First Draft Checklist

Larry Brooks posted recently a check list of essential story elements that an author should have defined after completing his or her first draft.

I revised them to check my romance WIP, now that words are flowing more easily again, and got a boost of confidence. I checked off every point.

1. What the protagonist wants, what she needs, and why for both.

2. What strong external antagonism or antagonist blocks the protagonist's path.

3. If all sub-plot threads are resolved by the end.

4. The first plot twist, aka the turning point that sets the protagonist on his or her story quest. (Story quest is defined by the story's core dramatic question.)

5. A strong dramatic story arc.

6. The main character's story arc that shows emotional growth and ultimate change.

7. A strong midpoint that energizes the second half of the story.  No sagging middle.

A story needs these to be elements. You might not get all down pat in the first draft, but IMO, no one can finish a good final draft without them.

How to write a good love scene

A couple years ago, I attended a fantastic presentation by Angela Knights on how to write a good sex scene.

Here is more or less what Angela said—I hope I got it right, Angela.

 Love scenes illustrate the development of romance. They reveal the way people feel about each other.

A love scene reveals characters, enhances the conflict, and develops the romance.

Love scene and the characters:

 How does it reveal the hero? The hero must be experienced. Don’t ever write about a virgin hero! Mention his romantic and sexual history before the first sex scene.

Show how his attitude toward the heroine change in the course of your story.

Show how the heroine helps him develop his strengths and overcome his weaknesses.

The love scene should reveal how he makes love to the heroine, how he finds her different from past lovers, and how his way change toward her by the end of the story.

Before a love scene, we should also know the heroine’s romantic history: how does she feel about sex? In historical romances, a love scene is a big conflict for the heroine who is usually not experienced. Give the heroine good reasons to trust the hero enough to sleep with him.

Picking up a hero in a bar and making love with him is dangerous and borderline erotica.

Is she sexually confident?

How does making love to him change her?

Does she gain confidence in them as a couple?

Let the heroine take the lead in some scenes.

Love scenes make them both grow. A love scene is always a turning point. You develop the plot with a love scene. You also develop the conflict with a sex scene. To intensify the conflict through a love scene you can make him dominant if she doesn’t like an alpha hero. And then make her reaction to him strong and dramatic. Let one character turn the tables on the other—heroine dominates the hero.

 Logistic of a love scene: 

A hero can’t go directly to kissing before a few steps of touching that establish trust.

You have to create the environment of trust for her to accept his kiss.

Love scenes should complicate the situation: A love scene is a critical turning point. What problems does it cause? How does it change the way the characters view each other now?

To know if your love scenes make sense read them back to back by themselves and see if the romance grow and develop through these love scenes.

Love scene pacing:

 Where does the love scene fall in the romance? What kind of emotion do you want to communicate? The love scene can intensify the mood: We are at our most vulnerable when making love. This is a perfect time for drama. Taking off clothes is a big act of trust.

Or it can lighten the mood: for example it will keep a romantic suspense or a thriller from getting too dark.

Watch your timing: Characters who are supposed to be hunting the bad guys can’t waste their time making love. Don’t follow a gruesome murder with a love scene.

Love scene construction:

Don’t rush. You need at least five pages for a satisfying love scene, for emotional impact. Don’t cheat the reader

Set the scene with a sensual environment: sharp vivid emotions with five senses.

A long pre-scene is acceptable but stay clear of purple prose.

Who makes the first move? Stay within characters.

More interesting when there is more than one objective to the love scene.

Sexual roles of hero and heroine: The heroine sets the sexual pace. She decides when characters make love because she’s the one who has the most to lose.

Concentrate on sensual details. Focus on sensations that characters feel. Use lots of sensual details, smell, touch, taste. Reader doesn’t want to guess.

It’s always better to be in her point of view. Don’t shift POV in the middle of a sex scene.

Use a lot of emotion to give love scenes their power.

Use dialog during a love scene.

Pillow talk: remember blood doesn’t go to a man’s brain when it rushes elsewhere. So keep dialog lines short and sexy. Moans are not considered dialog!!! Use sense of humor but keep tenderness to the last chapter otherwise your story is over.

Keep sex language appropriate to time and characters.

Keep heat levels corresponding to your readers’ comfort. Trade paperback and ebooks allow sexier content than mass market in terms of language and erotic details.

Look at other books in the same genre to decide what you can get away with.

Happy Ever After: Readers want to know what it’s like to find HEA with a sexy hero. Capture that experience with passion and imagination.

Remember that your first paragraph sells your book and your last paragraph sells your next book.

{more details in A Guide To Write Erotic Romance by Angela Knights}

 The four books in my box set, Foreign Lovers, follow Angela Knights’s advice. They sizzle with sensual tension and offer you memorable love scene.--99 cents.

