Never dull

I do a lot of research before starting my manuscripts, but that doesn't stop me from stumbling over gaps in my knowledge while I'm in rough draft stage. Rather than letting them slow me down, I write bolded, all-caps notes to myself and keep going. My current work-in-progress's notes include:

LOOK UP APPROPRIATE DISHES FOR WINTER DINNER.

CONFIRM DETAILS OF BATTLE OF QUEENSTON HEIGHTS.

PRETEND YOU'RE INTERESTED IN SHEEP AND ADD SOME DESCRIPTIVE DETAIL HERE.

The funny thing is, by the time I've learned enough about sheep to flesh out that paragraph, I bet I'll think sheep are fascinating. Maybe even almost as interesting as horses.



That's how it usually works for me. Before I started researching the War of 1812 as part of my current hero's backstory, I would've said it was nowhere near as interesting as the Napoleonic Wars. Now that I know more about it, well, it's messy and gripping and horrible, and it's just criminal how boring my high school history class made it sound.

Since I started writing historical romance, I've developed surprising interests in the flora and fauna of islands of the Indian Ocean (one of these days I'll finish that shipwreck story), the duties of footmen (I once had a hero go undercover as a servant, then decided it didn't work and rewrote those chapters), and the workings of the East India Company fleet. To name only a few. And my conclusion is that almost nothing is boring once you start to learn about it. Really, I think this Discovery Channel ad from a few years back sums up my attitude toward just about anything I've ever needed to research:



What about you? What topics that you thought were boring turned fascinating as soon as you knew anything about them?

My writing process

Since I’m about a month into a new manuscript, I decided to make my July contribution to Romancing the Past all about my writing process.

The romance writing community is divided between plotters and pantsers. Plotters plan out their books in great detail from beginning to end before starting Chapter One. They make detailed outlines. Many, I’m given to understand, write character biographies or make Goal-Motivation-Conflict charts for individual scenes and for the book as a whole.

Pantsers, on the other hand, just get an idea and start writing it, often describing their process as “flying into the mist.” They don’t know what’s going to happen next, beyond that in a romance the hero and heroine will get a happy ending--though I gather sometimes they discover the guy they began the book thinking of as Mr. Wrong is actually Mr. Right--or in a mystery that the murder will be solved, even if they don’t know whodunnit when they start any more than the sleuth does, and so on.

As you may have deduced by my use of the word “they” for both camps, I don’t really fit either group. Instead, I’m one of those in-between people sometimes called “plotzers.” While I take the word of successful plotters and pantsers that their processes work for them, I’m frankly a bit baffled by the extremists on both sides. How can you not feel like you’ve already told the story if you, say, write a 50 pages outline before beginning your book? And on the other side, how can you go in without even knowing what your final destination looks like? It’d be like getting on the road and driving without a map. Which I suppose some people do, but I’m just not that spontaneous 99% of the time. I like to know where I’m going, whether my end goal is someplace nice for dinner or the manuscript for a novel.

So what does my personal hybrid approach look like? Well, at any moment I have anywhere from five to a dozen half-formed story ideas bouncing around my brain. I have characters in search of plots, settings waiting for the right characters to people them, historical incidents I can’t read about without thinking, “there’s a book in that,” and so on. I do my best to feed my imagination with a healthy dose of reading, fiction and non, to help add to my stock of ideas. Every so often, some of the pieces come together in my mind--a group of characters walk into a setting and enact a fictionalized version of a historical incident, as it were--and I know I have enough for a book.



At that point, I write an outline, at least loosely based on the Hero’s Journey. It’s nothing detailed, just a page or two to reassure myself that yes, there’s a whole plot there. I’ll spend a few days naming my main characters and coming up with a working title for the book. If I know I need major research, I’ll find enough to get me started online and begin digging deeper by ordering books from Amazon and interlibrary loan or sending polite emails to experts.

After that? I write, shooting for 1000 words/day at least five days/week. It’s as simple as that. If I get stuck, I look back at my outline to find out what’s happening next. My rough drafts are filled with bolded, all-caps notes reminding me to NAME THE HOUSEKEEPER or WORK OUT THE DETAILS OF JACK’S PRE-1804 COMBAT EXPERIENCE.

