Category Archives: Writing

Playing with Emotions: What do you want to feel when you read?

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I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Since I gave up writing horror, actually. Surprisingly, however, the story that got me thinking about it again was a horror story. I finally got around to reading my friend John Peters’s story “Summer’s End” the other day. It’s not that I didn’t want to read it. In fact, I downloaded it weeks ago. It’s quite simply that I don’t have time to read anymore. Between my kids and my volunteer work and my own writing and just day-to-day life, reading has come in last on my to-do list for quite a while.

(BTW, my trip to Las Vegas the other day may have changed that. For four glorious days, I had, for a change, enough time. I wrote, I read, I slept, I had leisurely lunches with my husband and I shopped (a little). What luxury!)

It was on the way to Las Vegas, in fact, that I picked up “Summer’s End”. I expected it to be good. JP2 (his nickname from our old Horror Library group) is an excellent writer. I knew I’d be drawn in and find it difficult to put down. What I didn’t expect was how the story played on my emotions. Disgust, horror, and, finally, righteous indignation. I felt them all while reading this tale. And it got me thinking.

We writers play with emotions in our stories, but what we’re really playing with are our reader’s emotions. If we get good, we can make you cry, laugh, feel sick to your stomach (JP managed that one pretty well!) or get angry. But why do readers seek this stimulus? And what are they looking for in it? I can’t honestly answer this question although as a reader, I know I’ve sought all of the above, and as a writer, I’ve explored all of it (except maybe making you sick to your stomach—well, maybe…). In fact, the reason I stopped writing horror was because I wanted to make my readers feel better about the world around them.

What I realized after reading “Summer’s End” was that maybe that’s the point of horror, too. Maybe after you read a good horror story that’s really made you sick to your stomach, you stop and look around you and realize this world is so much better than that one…feels pretty good, huh?

I encourage everyone to read a good horror story before Halloween. Maybe you should start with JP2’s “Summer’s End”…

How to make your setting into a character…and why you should. Plus, today’s blog tour stop!

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I watched a movie last night that made a real impression on me. It was called “Saving Grace”, a British film set in a little town on the coast of Cornwall. What impressed me most about the movie (which on its own was very entertaining and made me laugh and cry), was that the town has become a character to me all on its own.

You see, I’ve been watching the British television series “Doc Martin” with my husband over the past few weeks. I’m so addicted to this show if I can’t watch at least one episode of it a day, I feel out of sorts. Last night my husband was on a Boy Scout campout and had forbidden me to watch “Doc” without him, so I decided to rent the movie the series had grown out of instead. I wasn’t sure I’d like it because, although some of the same actors are in it, they play totally different characters. None of the characters are the same.

Except the setting.

I’m not sure if they called the town by the same name, but it looked the same. The narrow curvy streets, the quaint cliffside architecture, the harbor clogged with fishing boats. Every time they showed the town, I felt a little happier and I knew it was because I recognized it. The town itself has become important to me, as if it’s a friend I visit when I watch the show. The setting of the story has become a character to me.

Setting is important to any story, of course. For the most part, you can’t let your characters carry on their story against a blank backdrop. City or small town, apartment or house, they need to be put somewhere. The question I’ve been asking myself ever since realizing the little town in “Doc Martin” had become so important to me is, “Can I do that in my stories? Is it possible?”

I think I’ve answered it. It is possible, because some authors have already done it. Think about Margaret Mitchell’s Atlanta. Didn’t you mourn the burning of Atlanta almost as much as her characters did? She must have really loved that city. Other settings I love as much as the characters in books: Hogwarts (Harry Potter), Prince Edward Island (Anne of Green Gables), and Bath, England (Jane Austen). In fact, if I look back on the books I’ve loved most, part of what I loved—usually a large part—was the setting. The authors not only provided a backdrop for their characters, they created living worlds.

Have I achieved this in any of my books? I don’t think so. Maybe I came a little bit close with Weeds and Flowers? Possibly. The setting of that book was the most important of any story I’ve told yet. I’m writing another one now set in my hometown of Brevard, N.C. It’s the first time I’ve tried it since W&F. Maybe the key is to love the setting as much as you love your characters, to let the setting influence the story and your characters. I look forward to exploring it further.

In the meantime, check out my guest blog on All I Want and More today for some background into the inspiration for Where the Heart Lies and an excerpt from the book. Leave me a comment for a chance to win fabulous prizes!

Book Tour Stop: Find out how I get my characters to fall in love.

