Category Archives: Craft

COMPLEX CHARACTERS

This is the fourth in a series of six observations on writing craft

Another note I find myself writing on almost every contest entry I judge is some variation on: Take the time to think more deeply about your characters.

More time. Always more time. Ugh.

Everyone drafts books differently, but for most people I would imagine that characters are less distinct in the first few drafts than they will eventually be. I find out a lot about my characters by writing them, and then looking at what I have and drawing them out of the clues I find there. It’s one of the great joys of working on a book – feeling these characters become deeper, more complex people.

But I’m always aware, when I write that feedback, that it’s a simple note for a difficult process. Easy to say ‘think deeply about your characters’, but what on earth does that look like? And once you’ve figured out how to do it, how do you bring what you’ve found back to the page?

The answers to those questions will be different for everyone, and I think it’s worth thinking about it – maybe even trying to make a process for it.

Something that occurs to me when I’m reading contest entries is that the writer might feel more free to explore the character if they took them out of the plot. The plot – especially if it’s a tight, romance-trope plot – often feels like it’s dictating the character, rather than the other way around.

So one way to approach it could be to have your character perform a simple task and write their stream of consciousness as they do it. Follow every little thought, no matter how trivial. Let them bitch and concentrate and worry. Toni Jordan used to ask us to write our characters peeling an orange. Then you have to figure out how your character peels an orange. With a knife, or fingers? Messy, fussy, annoyed? How do they experience the sensations? Are they even aware of them, or are they thinking about something else? How do their body and their mind relate to each other?

My feeling is that once you’ve done this work, you’re writing from a place of greater understanding and it will be quite natural to bring the more complex elements of your character into the scene.

However, I have one excellent shortcut to suggest: The simplest way to make a character feel complex is to have them feel multiple, even contradictory things at once.

I notice this when it’s done well, and I notice when it’s absent. If a character feels only one thing, they feel simple – especially if that one feeling is the obvious response to what’s happening in the scene. If they feel multiple things they begin to feel realistic. Intimacy is wonderful and scary. When new opportunities enter your life they often take you outside your comfort zone. Or going back to the last post about family: You can love someone and be frustrated by them at the same time, or want them to succeed and feel jealous. It doesn’t make you a bad person, it just makes you human.

Another effect it has is that it forces the character to have an inner dialogue about themselves. To feel multiple things at once you need a level of self-awareness that allows you to feel something and understand why you feel it, but not give weight to it or act on it. Or to watch yourself having the worst possible reaction to something even while you understand that you’re behaving badly and making things worse. We don’t always act in our best interests, and we don’t always enact our worst impulses.

I’m not saying every character should perfectly understand themselves, because so few of us do. But even when we wilfully misunderstand ourselves, it’s in the context of an inner dialogue that has developed over a lifetime of being in our own head.

Seeing this inner life makes characters feel multi-dimensional, and it makes them feel like grown-ups.

RELATIONSHIPS: SHARED HISTORY

This is the third of six observations on writing craft

One of my reader catnips is family. Found family, real family, doesn’t matter. Give me those deep relationships that matter more and can cut deeper than any other relationship. Give me unconditional loyalty and conflicted love.

Something I notice in most of the contest entries I read is that the dialogue between family members or old friends doesn’t have a depth of shared history to it. They don’t sound like people who have known each other forever – they sound like they’ve just met.

Honestly, I understand how this happens, and I feel like it’s even appropriate for a first draft. In a first draft they literally have just met. There were points in late drafts of Untamed when I would suddenly realise whole sections of the siblings’ history with each other was a giant blank to me. They existed only in the bits of their shared past that were recounted or referenced in the story.

It strikes me as a really good place to focus attention, thought and work as a story is developed beyond the first draft.

I think we all know that feeling of being an adult until you go home, and then you’re straight back into a family dynamic that was cemented when you were eight years old and you honestly can’t believe some of the ways you’re behaving. You have a professional job! Where people look up to you! And you’re smart! And mature! Until you’re with your family.

Showing this dynamic is a powerful way to give a sense of history (these people shaped each other) – but it’s also a powerful way to draw your character and make them feel complex. We see them behave differently in different contexts.

When our heroine’s talking to her little brother does she immediately start mothering him and organising things he’s probably entirely capable of doing by himself? Does he enrage her more quickly and effectively than anyone else? Does she not expect him to have a complex inner life? How does she deal with it when she sees signs that he, in fact, does? Do they always joke with each other – a habit that becomes painful when they have something devastating to deal with together?

Dialogue is, I think, the primary place to do this work. The ways family talk to each other – the things they say and don’t say – are going to tell us almost everything we want to know. This goes back to my previous posts on writing for an investigative reader: The inconsistencies between what they say, feel, and don’t say will give the reader room to begin drawing the shape of these relationships.