A day spent roleplaying

One of the reasons this post is late is that I spent most of the day at a friend's house playing a role-playing game. This was something I used to do more often but like many things, stopped when I got busy with other aspects of my life. It was nice, just spending time with people, creating a character that lived out of a few traits the game master had given, drinking diet soda and eating candy between rolls of the dice.

It was something different, taking a break from the writing. And it was a lot of fun.

Which brings me to why this is also a post about writing. Lately building characters in my head to put onto a page hasn't been the kind of fun that I had today. It isn't just that I could come up with something totally wacky, like my super heroine Maxi Rubber Maid, whose superpower consisted of shooting liquid latex at objects. That might not sound like much until you realize you can totally cover that sand floor with a rubber sheet and keep the sand worms from eating your companions, or when the super villain gives you too much static you can gag him with a rubber ball in his mouth.

There are a couple reasons it was fun making up my heroine. First of all, I didn't have to create her to appeal to a wide audience. She only had to make sense to the six people at the table, all of whom were friends. Her entire purpose was to amuse me and them. This is unlike the characters I write in my books who are subject to criticism by a wide range of people, who are frequently pretty nasty in their comments. This is much more like what I used to enjoy when working on my books, where the only person I had to please was myself. Back then coming up with a character was fun.

I've kind of stopped having much fun when I'm writing a character. That might be why it's gotten so hard.

Second, this wasn't a character that I'd ever tried to work with in the past and the people I'm dealing with today already exist in previous books. I already know them and am actually kind of bored with them already.

Starting tomorrow I'm going to work again on my WIP and see if I can't find a way to make those characters as much fun to spend time with as Maxi Rubber Maid was today. Maybe I'll give each of them a superpower and then somehow translate that into something that works in the book.

Cheers,
Janet

HOW WOULD YOU HANDLE ROUGH SEAS? By Rolynn Anderson

We’re sitting on our boat in Ketchikan, Alaska, waiting for the waters to calm down so we can ‘take’ Dixon Entrance, a wide spot in the ocean that can cause big trouble for our 45 foot boat, INTREPID.  Now, you should know that our Kady-Krogen trawler is built to handle rough seas, even without stabilizers.  It’s a trawler, built to circumnavigate the globe, and she’s done exactly that with former owners.  But my husband and I are cautious about taking open seas.  When we have to cross them, we watch the weather predictions carefully, preferring ‘light’ conditions, and at the most, 10-15 knot winds, looking for winds flowing with the tide.  We’ve waited for a whole week in a port for the seas to subside.  Luckily, we don’t have a schedule to keep so we don’t need to grit our teeth and go when the weather report is less than ideal.  What’s more, our boat is slow, so some of the large expanses of water take two days to cross.  Not easy to cobble two calm days in a row, let me tell you.

Yes, I can ride the gigantic waves coming at me as a writer and marketer of my novels, but let me have flat waters when I’m in my boat.  I was a high school principal, for heaven’s sake, opening a brand new high school.  Lots of rough seas in that job!

What’s the difference?  Why can I take on huge challenges in life, yet look askance at six to eight foot waves?  I think it’s the feeling of helplessness one gets in big seas.  The waves keep coming and coming and despite what you might think, they AREN’T even.  A six foot sea may turn into a ten foot sea in certain areas, where seas converge of where it’s shallow.  Sometimes, for no reason at all, the waves grow ‘short’, meaning less space between waves.  In such conditions, the boat actually bangs up and down.  And the wind can change so that you might be cruising along with the wind kindly traveling with the current, and suddenly you’ve got white caps crashing into your bow because the wind turned against the current.

So it’s the helpless feeling, the inability to plan ahead, and the portent of physical danger make boating tricky.  Believe me, when I was a high school principal, I felt helpless and surprised often, but worry about my physical well-being was rarely on my mind.

Okay it’s time for you to share the places that make you fearful.  I will add to my list: small planes, zip lines and floating raging rivers.  Sigh.  I’m not very brave, am I?  Are you?

http://www.rolynnanderson.com

Productivity revisited

Janet mentioned in one of her posts that she was having trouble feeling productive. Boy, do I know that feeling. There have been projects this year that just dragggggggggged and made me feel like my hands were in quicksand.

Now I'm working on a new project and I feel so productive. I'm totally in the world I'm creating, and I'm totally in tune with my characters. This is a 9 book series I'm crafting, and it requires a lot of world-building and complex plot shifts, so I'm actually plotting and trying to map out what happens from book 1 to book 9, and within each book and within each trilogy. Character arcs, book arcs, volume arcs, series arcs.

All fun because I adore these characters. These are people I want to spend time with, I want to be in their world. I enjoy my other characters (Molly, for example, is one of my BFFs and Jane is such a crazy lady I would love to sit with her all afternoon).

But the people in this book are my family. They're friends and their town is my town. They've been with me for years. I've done multiple drafts of their story and last year I decided, "enough already. Sit down and really write it." I take 6 months of every year to be with them and every time I come back, it's like coming home.

