Booklist
In our writing TBR pile:
How to write a Damn Good Thriller (Status: Reading)
Creating Characters (Status: TBR)
Creating Characters: How to Build Story People (Status: TBR)
Author Offerings
Three women haunted by horrors from their pasts. Four men who want to show them there's Nothing to Fear by Lacey Savage
Dragon Slayer now available at Noble Romance Publishing
About Us
Award winning author Lacey Savage (AKA Hunter Raines) pens erotic tales of true love and mythical destiny, peopled with strong alpha heroes and feisty heroines.
Fiona Jayde is an author of kickass, action packed romances and when not plotting murder and mayhem enjoys steamy romance novels, sexy spy thrillers, murky mysteries and movies where things blow up.
We love to talk about writing! Here, we share the "nuggets" we've culled from our huge collections of writing books, and chat about what makes us want to roll our eyes or raise our eyebrows.
Interested in guest blogging on Tips and WIPs? Contact us!
Archive for the ‘Eyes Wide Open’ Category
I was reading a blog post as Dear Author about reader wants and came across this comment from Joy …’I would say this feeling of “Wow! These people really love each other” is the primary reason I read a romance’…
This got me thinking – how do we portray love on the page? Lust/desire/arousal is a physical reaction, and I suppose love can be as well? Is it the actions of what characters do for each other that make us readers believe they’ve fallen in love?
Authors and readers – how do you perceive characters falling in love – in favorite novels or your manuscripts?
I’ve discovered a great tool which some people may call cheating:) I don’t know if it’s cheating or not, but it was certainly helpful in my latest MS.
I’ve discovered a book called Flip Dictionary which is basically a large thesaurus. Since I tend to constantly repeat a word or two in an MS (and they change with each MS!) the Flip Dictionary is a terrific tool for finding alternative words or phrases and inspiring me into a new hopefully “sharper” prose.
Its also a wonderful way to build up vocabulary:)
Snowflaking is a verb. Really. My friend Beth Kery made it up:)
Actually “snowflaking” or rather The Snowflake Method is a plotting method designed by a software engineer turned writer Randy Ingermanson who basically approached it the same way as he would managing a large project: starting from top or high level view and working outward, getting more detailed in the process. You guys can check out the main idea behind the Snowflake method here.
For those of us who really like structure in our daily madness of writing, this is a terrific tool to get organized and not let our own creativity stifle us. (My pantser friends are shuddering in horror just about now). As a die hard plotter, I tend to freeze up when I hit a plot hole – and using this method, I’m finding my plot-holes before I even start writing.
Since I’m also a huge geek, I jumped at the chance to purchase the Snowflake Pro software – which is basically a “self guiding” plotting method. (While the article about the snowflake method is free for all to use, the software is a little pricey… Though worth the price in my humble opinion, especially since you get free upgrades for life, and if you purchase Fiction for Dummies and get a 50% off coupon)
So far, I’m seriously loving it. I love that everything is one place , and I don’t need to jump back and fourth between my Excel file and m character note cards and my synopsis. I also love that it makes me think in terms of structure and not just random plot points that can happen at any time.
I highly recommend the Snowflake Method as a plotting method, and I’m loving the Snowflake Pro.Do you guys use other software/organization tools you want to recommend?
I often lament (read: whine) to Lacey about my fear of writing a full length novel. Its so confusing and full of subplots and twists, and well… long! So Lacey gave me a truly brilliant suggestion: take something by one of your favorite authors and outline it – scene by scene, chapter by chapter. Outline it in terms of subplots, and tension and why YOU enjoy the work so much.
I can’t say I followed that advice – as brilliant as it was – until last week. But man, did I learn a lot. I used my favorite book: Ice Blue by Anne Stuart as my guide.
Ice Blue is exactly the type of book I’d like to write – edge of your seat romantic suspense with smoking hot sexual tension and characters that I can’t stop thinking about even after I close the book. I have this amazing obsession with assassin heroes – and the women who bring out the human in them.