It’s also a good chance to make the dialogue work harder. It’s a framework for asking: How would this specific character say this thing? What would they say in this circumstance, to this person? If the characters are all in relationship with each other, then they need to speak as their particular self for the dynamics to work.

Another simple but effective tool is thinking about the shorthand they would have developed over years and years. If someone brings up something that happened years ago is it a story they bring up all the time, God, Jenny, we know! Do they all have different positions on what really happened that need to be relitigated every time it comes up? Is it a shared story they can reference with one word in order to illustrate a point? Do they use the name of one particular sister to reference certain behaviour (Don’t Donna me over this!)?

There’s almost no new information you can tell your family – only continuing, evolving conversations, decades long.

THE INVESTIGATIVE READER: OPENING SCENE

This is the second of six observations on writing craft

In the previous post I focused on dialogue, because that’s where the power of leaving space for the reader is most immediately apparent to me as a reader. However, another place I’ll notice whether I’m invited to participate in the story or not is in the opening scene – the opening lines, even.

We all want to nail the beginning of our story, because we want the reader to stick with us. I think writing for an investigative reader is a useful tool for doing this.

The beginning of a story is when we have to introduce a lot of brand new information to the reader. With every solid piece of information we tell the reader – the markers that give them a sense of where they are – we have a choice about whether we give them room to start putting the shape of the world together themselves, or whether we draw it for them.

There’s a fine balance between statement and question in writing, which I don’t fully understand, but which I’m aware of navigating while I write. When is it more powerful to make a statement – to ‘just say the thing’ – and when is it more powerful to ask the reader to figure it out? But for this post I’ll say, simplistically: Each question arises from and is anchored to a solid fact.

An example:

Stating the fact and the answer together (and thus leaving nothing for the reader to do) might look like: She needed to feel bold today, so she wore her brightest lipstick.

Stating the fact that gives rise to a question might look like: She’d chosen her boldest lipstick.

Readers will immediately start to think about why she’s wearing her boldest lipstick. The most obvious reason – that she wants to feel confident – will occur to the reader, almost unconsciously. Even just working on that level, it’s a detail that will invite readers in, rather than shut them out.

But what if she’s meeting her mum and as soon as her mum sees the lipstick she becomes disapproving? The reader connects those two pieces of information and comes up with a world of detail.

Yes, she needed to feel confident, but she was also intentionally rubbing her mum up the wrong way. It shows us how she feels about that relationship (like she’ll never get her mum’s approval, like she desperately wants her mum to see her). It raises questions about their relationship (what went wrong between them?). It shows that what she tells us and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same thing. It leaves room for some really tender emotion to enter the narrative.

This thought process can be applied to every new detail that is given or purposely omitted at the beginning of the story. Some of those details are character details, like the example above. Some will be plot details, where we have to think about how much solid information the reader needs to feel situated in the story and how much we want to leave for them to guess at – which questions we want them to be asking.

THE INVESTIGATIVE READER: DIALOGUE

This is the first of six observations on writing craft

Here’s a sentence I find myself writing over and over when I’m marking up contest manuscripts: Writers love to investigate – it’s what makes them engaged readers!

(And now you know if your work was judged by me, because I am in love with this concept.)

I started thinking about readers as investigators during the past year or so, and I love how clearly it draws the relationship between writing and the act of reading. It gives me a way to look at my writing on a sentence level and consciously make it more dynamic.

I began noticing it when my attention would wander during dialogue that didn’t ask me to participate in any way.

This is dialogue where two people are responding exactly to what each other is saying. One asks for information, the other gives it. One makes a remark that merits a certain emotional response, that emotional response is given. All the relevant information for the interaction, scene and narrative are given in the text of the dialogue without activating the subtext.

This leaves me, the reader, with nothing to do but passively receive what I’m given.

What I really want as a reader is to be an active participant. I want to be given crumbs to collect, and follow. I want to be required to carry one piece of information with me, and arrive at some new understanding by connecting it to another piece of information. I want, basically, to play connect the dots. The story gives me enough solid points to travel through, but I draw the line.

We’re puzzle machines. If we see two disparate pieces of information we will immediately begin to find the connection between them. This is where we engage readers – by leaving the answer blank and asking them to find it.

(That’s a bit reductive. A satisfying narrative will likely eventually state the answer – it’s just way more satisfying if I, the reader, have already solved for the same.)

There’s an example I always think of that does this so beautifully, from Peter Temple’s Truth. (I’ve written about it before).

The detective, Villani, is out with his dad preparing his property for approaching bushfires. His dad mentions that one of Villani’s brothers is scared of him, to which Villani replies, ‘Bullshit.’ That appears to be the end of it. For half a day they clear the property, and Villani’s internal thoughts are on his dad and their history. That evening they’re sharing a beer and talking about other things when Villani says, ‘Why’s Gordon scared of me?’