As I write, I research. I know my current manuscript is going to end up at Waterloo. That’s still a good 50,000 words away, but it’s big, and I want to get it right. So I’m reading or re-reading everything about the battle, including the run-up and aftermath, that I can get my hands on.

I don’t quite collage, but I look for visuals to bring the story alive. My WIP took on an added bit of life, for example, when I realized my hero looks like Richard Madden (Robb Stark in Game of Thrones, pictured above) and that the barn on his Northumberland family home is a bastle house, built for defense against border raids and home to not just the beasts but the family until sometime in the late 17th century (see below). Along the same lines, I assemble a soundtrack. So far the WIP’s just includes “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “Holding Out For a Hero,” but I expect it to grow into a healthy playlist by the time I finish my first draft.



Writers, are you a plotter, a pantser, or somewhere in between, like me? Readers, do you think you can tell the difference by the finished product?

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Susanna Fraser writes Regency romance with a focus on the Napoleonic Wars. The Sergeant's Lady and A Marriage of Inconvenience are available now from Carina Press.

Blending Fiction with Fact

Letting one's imagination run completely wild becomes slightly more complicated when you're writing historical. How far can you abuse the facts before readers start to doubt your research abilities?

In contemporary, you can put Mr Smith in the White House, make him single and dashing and falling in love with the gardener's daughter and call it a romantic comedy. Doesn't matter that Obama is currently there, doesn't matter that never before has there been a dashing, young, single president with enough time on his hands to chase after the gardner's daughter.

This doesn't work so well when you toss Queen Elizabeth off her throne to make room for your young, dashing king (unless you're writing alternate history, of course). Which, granted, is an extreme example, but a similar fear applies to smaller facts. How far can we stretch before belief is suspended and doubt in the author settles in?

In my next medieval release from Carina Press, my story is set in Jedburgh, Scotland. I have a scene at an abbey and there my debate started. Do I make up an abbey, or use the famous Jedburgh Abbey? My problem is that my story is set during the Protestant uprisings and reformation, and Jedburgh Abbey was pretty much ransacked and destroyed. I did my research. I know that. BUT I still wanted to use that fabulous setting.

What I ended up doing was working the fiction into the fact long before that scene.

Fact: Queen Mary of Scots stayed at Jedburgh Abbey a couple of times, she had a townhouse in Jedburgh and I saw no reason why she might not have had a soft spot for the place.

Fact: During the Reformation, some abbeys were taken under the wing of protectors/guardians and were left alone so long as the monks did not stray beyond the walls to preach.

Fiction: On a visit to Edinburgh, I put in a scene between my hero (a powerful laird in Jedburgh) and Queen Mary, where I make it clear Jedburgh Abbey has been put under his protection at her request. He has a permanent guard at the abbey to protect it from the mobs, and so in my story it has not been ransacked.

Another big event in my story is the escape of Queen Mary from Holyrood House where she is held captive by her own barons and her royal guard. Queen Mary facilitates her own escape by 'making up' with her traiterous husband (Henry Darnley) and winning her royal guard back to her side. Of course I wanted my hero to have a hand in rescuing the queen, but no way could I have him intrude on that escape setting which is so iconic.

But, I have always wondered why the royal guard switched sides so quickly. One minute they were sided with the traiterous barons and her captors, the next they were escorting her down the servant passages to help her escape. Step in my hero, when there's a build up and a scene where he 'convinces' the captain of the guard (using, um, brute force and threats) to change sides, so the captain's mind was open to being approached by the queen for help. So, my hero gets to play a small role in the queen's escape, and in a way that might or might not have genuinely happened.

Both instances mentioned are stretching facts, perhaps too far, but hopefully I've shown that I do know my history and have purposely contrived fact to bend toward my fiction. I'm not sure. This is one of the small examples of the risks historical authors take, over and over, in order to make their characters and story work within the frame of documented history.

I tend to write royalty and well-known figures into my stories, which makes it even more tricky to take my story where I want it to go and not where history has already gone.

As a reader of historical fiction, how much leeway do you allow for in the blending of fiction and fact?
As a writer of historical fiction, do you stick strictly to documented fact and how do you get creative?