I outlined the book an Excel file, with columns for scene, chapter, pov, pages in the scene, description of the scene, sexual tension and when I remembered, plot “hooks”. The hardest part was putting the book down to get to the damned computer to plug in the scenes:)
I learned some remarkable things. For one, I learned how to slow things down while keeping the pace taut. (since I write short, my stories tend to go at a breakneck pace, and a recent very favorable review compared my writing to a highway where you have to grip the wheel with both hands…ie: Gripping but you can’t take your eyes off the road lol )
I learned how to seriously coil up sexual tension – my favorite part in a romance. And I learned how to interject subplots – without slowing down the pace too much – and keep those subplots relevant (which is always an issue with me – there are some brilliant books where I skip over the subplots because they don’t have any real connection to the HH until the very end… )
In all, I’m thrilled with what I learned, and looking forward to repeating the exercise.
My biggest problem is getting out of the book long enough to actually absorb technique instead of devouring the story, and this technique allowed me to do just that. What do you guys do to learn from your favorite authors?
I picked up a number of excellent tips and tidbits at the Romantic Times Convention which I’d love to share:) I’ll do my best to attribute them to the right person, but after a week of decompressing my memory isn’t a hundred percent:)
1. Throw out the writing books and read what you want to write.
This is from my conversation with thriller author Robert Gregory Browne at the Book Signing Fair.
2. Get out of the mindset that a story is over just because you typed “the end”. You may be asked to add in a scene or two – and if you’re mentally “done” you’ll have a hard time coming back to that world.
This from a conversation with an Ellora’s Cave editor – very practical I thought.
3. Research is one thing but to really get into the mindset of a certain “profession”, read biographies of people living similar lifestyles.
This was either said byRick Mofina or Barry Eisler- my apologies for not quite remembering which thriller author said this, but brilliant advice non-the-less. It was said at one one of the thriller workshops – and really got my mind whirling. Time to renew that library membership!
4. Feel free to keep the “little darlings” until the final draft, and let your editor decide which to keep or toss.
This was from a conversation with thriller author Brett Battles about inserting tidbits of your own cleverness into a manuscript and being reluctant to remove them.
5. Read more. (Duh right?) I’ve been sadly lacking in that department.
6. As you read, note or highlight (hopefully on the Kindle) the areas which you feel you could improve on.
This by our very own Lacey Savage 
You guys got more tips (from RT or otherwise) to share?
I just returned from the Romantic Times Convention. For those of you who don’t know, this is one of the largest gatherings of romance authors and romance readers. It’s an annual conference, and it takes place in a different city each year. This year, it was held in Columbus, Ohio.
I’m going to skip over my horrid travel experience and just say that the conference was wonderful!
I presented on three panels this year, and they all went very well. By far the workshop I gave alongside Mechele Armstrong, Samantha Kane, Trista Ann Michaels and Liddy Midnight was the best attended. The workshop was entitled THE MÉNAGE PLOT: THE GLUE THAT HOLDS THREE (OR MORE) PEOPLE TOGETHER. We nearly packed the room. There were tons of questions, and at the end people came up to talk to us. A number of them said this was the panel they got the most out of from the entire conference, so I was thrilled. Since the panel was Friday, I left on a high note.
I also attended a few workshops myself — two of which were unbelievably good for me. One was on goal setting and productivity, with Vicki Pettersson. Absolutely amazing workshop. She was engaging, fun, genuine, and she gave me a ton of things to think about. I think attending that one workshop will do more for my productivity in the next year than anything else I could have done. The second was on conflict, and it was given by two historical romance authors: Robyn DeHart and Tracy Garrett. They made me think about conflict in ways I never had before, and I’m not new at this writing thing. Just when I thought I couldn’t get much more out of craft workshops, along comes something like this that makes me dig deeper than ever. I’m very glad I attended both of those. (This just goes to show that you never know where your next critical tidbit will come from. Take every opportunity to learn!)
I also attended other events: the parties in the evenings, the agents’ panel, the editors’ panel, some publisher spotlights. If you have an opportunity to attend an RT conference, or any writers’ conference, for that matter, take it. It’s a fabulous way to network with industry contacts and to learn, learn, learn!