There’s so much meaning we can read into the space between these two things. Villani’s initial response, ‘Bullshit’, seemed to be a full-stop. He disagrees, end of story. When he brings it up again out of nowhere, we realise that he’s been thinking about it this whole time. That gives us a new sense of him as a character: That he’s sensitive and defensive. That he acts first and thinks later. That he cares about what his family thinks of him. That it bothers him to think his brother’s scared of him.

Even more, the phrasing of his question, ‘Why’s Gordon scared of me?’ tells us something. If he’d said, ‘Is Gordon really scared of me?’ it would still have the flavour of dialogue that responds directly to what’s been said. However, his phrasing shows us that he’s not only been thinking about it but he’s drawn a conclusion from it: He agrees with his father.

This sense of internal thought and self-knowledge makes him feel complex and real. Like an adult. And none of that happens on the page, it all happens in my puzzle-solving brain, in the conclusions I’m drawing from the evidence presented to me.

The more I’m asked to participate in the story, the more thrilling it is.

observations on writing craft

I have the absolute privilege of judging a number of romance writing contests throughout the year, and every time I feel like I gain insights into writing that help me with my own craft. (And hopefully help the entrants with their next draft. That would obviously be awesome, too.)

I’m going to put up a series of posts over the next couple of weeks that examine the common areas I see again and again where I feel some hard work and consideration will make the biggest difference to the next draft of a story. I won’t in any way reference specific competition entries, just elements of craft.

Everyone receives feedback differently. Some writers are hungry for it, some can’t bear it. I fall somewhere in the middle. For the first few days that a new work is out being read by others, I am unbearably sensitive. The slightest query or suggestion is excruciating. Then I get used to the sense of exposure; I start to be able to separate myself from the project.

And then, the truly magical part of the process: I start applying some of the feedback to my work and see the story immediately improve. Like, in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Then all I want is to make it even better.

So aside from the techniques I’ll be discussing in the coming posts, here’s probably the most important thing I take away from judging competitions:

Every single story, no matter how good, will be made better by having more thought and work put into it.

That can be hard to hear, especially when you feel like you’ve reworked it as much as you possibly can. (Seriously. I was certain there wasn’t a single thing I could do to Untamed without taking it into the next stage with an editor, and then a couple of months later I threw the whole thing out and started again. And again.)

We’re lucky as writers that the barrier to entry is low. We all have access to a computer, or a pen and paper. But where we don’t have to buy a suite of expensive equipment to practice our art, we sure do have to pay up with our time. Writing takes time. SO. MUCH. TIME. Even more time than we think. It really sucks.

(Yes, my last book was published six years ago. Why do you ask?)

We can certainly work on ways to make our processes more efficient, but I think it’s a false efficiency to avoid putting the time in. The posts in this series will outline some tools that I feel are useful when developing a first (second, third, fourth) draft into a more interesting, complex story.

punch an asshole in the face

It took me an age to realise something obvious about sex. Sex on the page, sex between characters.

I’ve thought a lot about how to make sex hot again. God, is there a new position on the face of this green planet? We have seen it all, read it all.

We experience something new to us differently, because our brains are processing information for the first time – it’s more intense, slower, more deeply felt. So how do we make the sexual encounter between two characters feel like something new, something that has only ever happened between these two people?

My go-to method is to sink deep into the romance and write from there: write pain, hurt, disruption, vulnerability, bliss and oh shit did I just realise I’m in love. It’s a pretty good method, on a pure-id level.

But for putting your critical brain to work on making what your id gave you ten times better, here’s the obvious: the characters aren’t having the sexual experience. The reader is.

It clicked when I was reading a romance with a tense sexual premise. The hero has a sexual kink that is the source of shame and self-loathing to him. He’s tried and failed to cut it out of himself. The heroine is sunny and somewhat naïve. The longer they spend together the more his sexual desires reach out to her, the more he loathes himself.

About half way through the book he finally confesses everything to her – and she is a wonderful person who listens and asks questions, admits when she’s confronted but takes it in her stride. Then expresses some curiosity in exploring the kink with him.

An amazing woman, and a total buzzkill.

I had been experiencing the hero’s emotional agony (which, up front, I love) – but more than that, I’d been experiencing this building sexual tension that was all wrapped up in his shame and his raging need. The self-loathing that came from wanting what he did only fuelled the desire, because it made it that much more unattainable. He himself was aware how the shame was part of the sex, for him.

So when the heroine ‘absolved’ him, I no longer experienced/read the desire as shameful and therefore I no longer felt caught up in the sexual heat. I was no longer experiencing the kink.