The Evolution of a Story

I started Always a Princess in the 1990s with the germ of an idea…what if two people met at a gala London ball, both planning to steal the same jewel?  He's the son of an earl, recently returned from his travels against his will.  She's a lower class woman who steals to survive.

My heroine, Eve, needed a bigger goal than just staying alive.  As a child in the London slums, Eve always imagined that the bucolic life would be a paradise, and she wants to buy a farm and escape the city completely.  After a major jewel heist, and after surrendering her virginity to the hero, Phillip, she takes the stolen diamond necklace and disappears.

Of course, Eve would have no idea of the realities of country life, so I had her buy a dilapidated farm with a barn standing only until the next strong wind comes through and a scrawny cow with a moo that sounds like a death rattle.  I was working with an Englishwoman at the time, and she acted as my consultant on the book.  She had relatives who were farmers, and so she did double duty providing information.  I remember asking her what an English farmer would name his cow.  When she told me “Buttercup,” we both cracked up.  It was such an impossible name for that emaciated cow.

I turned in the book.  A while later, I had one of those calls from my editor at the time.  “Alice,” he said.  “I love the first half, but the rest doesn't work.”  He was right.  Not only had I hijacked the story from London, where it belonged, but I’d allowed my heroine to escape from the consequences of having slept with the hero.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I put away that farm, with the leaky hayloft where the hero has to try to sleep after he’d tracked Eve down.  I took the story back to London and made Eve deal with Phillip and their new relationship.  I lost Buttercup.

Now, I had another half-book to write, and I needed an entire new plot.  I’d had a relatively unimportant character in Eve's bumbling but caddish former employer, Arthur.  I built a whole new thread in which Eve would take her revenge against him by marrying into his family and disgracing them.  I wrote that and turned it in.  After all that work, I got one more revision letter and did hours more.  Finally, the book appeared in 2001 published under the pseudonym Alice Chambers.

Flash forward to 2010.  I had the rights to Always a Princess back from the original publisher and asked Carina if they’d be interested in re-releasing it.  Happily, they were.  Now, I had a new editor, Jessica Schulte.  She liked much about the story but thought, rightly, that no woman in her right mind would ever want to marry Arthur Cathcart, even for revenge.  Out went that plot, and went back to work yet again.  I don’t want to reveal too much of the new story, but Arthur still plays an important part.  Also, the police are a bit more active in this version.

I was finished finally, right?  Well no.  As I mentioned in an earlier blog (The Case of the Disappearing Dukes), it’s always seemed odd to me that English lords seem to die off in their early fifties and sixties, leaving their thirty-something sons the title.  In Always a Princess, I’d given Phillip a mother and father he liked very much.  To some readers, that made him seem like a mama’s boy—not something you want in a romance hero.  A few more tweaks convinced Jessica we’d fixed that problem.

After all these rounds of changes, I estimate that I’ve written over 160,000 words to produce a 90,000 word book.  As a writer friend always tells me, “To write is to rewrite.”  I grumble every time he says that, but I do the work because he's right.  As writers, we have to remember that none of our words are gold-plated, and we have to discard them and produce more as the story demands.  We have editors for a reason.  No matter how long we’ve been writing, we can’t evaluate our own work the way a disinterested professional can.  If one of them tells me Buttercup has to go, I need to take his advice.  But, I sure do miss that cow.

Always a Princess will be released in August.

Alice's website

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How I do what I do

I have to admit from the outset that I don’t have a firm grip on how I write. To tell you the truth, I think that’s probably true of many, if not most, writers. I don’t know where I come up with some of the things that come out of my fingers…you know, the sort of instance where the author insists “the character said that,” or “I tried to make the heroine do X, but she just wouldn’t do it.” That’s all cute and cosmic and stuff, but the truth is there only is the writer and a blank piece of paper or, these days, screen.

Given the above, there are a couple of things that mark my coordinates in the universe of writers. One, I’m a pantser. Those of you who aren’t insane enough to try to do this may not be aware that as a group, we divide up pretty firmly into two camps: the plotters and the pantsers. Plotters plot. They lay out the whole story in advance and know what’s going to happen all along the way before they start on page one. Pantsers write by the seat of their pants. They pretty much open a new document and start writing. Then, they keep writing until the story’s done.

