Have you ever tried to explain to your friends or significant other what it’s like to be a writer?Can anyone else possibly understand the headache of yet another revision,or “I’ve got three main characters whose names all start with F,” than a fellow scribbler? Getting through the daily grind takes energy, hard work and a sense of humor. You know you’re cursed—blessed—to be a lifelong writer if the following signs apply to you...
10)You’re breathless at the sight of your thesaurus.
9)Even brochures in the doctor’s office are interesting research to you now.“How to Manage Bunions.”
8)You love or hate movies on a whole new level.
7)Your partner wants to give you an extra special birthday present. You get the choice of a romantic dinner and night out on the town, or to upgrade the hard drive on your computer. You choose the hard drive and a sandwich.
6)Those painful childhood memories are suddenly very valuable. You wish you had more painful memories to draw upon.
5)You spend more time deciding on the names of your characters than you did on your own children.
4)You look forward to once-a-week grocery shopping for the social interaction. 3)When you enter the home of a new acquaintance, you feel strangely suspicious if there are no books in sight.
2)You enjoy starting hypothetical arguments with your partner—the ‘what if’ scenarios. “If I died tomorrow, how soon would you begin dating someone new?”
1)You’re thrilled to discover the word ‘infection’ was in use in 1875!
Kate Bridges loves the writing life. She drove her husband crazy with hypothetical questions while writing her Klondike series. She loves the smell of libraries, running her fingers along the crisp edge of a new pack of paper, and buying pens in every color.Kate is a proud member of the Toronto Romance Writers and occasional guest blogger on www.petticoatsandpistols.com. For more info, please visit www.katebridges.com.
1.)Movies often cheat in their openings. They disregard chronological order and often start at a high emotional moment in the story, sometimes even the climax, and work their way backward to explain how this moment came to be. “Mission Impossible III” did it, and we could all probably name several others. These movies try to hook the audience by starting with a moment filled with tension and conflict. I’m not saying a novel should start at the climax – but perhaps we can take a cue from this.
Julie Garwood uses this nonlinear technique in one of my favorite Westerns, ONE RED ROSE. Her opening sentence is “He found her in his bed.” Then she backs up in the story and tells us how that moment came to be – the hero returns home for a family reunion unexpectedly in the middle of the night, undresses in the dark...and eventually gets to the funny moment where he unknowingly slides in next to a sleeping warm body.... I am not suggesting that in your novel, you must start at a later point and work your way backward. What I am suggesting is that wherever you start, make the opening sentence and opening paragraph emotional, and hint at conflict. 2.)What’s that you say? Is your dialogue exciting, witty, filled with subtext and hidden meaning? Even if on the surface the dialogue seems mundane, perhaps the body language of the characters is at complete odds to what is being said, thereby making the interaction entertaining. Ask yourself this: If you happened to be walking by your characters while they were having a conversation, would you want to eavesdrop? If no, rewrite it. If yes, good job.
You’ve probably heard the term in screenwriting that dialogue shouldn’t be on-the-nose. This means screenwriters should avoid writing dialogue where characters always say exactly what they think or mean. It’s more interesting if things are said in a different way than straight-on. In novels, too, there should be wiggling and squirming and inability to communicate directly and hidden agendas and sarcasm and sometimes, plain-out lying. Not all the time, but it is entertaining fiction, after all. However, after the hero and heroine have gone through their transformational arc, they will have grown as people and in their ability and desire to communicate with each other.
About endings:In romance novels, we usually like to see some sort of conclusion where the couple has an honest moment where they disclose their feelings. Most of us, as readers, like to see the conflict resolution unfold on the page. In Hollywood, writers are sometimes encouraged not to end it with characters directly saying, “I love you.” (Thereby avoiding on-the-nose dialogue.) The characters may say it instead in their actions, or a funny remark where the audience gets the idea. I heard Carrie Fisher stress this in an interview once about how she writes screenplays. It’s an interesting technique you might want to try in your ending. Or not. Or use in some combination.
3.)Do you button your scenes well? In screenwriting, a button is the final joke or line of a scene that gives the scene a feeling of completion. If you’re good at it, this means ending the scene on a moment of suspense, or a moment of high emotion, or a moment of comedy. Have you ever tried screenwriting? Do you prefer seeing a movie or novel open chronologically in time, or does it matter?