It’s a good distinction to make, between character arousal and reader arousal. Oh man, is that suddenly a bit confronting to talk about actively arousing the reader? No? Ok, get on with it, Anna.

Understanding the distinction means you can write a scene like, She gave him a blowjob and he was very aroused and he came, which leaves the reader unmoved, or you can write a conversation that works on the reader like sex, because all the elements of the relationship, the kink, the arousal are there.

This is so useful! Sex shouldn’t always be arousing, and if romance is really going to hit the reader in the feelings, conversations should be. It’s easier to manipulate these effects once you understand that the reader is the one having the sexual experience.

I’ve been reading a lot of Charlotte Stein recently, because she brings the id like whoa. I love this description of an orgasm in Curveball: It’s unbelievably good. Like squeezing a stress ball or punching an asshole in the face.

A lot of the time we rely on shared physical experience to arouse the reader. We describe licked nipples and pulled hair and the erotic associations the reader has with the acts trigger arousal. What I love about Stein’s description is that she adds to base physical arousal; she creates two distinct effects in the reader’s mind and body. Squeezing a stress ball has associations of release and pressure, and punching an asshole in the face conjures pure satisfaction, violence, disruption.

Another example of how this works is dirty talk. I love the idea of dirty talk. I always get excited when a character threatens another character with dirty talk. But it rarely pays off for me when it actually happens. Unfortunately, just like sex positions/acts, dirty talk is well worn. Pretty generic, really, when you read it on the page. So it’s exciting for the character who’s experiencing it, but not for me, the reader experiencing it.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to do dirty talk in a way that really works. I considered my expectations – what makes the idea of it exciting to me? What I want is for it to shock me, for it to be a pin prick, a cut with a knife. I want it to disrupt the narrative and reveal something hidden and unsafe about the characters.

So one answer to how to do dirty talk is to achieve this effect on readers through other means. I think this is what I was reaching for in Untamed when I had Jude say shocking, exposing things to Katherine in a way that was erotically fraught.

‘You’re here,’ he said, and covered her hand with his palm. The sensation touched him – his hand like a lover taking hers from behind. He pushed his fingers between hers, and they lay like that without speaking for a couple of minutes.

Then he said, ‘I miscalculated in so many ways, when I asked to come with you to the country. I didn’t understand how dark it would be, or how quiet. But the worst of my errors was not allowing for these hands.’ His hand flexed around hers, the only movement in the room. ‘I didn’t know you’d go without gloves in the country. And you don’t have easy hands, Katherine. At first they repulsed me.’ He was ready, and didn’t let her pull away.

‘When you handed me that first plate of food, and I knew these hands had made it, I could barely swallow it down. But the more I watched you, the clearer it became that your hands cannot be separated out from who you are. The parts of the world that fascinate you pass through your hands first. I thought at first it was childlike, before I suspected what wisdom was in touch. And then I thought about touching. And then I could not stop myself from imagining the rasp of your hands on my skin – those rough, truthful things rubbing me until I was uncomfortable and tender with it. Testing and tasting me in order to understand me. I began to long for you to understand me.’

There was a long silence, and their harsh breathing, and then she said, ‘You shouldn’t talk to people like that.’

Not quite ‘I’m gonna come in your hot little hole’, but it sort of made me catch my breath, to write something so exposed.

the fetish object

Most romance has explicit sex in it, but where “explicit” sounds – I don’t know, naughty? sexy? breathless? the sheer volume actually strips sex of its appeal. Nowadays when I read about a hero sucking a heroine’s nipple, it’s as bland as drinking milk. (Wait – milk is delicious.) It doesn’t move me in the slightest.

Nipples are quite amazing in real life. Nipples, as a body part to be checked off some foreplay list – not so amazing.

Some writers, of course, can make the same sex acts feel new and thrilling and touch some nerve of recognition. I just read The Luckiest Lady in London by Sherry Thomas – a seriously freaking amazing book – and she has this particular superpower. For the rest of us, I think we should take a step away from the naked human body and look at other ways to bring sex in.

A fetish object is something that’s imbued with power – often power displaced from something else. A sexual fetish object is something that’s imbued with sexual power, again often displaced from the more common, everyday fetishisation of the body (although it can itself be a body part, of course). According to Freud, a fetish object is the mother’s castrated penis so that dudes don’t have to deal with vaginas or something.

In the narrative examples I’m thinking of, the fetish object has some sexual power for the characters, but acts far more strongly on the reader. The sexual narrative that’s drawing the reader in is redirected through this object, which makes it more powerful than if it had remained in the everyday body.