I once managed to plot out an outline before I started writing the book, but the only way I could do it was to grit my teeth and promise myself that I wouldn’t have to stick to the damned outline if I didn’t want to. It was agony.

I generally used to think up two characters and an interesting opening situation and started writing. Since I started in (cough) 1990, I’ve learned that there are a couple of pitfalls I tend to fall into, and now I plan ahead how I’m going to avoid those before I start the story. I’m happy to report I never run out of pitfalls. So, I’m doing more and more planning as I mature as a writer. Which brings me to the next point.

Just about nobody is a pure plotter or pure pantser. I have one friend who writes an outline and then fills in the scenes and then the details for the scenes so that when she’s done, she pretty much just needs to flesh out her outline. She’s extreme. Most plotters work from a more general outline than that.

Even the most extreme pantser who writes romance knows some things about her story before she starts writing. She knows there will be at least two people who are destined to love each other but who have to overcome some conflict to be together. There will be a happy ending, usually following a dark period in which it appears their love can‘t succeed. Sexual tension will be a big part of the story, whether or not it’s expressed in actual sex. Most of us writers aren’t pure plotters or pantsers but are hybrids to some extent.

A second dimension on the plane of my writing lies along the continuum of what I call multiple-drafters and few-drafters. Some writers love to barf out whole books in what they sometimes call “sh***y first drafts” and go on to revise, revise, revise. Such writers thrive in forums like Book-in-a-Week or National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). They get it all out and go back and fix it. The few-drafters write more slowly, revise as they go along, and only need to polish (even if they do a lot of polishing) at the end.

I fall in the second camp. My idea of hell would be to take 50,000 words of stuff I threw at a page and turn it into a book. In fact, I hate revisions of any kind. (My editor can’t read this, right?) My friend, the extreme plotter I mentioned above, puts it perfectly. “Every day, I write six sh***y pages. The next day, I revise them and write another six sh***y pages.” That’s how I work. At the end, I have a book that needs a few pass-throughs before I send it in and wait for the inevitable revision letter. I don’t know of any evidence that the other method is better at avoiding revision letters than my method, so I’ll stick to mine.

I’ve met Chris Baty, the creator of NaNoWriMo, and truly, he and his creation are unmitigated Forces for Good. Someday, I will do NaNoWriMo, but when I’ve finished, I won’t have an entire book. I’ll have the first 50,000 words of a book. (Chris can’t read this here, right?)

So, I’m a slow-and-steady pantser. There’s one real danger at being that type of writer. If you write small amounts of material at a stretch, you’d better make sure that you have Discipline. Writing 1,000 words every once in a while will pretty much guarantee that you never get a book done. Discipline is where I shine.

I work at my day job four days a week. That gives me three-day weekends. I’ve found that 5,000 words per week produces enough pages to create finished stories on a pretty good schedule. Five-thousand words divided by three days is 1,666.666666666 words per day. That’s what I do. I have to take days off from time to time, but otherwise, I write those 1,667 words every Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I will literally stop in the middle of a sentence once I get to that magic number.

That was working for me until a publisher asked me to do an extra story I couldn’t refuse. Rather than give up working on my main work-in-progress, I decided to add another 625 words per day on my lunch hours at work. That gave me another 2,500 words per week. Slower than 5,000 words per week but workable.

Then, I got involved in blogging regularly. To do that, I added another 500 words when I get home in the evening. (That’s what I’m doing right now.) I’m almost fanatical about doing this. If you’re a slow writer, you need to be religious about your schedule, too, even if it’s an hour per day and you get 500 words done during that hour.

Writers write. Period. You may take months plotting out your book so that when you sit down to write it, you’re only fleshing out what you’ve already planned, or you can sit down at the computer and let your freak flag fly. You can write in marathon sessions, producing twenty, thirty, forty pages a day, or you can schedule regular hours during your weekends and reliably produce small amounts of text that finally build to a completed manuscript. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Just do it.

http://www.alicegaines.blogspot.com/

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