For me, that's what productivity is all about. Finding that sweet spot and enjoying it. I get it with my other books, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't come as fast and as deep as this series I'm doing. Savor it when you have it and don't sweat it if it's gone. It'll come back. Just give it time.

J L
(jayellwilson.com)

I can almost hear the voices -

shouting to be heard at RWA National Conference.

I didn't go this year. Haven't gone for a few years, and may not go for a few more. Very pricey and often inconvenient for me to get to.

But I will go to another one, someday, and I want to see if it's as LOUD as I remember. Thousands of women all in one place, talk-talk-talking. That's what I remember about the RWA conferences of the past.

I also remember the incredible energy of all those writers in one place. Many were pitching books, many were trying to pimp their books (you know what I mean) and many were just there to visit friends. It's like one big energy bundle all bottled up in one spot.

Yep. This is conference week and I feel a bit envious of those who are there. At least, I'm envious until I revel in the quietness of my home here in the woods.

I can almost hear the voices....

J L
(jayellwilson.com)

In search of productivity

Recently I've had a problem that I'm sure most writers have from time to time. That problem is productivity, meaning writing productivity which translates to words on the virtual page. I sit down to write, fully intending to write, but for some reason I can't help looking at email, checking my Facebook page, or doing pretty much anything but actually writing.

I've decided this has gone on long enough. Starting today, I'm going to actually work on my WIP rather than say I'm going to work on it and then end up playing solitaire instead.

I'm a sucker for software products that are supposed to help with this kind of thing, so I've just installed a program on my computer called "Vitamin-R" which was part of a MacHeist software bundle I purchased today. It came with several other programs that I might look into later, but it was the Vitamin R that sold me on the bundle.

The program is running now as I write this blog post, having hidden all my other programs so I'm not distracted. Every minute or so it ticks and at intervals announces how long I've got left on the time slice I allotted to write this. Kind of cool, actually.

I have only five minutes left... I know because it just told me.

So maybe this is just a toy that I'll soon get bored with, but there is something to be said for positive reinforcement, even if it is just a computer program ticking in the background.

Anyone have any other tips for creating productivity?

Cheers,
Janet Miller/Cricket Starr

CRUISING by Rolynn Anderson

You'll be reading this blog entry when I'm on my way through Rocky Pass and El Capitan in Southwest Alaska, two tricky passages we'll traverse for the first time on our way to Dixon Entrance.  Not only are these routes serpentine and narrow, but they are shallow and we'll need to watch out for strong currents in some places.  So you might ask why we don't take a less tricky route on our way south.  Good question.  One reason is this is a shorter 'road' to Dixon Entrance.  Better: other boaters tell us the scenery is gorgeous.  My husband would add this reason: this is a challenge for us and a new experience.

We've enjoyed returning to familiar places on this, our last trip to Alaska by boat, but we've taken pleasure in new experiences as well.  Take a look at our journey in our blog: http://steveandrolynn.blogspot.com/  and follow our 'bread crumbs' on our SPOT GPS (you'll find the site on our blog).

Happy summer to you all.  Forgive me if I don't respond to comments...I won't have access to the internet for all of July.  Rolynn

Self-imposed deadlines and why they're good

I've discovered that if I set a deadline to finish a book, then lo and behold, the book gets done. I set a very tight deadline for myself for the latest book. I started it on April 17 and I wanted it done by July 1.

Well, I didn't hit July 1. I hit July 7. But I was traveling for 2 weeks in there, and we had 2 trees land on our house during a tornado, so I was a bit distracted. I counted up my writing days, and it took me 62 days from start to finish.

Not bad.

I think deadlines are critical because otherwise it's way too easy to procrastinate, or wander while you're writing. If I have a firm deadline, I'll stay on task and keep my story in check. It's sort of amazing to me that after 7 years in this business, I'm still learning what works and what doesn't.

So on to the next deadline -- I haven't set it yet, but give me a week or so to relax, then I'll be itching to write again.

J L
(summer book out just waiting to be read!)

Unknown benefits of conferences

I just got back from a very good conference (Rom Con) in Denver. I had a good time, met a lot of readers, and re-connected with some friends I met last year.

Some conferences can be real drains on energy (RWA, for example) and some are real boosts. This is a Boost conference because I have a chance to kick back, relax, and connect with readers. I played all sorts of silly games, some with big name authors (Heather Graham, Cherry Adair) and some with readers. It was a lot of fun and here's the benefit of conferences like this:

Readers are why I write, and sometimes it's easy to forget that. But when I saw how excited people were about my current book (below) and new books coming out, I was excited, too. I forgot about the work it takes to get it there. It's all about the book and the reader, and I am the connection between the two.

I plan to savor that memory when I'm on deadline to get a book done.