Here are the ways this method’s really worked for me as a reader:

The first is from Ember by Bettie Sharp. The story is a retelling of Cinderella, where Cinderella is Ember, the wicked witch and her sisters and stepmother are courtesans, dearly loved by her. Prince Charming has been cursed/blessed that all who see him love him. The first time Ember sees him is at a parade when she’s nineteen. She’s destroyed by lust. Charming smiles and throws coins into the crowd that are stamped with his likeness; Ember finds one between two cobblestones once he’s passed.

His profile winked sunlight at me from the silver surface of the coin. I raised it to my lips and kissed his likeness’s metal cheek. Licked it. I slid the coin into my mouth, tasting the tannic flavour of his glove above the metal and beneath the grime.

With the silver likeness of the prince clamped between my lips, I turned and hurried back inside. I could not close the door fast enough to suit the drumbeat of desire in my blood. I hadn’t the patience to climb to my chamber and dream of him in private. Indeed, I barely managed to squeeze into a broom closet and shut the door before my hands were pulling up my skirts and parting the hot, slick folds of my sex.

I ran my tongue across his likeness on the coin as I thought of him. I thought of his eyes on me, his hands on me. I imagined the sublime joys of his touch, the taste of his skin, the feel of his cock between my lips.

She goes on to imagine dying from the force of having her maidenhead taken, and him weeping over her because he’ll never love another. (She gives the reader permission to laugh at her youthful fantasies.)

As sad as it is to admit it, I must tell you this melodramatic imagining was the thought that gave me my first taste of womanly pleasure. My body seized, climaxing with a ferocity that made me stumble to the floor. I gasped for air, only to feel the cold bite of the silver coin lodging in my throat.

I panicked, coughing and gagging, trying to force a decent breath around the silver barrier imprinted with the prince’s face. My death flashed before my eyes and in this scenario, I was not a noble virgin sacrifice, but a silly girl, crumpled on the floor of a broom closet with her skirts rumpled and her hands stinking of sex.

There are a couple of reasons this worked so well for me that it’s stuck in my mind ever since. The prince’s curse has already powerfully disrupted the sexual narrative. Ember doesn’t look at him and feel a natural response which she can choose to act on or not; his sexuality is a force that makes objects of everyone who sees him – it is already displaced.

This sexual power is then concentrated in one small object: the coin. For me as a reader, there’s something so much more unexpected and exciting about Ember pressing her tongue against a likeness of his face and experiencing the full force of her desire, than if she’d had access to his person.

Maybe it’s because he can be fully “objectified” – it’s a purely sexual transaction. Charming is present, but the scene isn’t really about him. There’s something powerful about the coin generating her florid sexual fantasy – and then choking her at its climax, which utterly changes how she perceives herself in that moment. Both feel sexual to me, the arousal and the shame.

Probably the crux of why the coin works for me, actually, is that it means Charming is so freaking hot an inanimate imprint is enough to bring Ember to her knees. Is that bad?

The second example comes from a real source: the diaries of Maud Rittenhouse in the late 19th century. I haven’t read her diaries in full, just Jodie McAlister’s wonderful recaps at Momentum Moonlight. Maud chronicles her romantic adventures and disasters and refuses to let romance define her. Her thoughts are almost hypnotically charming.

In the penultimate volume she’s just met Earl Mayne who – well, in her own words:

Mr Mayne. Everybody in town knew him but me. He is deliciously bright and well read and talks like a fairy story set to music…

He’s younger than her and you get the feeling he’s a bit rough around the edges. Her infatuation burns up the page, and then there’s this:

Well and the Adorable came, and dined with us, and oh! oh!! he eats with his knife. Positively it gave me a queer feeling way into my hair. I was so afraid he’d cut his lovely mouth or jam one of his white teeth. His knife! The “one altogether lovely”, eating with his knife! I know he must have some real good scientific reason for doing it, but it made me look the other way. How can such an Adonis do anything so plebeian even with reason.

This moment gets at me viscerally the way any amount of “he’s so wonderful” doesn’t. She’s repulsed by him eating with the knife, but as a reader I feel the depth of her sexual attraction within her repulsion. Like Ember’s shame on swallowing the coin, the shame and fascination around this object feels decidedly sexual.

His “lovely mouth” feels so much more significant when it’s threatened by his knife.

It also happens to be one of my favourite romantic mechanisms: his action breaks the social mould through which she perceives everybody and everything. This sets off an overwhelming sensation in her that she doesn’t know how to interpret. She interprets it as embarrassment; I don’t.

The last example is from The Luckiest Lady in London. My favourite part of this book was how explicitly honest the hero and heroine were with each other – and how that didn’t leech the tension at all. It’s an electrifying, exciting kind of honesty.

But – ahem. Before I get carried away fangirling all over the place, I’ll get back to my point. Felix has asked Louisa to be his mistress, and they’re playing a kind of game of chicken with their attraction and what they each want. In this scene they’re alone in a carriage.