What was the last writers’ conference you attended? If you’ve never attended one, what’s holding you back?
Related articles to check out:
- Quick Romantic Times Recap (whatever.scalzi.com)
- Overheard at Romantic Times 2010 (smartbitchestrashybooks.com)
I’m reading How To Write a Damn Good Thriller by James Frey (An excellent book in a series of excellent books) and I had a minor epiphany: I want to write thrillers! All these books claiming that a first step for any author should be figuring out their genre and subgenre were absolutely right. My Genre and Subgenre is Romantic Thrillers!
It doesn’t really change anything for me in terms of traditional labels – I’ll still write a contemp today and a Urban Fantasy tomorrow, but now I know how to identify that feeling of “something missing”, and what to do about it:)
Plus, if someone asks me what I write, I don’t need to stammer between “romantic sci fi or suspence or time travel or fantasy” I can just say “Romantic Thrillers in various subgenres”. As long as I’m impressing myself, right?
How did you guys come to figuring out what you wanted to write?
I had a small epiphany last weekend.
I was speaking with one of my oldest friends and picking her brain about recording studios. My current MS has to do with music – and I know next to nothing about the logistics of professional music recording. My friend is in the business and being a writer herself (she writes lyrics), we speak the same language… sort off.
Now – my MS had stalled. It had been stalled for a while. But when speaking with my friend – about the music studio, about my hero and his personality and how he hates the “mechanization” of music, I suddenly realized my hero breathed. He freaking breathed – and all I had to do was see things from the angle of his environment.
I have all these buzz words on paper -but I don’t think they’d matter all this much because in light of researching the background, I stumbled onto the thing that motivates him: music, raw music. Or as my friend had put it – the spontaneity of live performance. (She’s brilliant, what can I say.)
Of course this led me to add about twenty titles to my Netflix que – my other favored method of doing research. But I figured out that it really does matter to have someone in the know to bounce ideas off.
So what is your favored method of doing research? How do you go about it and what tips can you share with us?
It’s my father’s birthday today, and in between cooking a fabulous birthday meal, I finished reading BY CUNNING AND CRAFT, by Peter Selgin.
I never read anything without a highlighter by my side, so I thought I’d post a few of the items that struck me, in the hopes that they’ll help you, too. I wholeheartedly recommend getting the book, by the way. It’s a quick read, filled with a lot of insightful tips. What I liked the most was the fact that the author is known for his short stories, and so he focused on that aspect of the craft. I love writing short, but so often books on writing are about the novel, because let’s face it, the novel is still considered the end-all-and-be-all of literary works.
Ask yourself, What does the character want? and then How far is she willing to go to get it? If the answer to the latter question is, Not very far, then at least you know why you’re having trouble writing active scenes: A character who doesn’t want anything, or doesn’t want it badly enough, is not going to act. Give her the necessary motivation, situate her such that she doesn’t simply want the thing in question, but needs it to survive physically or emotionally, and your character will do things to show us, vividly, who she is. (pg.33)
Unless it really tells us something about the character, don’t record banal gestures. “She took a breath and exhaled,” tells me nothing about a character other than her respiratory system is functioning. Because they serve no purpose, such stage directions are intrusive. (pg.108)
Research just enough to feel competent at discussing your subject. You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to discuss brain surgery, only to sound like a brain surgeon. (pg.120)
We fiction writers don’t always know what we’re doing. Until we’re done we never have the whole picture, only parts of it. (pg.182)
Often our working titles supply us with our stories’ themes or make it clear that we don’t yet know what they are. (Which is why you should title your stories provisionally, even in the earliest stages of writing, since the effort will help you locate the story’s center.) (pg.188)
What do you think of these quotes? Did anything resonate with you? Anything you don’t agree with? Drop me a line in the comments, and let’s discuss!
The other day, Lacey was asking me about my process of completing a project, so I thought I’d post this here with the hopes that it may help those who suffer from “third chapter blues”.
To give a bit of background: I was one of those people who never could complete a story. I would rewrite the first three chapters until I choked my characters with my plot and then dropped the whole thing.
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