still sweet romances?

Is there still a market for sweet romances that aren’t explicitly religious? The kind where any sex that happens is behind a discreetly drawn curtain or after the end of the story? I keep having to go back to add more sexual encounters and thoughts to my stories. That’s not necessarily untrue to what’s happening in the rest of the story — no more than adding description to a place that’s too bare is untrue to the story — but in most cases it’s not adding a lot, either.

Which implies that I might need to change the way I think about basic relationships in a modern romance. Sex added on to a basically restrained story isn’t going to work well.

Which implies that if there’s a market, I might be better off writing them the way I’m writing them. I don’t always conceptualize that way — some of my stories are pretty spicy, maybe even hot — so it might be what these stories need.

Read Full Post »

outlines, answers, and questions

Over at Tales to Tide You Over, my friend Margaret has been discussing her experience writing her current draft. The related discussion about outlining has had me turning over thoughts in my head. I said I started from the tangents, and Mar replied, “Yes, I know we work differently, though with a comment like “I start from the tangents” it reveals just how far. I can’t even understand what that means, since to me, to be a tangent it has to come off something that’s not tangent.”

And I looked at it and thought, “Yeah, okay, she’s right, that is a little weird. I wonder what I really meant.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that really is what I meant. My plot structure is a whole bunch of tangents going every which way from a center that doesn’t really exist. I have spent a great deal of time over the years trying to get those sprawling scenes to fall into a sequential shape suitable for a publishable tale — something that starts at the beginning and goes through to the end. I’ve tried out many outlining techniques to find a beginning and get through that mysterious end that will answer the story question, but most of them seem to kill the story. I wind up with something competent and lifeless.

But tangents don’t have a beginning and end. They have, as Mar pointed out, something they touch, something that holds them together, something in the center, but they don’t start in a particular place and they can go anywhere. Tangents are about questions and exploration, background and flashbacks, possibilities and alternatives. They aren’t about answers.

Frankly, I don’t care about answers — I don’t think there are answers. I write because of the questions. I write to explore the depths of possibility, the questions of motivation, the many complications and dangers of a situation or a character. I don’t want to know Yes, No, or even Maybe. I want to know how and why and why not. I want to know what else could have happened. I want to know why one person cracks when another person triumphs.

No answers. Just tangents. I’ve always known that.

But that puts me right back where I started — “just tangents” does not make a very satisfying reading experience.

Which is where that center comes in.

A center doesn’t have a beginning or an end, but it holds the world together anyway. It pulls all those flyaway tangents back to the center — not in a linear “answer” sort of way, but in a dynamic orbital sort of way.

Is that a theme? I don’t know. I can’t recall seeing a discussion of theme as a structural element (as opposed to some “deeper meaning” etc.) in fiction, but perhaps I wasn’t ready to see or understand.

Read Full Post »

the plot thickens

I’ve been thinking a lot about plot recently, trying to gain some insights into why it is that outlines so far haven’t worked for me. It ought to be simple enough to write down what happens, right? And then the meaning hangs on that. If I get to know the characters better as I go along, that shouldn’t change what happens, right?

Wrong, apparently. I need to go deeply into the characters before the story hangs together, and to do that, I have to find out what they do in the story. Very circular. So that’s how I’ve been writing, in a circular fashion, in a process that bears a passing resemblance to Ingermanson’s “snowflake” outline, only more random. It’s time consuming but produces good results, so I’m not complaining too much. But why does it work that way? What is it that more conventional outlines leave out?

The answer, it appears, is meaning.

I don’t mean meaning as in that theme-and-symbol stuff that kill so many readers in high school. But everything that happens has significance to the characters, and it goes far beyond just what happens next, which is what the basic plot is about. It’s the string of events that make up the story. Most stories are also influenced by another layer, the details of how it happens — the complications and setbacks that turn a string of events into a more dramatic structure.

Even the most plot-oriented stories don’t operate well at this level. Romances, thrillers, mysteries tend to be straightforward, but if they don’t go beyond the what and the how, they seem like shadow plays. For the characters to have real depth, the story has to get into why it happens — the motivation. And that’s when things start to change, because motivation can go deep. The deeper it goes, the better the story — but also, the more complicated the situation becomes. Characters with motivation want things, and they react to things, and that means what happens in the story changes them. This is good. This is what makes a character arc. But that also means that the character I’ve developed sometimes won’t do the thing I had planned in the plot. It would be out of character.

So the character acts and changes things, and those things change the character. Not just the MC, though. This is true for every single character in the story.

Relationships are changing. Dynamics are changing.

And that’s where another aspect comes in. The events mean something to the characters. The fact that one of my MC’s has an ex-boyfriend who is closeted, so their relationship was never public, so they can’t have a real breakup without giving the relationship away, isn’t just background accounting for why Nicky’s single at the moment. It’s not even just baggage. It causes unexpected complications in what seem like simple events. If Nicky doesn’t go to a certain event because he doesn’t want to run into the ex, reporters will notice. If he sucks it up and goes, the new guy in his life is jealous. The event’s the same as it was in the original outline, but all the context has changed.

And it occurred to me that for the kind of fiction I write, the entire story is taking place at this level. The events don’t really matter. They’re just a stage for the emotional interaction to take place on.

So it isn’t that the outline isn’t working. It just isn’t telling me what I need to know.

Anybody have thoughts on this? Ideas? Does it fit in with your own observations? Am I way off base here?

Read Full Post »