He lifted his straight rod of a walking stick and, holding it near the base, set its handle on her lap, a frightfully intimate, invasive gesture that made flame leap through her.

The terrible thing was, the more he revealed himself to be dangerous and warped, the more she fell under his spell. And the more she fell under his spell, the freer he felt to reveal even more of his true nature.

His eyes met hers again. “Let me give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of.”

But he couldn’t. Or at least, he wouldn’t.

For she could no longer be satisfied with an expensive telescope, an exemplary spinsterhood, or his sure-to-be-magnificent body – or even all three together.

She was a woman in love and she wanted nothing less than his unscrupulous and very possibly unprincipled heart, proffered to her in slavish devotion.

She set her fingers on the handle of the walking stick, still warm with the heat of his hand. At first she thought it was but a knob made of heavy, smooth-grained ebony, but as she traced its curve with her hand, she looked down and realized that the handle was actually in the shape of the head of a black jaguar.

“Very fine specimen you have here,” she said, a little shocked at both her words and her action.

She was *caressing* the part of him that he had chosen to extend to her person, her fingertips exploring every nook and cranny of the handle. His gaze, intense and heavy lidded, traveled from her face to her uninhibited hand and back again.

“You like it?”

They throw some double entendres back and forth and get extremely lustful about each other. Then:

…she raised the handle of his walking stick, leaned forward, and kissed it on the tip.

“You make me do such unspeakable things,” she murmured, looking at the jaguar’s head.

Slowly, he pulled the stick from her grasp. He examined the handle closely, then glanced back at her, his gaze heated yet inscrutable.

The walking stick is quite obviously standing in for his man bits in this scene, but that’s not where I think the sexiness of it comes from. In fact, I would find it even sexier if the parallel weren’t drawn at all.

What I love is the “intimate, invasive gesture,” and the “part of himself he’d chosen to extend to her”. It’s in his character that he wouldn’t just give himself over to her, so instead he does something he thinks will be safe – he touches her with an inanimate object. But she makes that object part of him, and so he can’t remain unaffected by her touch. It becomes incredibly exposing.

Gah, it’s awesome.

This method is more about the reader than it is about the characters themselves. I’ve become somewhat desensitised to sex as a reader, but diverting it through an object makes me feel it again – it becomes unexpected, a pleasure.

It also happens to be a powerful tool for writers; it means we can bring sex into any scene, without being explicit. If Maud were a romance heroine, watching her hero eat from a knife, I would believe her when she kissed him later.

what I learnt about writing from judging the VPA

I had the great fortune of winning the Valerie Parv Award in 2010, and this year I was finally able to give a bit back by judging contest entries.

I wasn’t expecting to learn so much about writing in a short period of time, just by reading three very different synopses and excerpts. It’s always easier to see other people’s writing clearly, and I’m grateful for what this has taught me about my own writing. I’m going to share very general insights, which don’t apply specifically to any one entry.

Synopsis

Synopses are notoriously difficult to write. How do you condense a whole story down to a couple of pages, all the while ensuring you don’t leave anything important out?

I read the contest synopses not to critique them, but simply as a reader wanting to understand the story as clearly as possible. I think because of this I picked up on one problem in all of the synopses – and I’m absolutely certain this has been my own problem as well: lack of specific detail.

In trying to condense the story down – or sometimes in an attempt to build suspense – we write about plot points in general terms. E.g. “She makes a plan to find out more about him.”

We feel like it’s saving space to be general and brief, but in fact what it does is muddy the sense of story. Whenever I came across a statement like this I found myself feeling frustrated at being somehow locked out of the story. It can also create confusion later in the synopsis. E.g. if the heroine’s plan to find out more about the hero is to break into his apartment and go through his things, there might be a statement later in the synopsis that’s something like, “After he finds out she broke into his house…”, which will make no sense to me as a reader. Even general statements later on such as “When her plan fails” simply add to the confusion, as I still don’t even know what her plan is.

Instead of “She makes a plan to find out more about him,” I could write, “She decides to find out more about him by breaking into his flat.” It takes up slightly more space on the page, but the reader will remain clearly in the story – and I suspect it will save words later in the synopsis when the writer has something concrete to refer back to.

Observations on writing

In every excerpt I read, the author had created two interesting characters from very different worlds and a premise that set up believable conflict that I wanted to see play out between them. All I wanted was to watch the characters interacting with each other in a scene, while their personal differences and opposing goals played out. For me, that is where chemistry sparks between characters – chemistry that doesn’t immediately have to be lust, but will more believably become lust.

In every excerpt, the author began with their excellent premise and characters and then added conflict. It mostly took that classic romance form of “I hate you, I want to bone you, you annoy me, but look at your biceps”.

