it doesn’t convince the reader that she should spend her valuable time reading your book.

I’ll admit to having a difficult time with this, and whenever I go back to my books, I always think I could have done it better. But, here’s the beginning of my book, Miriam’s Surrender. What do you think?

The line from Casablanca flitted through Josh’s head. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world...” He fisted his hands at his side and closed his eyes. 

This morning, he’d hurried to work for a meeting with a new client. He’d worked on the presentation for weeks—a structural redesign of an Alumni Club for a local private school. It was different from most of the projects he had worked on before, and it sparked his creativity. They’d been awarded the contract and this morning’s purpose was to meet the client’s daily contact, the person Josh would work with throughout the span of the project. 

He’d walked into the red and black conference room of his architectural firm and froze. Sleek, black, flawless coiffed hair. 

No way. 

Ramrod straight posture. 

It couldn’t be. 

And as she turned and approached him, she’d glided. 

Oh crap. 

Miriam.