There’s a very good reason the authors did this – and I know I relied on this form of conflict in my YA romance more than I should have. It’s easier to keep two characters from falling in love if they spend most of their time telling themselves they can’t stand each other. It also creates emotional chemistry between them that can be transformed into love later on. It gives you something to root for: you want them to overcome their aversion; you want to watch them change their minds.

The problem is that I’m not invested in two characters finding each other attractive but annoying. What I’m invested in is seeing these two very different people collide. What’s the point of creating interesting characters, otherwise?

It became so clear to me that the authors had built these characters and premise as a kind of canvas to write the story on. I wanted the characters and premise to be the story. I wanted to watch interest spark reluctantly inside an awful conversation. Or spark immediately and irrationally – and then run into the wall of reality.

I think it’s scary to put that much belief in our characters and premise, that we’ll simply put them in a scene together, let them be wholly themselves (even in the ways they act out) and let the story unfold. It’s less scary to add emotion and conflict, on top of what’s already there.

Which brings me to the biggest, scariest realisation I had while reading the excerpts. I know this is in large part formed by my own experience writing Untamed, but I’ve seen many writers I admire go through the same process, and witnessed the results.

The excerpts felt like they were at the stage my MS was at when I submitted it to the Award, i.e. a first draft that’s had a lot of work put into it. I was convinced, when I entered the Award, that my MS was almost complete. I just had a bit more work to do – another couple of read-throughs, some more edits. But I felt close.

I wasn’t.

What I had was an excellent place to start. I had the concept of a book, and the beginning of characters. I spent the whole year of my mentorship pulling the first draft apart, turning everything inside out – finding the heart of the story I really wanted to tell. And then at the end of the year I threw it all out and started again.

Everyone’s process is different, so hopefully you’ll never throw out as many words as I did. But I’ve seen meticulous writers go through this same process at 30,000 words, or in the world-building, planning process.

I wanted to say to the authors whose excerpts I read: Be proud of this wonderful story you’ve produced. Now break it apart, turn it inside out, dig around until your characters feel almost unrecognisable to you. Dare to turn this massive plot point completely on its head, simply because when you do it makes you go all zingy.

And I knew how it would feel to hear that feedback, because I knew each of those authors must feel so close to finishing, like I once did.

narrative, backwards

My favourite literary device is the Rosetta Stone moment: the piece of information that illuminates the story, backwards. You realise there has been a second narrative running under the first the whole time, and while you haven’t consciously been reading it, part of your brain has been picking up the cues, so that when that last piece of information clicks into place you don’t have to laboriously piece the whole thing together – all it needs is illumination.

I recently watched The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and while the tone of the film wasn’t so much my thing, it had a perfect, spine-tingling Rosetta Stone moment. I’m going to go through how it was done, complete with spoilers. It was by far the best part of the film, so if you intend to watch it, don’t read on!

The sub-narrative is all about Charlie’s relationship with his Aunt Helen. These are all the cues we’re given throughout the film:

Charlie is a troubled kid who has been in hospital. He’s going to high school for the first time, and he wishes he could talk to his Aunt Helen. She would understand.

Later, he remembers his Aunt Helen coming home to their house, with a Welcome Home banner and everything. She looks up at him, on the stairs, and they share a smile. They are special to each other.

When he sees his older sister’s boyfriend hitting her, he tries to intervene. She tells him not to get involved. “How could you,” he says, “after Aunt Helen?”

He goes to sit in the park, and remembers being there at Christmas with Aunt Helen. The pathway was lit up with lanterns, and she bent down and told him it was Santa’s runway. She told him to stay just where he was, while she went and got his birthday present.

Charlie loves a girl called Sam. She throws a Christmas party just for their close friends. Charlie gives her an old record of the Beatles song ‘Something’ and afterwards they sit on her bed together. She asks if he’s ever kissed anyone, and he shakes his head, bashful. “What about your first kiss?” he asks. “I was eleven,” she says. “His name was Robert. He used to come over to the house all the time.” “Was he your first boyfriend?” “He way my – he was my dad’s boss.” Charlie, who is so innocent and naïve, listens without judgement, but we see it hit him. Sam doesn’t know if she can become more than she is – get into a good school, make something of herself. Charlie tells her she can. “My aunt,” he says, “had that same thing done to her. And she turned her life around.” “She must have been great.” “She was my favourite person in the world,” Charlie says, “until now.” Then Sam tells Charlie she wants his first kiss to be with someone who loves him, and she kisses him.

While they’re kissing, Charlie strokes Sam’s back, down to her bottom. He stops. She asks if everything’s okay, and he says it is, and they keep kissing.

Later, Charlie remembers more of that Christmas scene from his childhood: Aunt Helen tells him to stay where he is while she goes to get his birthday present. She whispers in his ear, “It’ll be our little secret.” We see her driving, a record of the Beatles song ‘Something’ on the passenger seat. A truck hits her car, straight into the drivers side.

Charlie starts going out with the wrong girl, and he does the wrong thing. His friends – the first real friends he’s ever belonged to – disown him. His mental state deteriorates. He has no-one to talk to. He’s seeing things again. He’s at home alone, and he can’t stop seeing things.

He’s back kissing Sam on her bed, and his hand slides down her back, to her bottom. He’s remembering a hand touching his leg that way, and he’s a small boy, and the hand belongs to his Aunt Helen. She’s giving him that special you-and-me smile. He remembers finding her at the kitchen table, crying, and touching the long scars on her wrist. Then he’s back where she’s touching him, and whispering that they shouldn’t wake his sister, who’s asleep on the rug. He can’t stop thinking: What if it’s his fault she died, because he wanted her to die?

Charlie ends up in hospital again, and we never see it onscreen, but he finally tells someone what his aunt did to him.

Every memory leading up to the revelation is recast. Everything she said to him, every way she looked at him. His wilful innocence in that conversation with Sam. The way he can’t own his own experience.

Casting their relationship as special and important gives this sub-narrative so much more power than if it had just been couched in mystery. There’s a deep emotional truth in Charlie processing it that way. It’s also impressive from a storytelling stand-point, because there were enough cues that something wasn’t right, that it made complete, stunning sense when the truth came out. The way Charlie deals with Sam’s story of abuse, and the way he reacts to physical intimacy create an emotional resonance for his own experience, once it comes out. We’ve actually been reading that story the whole time, just without realising it.

It’s clear to us that Charlie loves and misses Aunt Helen, and that she was incredibly important to him. But we instinctively feel some piece of information missing from the core of their relationship: What binds them so tightly together? There’s an element of obsession about how he always thinks of her that is low-level creepy, but easy to dismiss because the narrative is telling you this was a good, special relationship.

There are more obvious cues, such as her saying, “This will be our little secret.” That phrase is so coded as abusive that I even thought of abuse outright at that moment, and then uneasily dismissed it.

Charlie’s denial recasts their relationship into something impossible. As his vision of things sits more and more uneasily alongside reality we begin to see how it is impossible.

There’s a powerful narrative lesson here. He doesn’t express blank denial, or bottled up rage. He feels something that’s emotionally true, the way dream logic is true, and it’s heartbreaking.

body/carcass

Sex scenes can be difficult to write. Probably the most ubiquitous piece of writing advice is: Make the sex further the characters. That is, have something emotional at stake between them. Have it develop and surprise and change them the way a conversation might.

That advice highlights for me that a romance is really two stories happening side-by-side: The love story of the body, and the love story of the mind. And if you get a really good writer it’s impossible to unwind one from the other.

I know I quoted this recently, but it’s so pertinent I have to quote it again. When Rochester is desperate to make Jane stay, and she won’t, he clutches at her and says, “But whatever I do with this cage, I cannot get at you, and it is your soul that I want.”

Bodies are alive. Bodies are dying, breath by breath.

I first started thinking about what a morbid thing this can be – this attempt to get at what’s inside the organic, breathing, dying cage – when I was reading KA Mitchell. I’d just read a medic hero followed by a surgeon hero. Because of their professions they come across a lot of physical trauma, which KA Mitchell doesn’t try to separate in the text from sex – physical penetration, raised heartbeat, blood and flesh.

In No Souvenirs Kim is a surgeon and his lover Shane undergoes severe physical trauma:

And even when the paddles and the hypo brought back the flutter of life, Kim couldn’t shake off that feeling like the emptiness was just waiting for another chance. It was there in every long space between the electric contractions of Shane’s cardiac tissue. Nothing as sure as the knowledge that they were all nothing but animated meat just waiting for the power to go out.

Then later:

At every stroke of Kim’s hands, the muscles under Shane’s wet skin rippled with that vital current, warm and alive. Kim couldn’t erase the memory of Shane cold and still on that reef, of the clammy, pale chest when he’d ripped open Shane’s wet suit to get the paddles on bare skin, but he could have this one to go with it, Shane’s heart pounding hard against Kim’s palm, breath deep and strong as he fisted Shane’s cock.

The body is how we can come close and express love, and the body is the thing that will betray our love by dying.

   

These images from Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty’s 1746 “Anatomical Study” perfectly capture the body as a romantic object that is also a piece of flesh.

There was a study done last year on how arousal “makes everything less disgusting”. For my money, sex scenes could do with fewer perfect bodies, and more living/dying flesh made wondrous by love, by the urgent desire to keep on being – and by a healthy dose of lust.