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I’m discussing falling in love with the queen today. The Queen of All She Reads is hosting one of my blog tour stops, and I’ve got a guest post there about how to convince your characters to take the plunge…and fall in love. It’s not as easy as it sounds! You can read about it here: Queen of All She Reads Guest Post. While you’re there, leave a comment so I can tell you how much I love you for coming by and enter you in my giveaways!

Learning to Write: When Does It Actually Happen?

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A federal report released yesterday says students in the United States lack writing proficiency. The study, conducted last year, tested the writing skills of samples of eighth and twelfth grade students. They were allowed to use a word processing program, complete with spell check (thank heavens), dictionary and thesaurus. The result? Twenty percent of eighth graders and twenty-one percent of twelfth graders scored “below basic”. Only twenty-seven percent of students in each grade level were considered proficient or advanced.

I wasn’t even surprised. I know what a chore it is to get my third-grader, who is very bright, to write a sentence with more than four words in it. And my seventh-grader, also a very good student, considers a page and a couple of lines to be a two-page essay. And then I can also remember my own school days—back when you had to hand-write reports. Remember then? Remember when your teacher told you write a five hundred word essay on the American Revolution, and you painstakingly wrote exactly five hundred words, pausing to count every few minutes to see if you’d written enough? Remember saying “very, very” so you could get two words for the price of one? (“The American Revolution happened in 1976 and it was very, very bad. Lots of people died.”) Remember all the adjectives you stuck in to help you obtain the required word count? (“The British wore really bright red coats with really bright white x’s across their chests, so Americans called them Red Coats.”)

(Ha ha. I laugh. I’ve been writing five minutes and have already achieved 225 words. And according to my spell check, they’re all spelled correctly, too.)

Even in college a thousand words seemed unachievable. I remember wondering how on earth doctoral students ever came up with 20,000 plus words to write about a single subject. I also remember the D I received on my first English literature paper.

Ouch.

So, really, I wouldn’t have scored too well on the national writing exam, either, in either eighth or twelfth grades. I learned to write in college. I can’t remember the name of the professor who taught me what it means to write a real research paper, but I’m very grateful he took the time to do it. I hope he knows I continue to put one word in front of another in my march along the literacy path.

What does this mean for the students of today? Is it hopeless? Is this another sign that our education system is broken? Nah. Teachers will continue to teach and students will continue to (albeit reluctantly) learn. As their brains mature, the smarter ones will grasp the concept of writing persuasive essays, just as they always have. If they take their writing to the next level, they’ll figure out how to leave out the adjectives. But most of this will come after high school, unless they’re lucky enough to go to a school that helps them obtain life experience before leaving the nest.

And hey, maybe some of them will even become romance writers. That would be very, very cool, don’t you think?

(For the record, this essay was more than five hundred words. And I wrote it in less than half an hour.)

(And, ahem, I found no less than three typos in the course of editing it!)

Success in Writing: What it Takes

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I recently read an article about how much you should write every day in order to be a successful writer. I always read these articles and smile a little because I’ve read so many of them, and I know every writer is different. You may read an article that says to write a certain number of words, no matter how long it takes. Another will state positively that you must write for a certain number of hours every day. No matter what, sit down at your desk for that amount of time.

The most popular question people ask me when they find out that I write is “Where do you find the time?” I actually like this question because it shows some understanding of what a mother’s writing life is. It’s getting up at the break of dawn and getting the kids off to school and writing furiously for an hour before you have to run errands or clean the house or exercise or whatever. Then it’s rushing back to get a few more minutes in before the first pickup of the day.

After that, my writing time comes in what I call my “stolen moments”. All of a sudden you realize the kids are busy with homework, the house is clean(ish) and you’ve got fifteen or twenty or thirty minutes before you have to fix dinner. Or the kids are all in bed and your husband is busy and you’ve got an hour before you need to get to bed.

That’s what it takes to write a novel when you’re a mom. The sound of the school bell affects me like Pavlov’s dogs. I begin to salivate, looking forward to my writing time, and I imagine it’s the same for moms who write everywhere.

But what does it take to succeed in writing? I think Stephen King has it right. He says you have to write a lot. Like anything, writing takes practice and every word you write gets you closer to that nirvana of perfection. Whether or not I’ll ever achieve it, I don’t know. I’m working toward it every day, on this blog, on the guest posts I do for my book tour, on my work-in-progress. Everything I write is a step closer.

In case you missed it, I took one of those steps yesterday on Welcome to My World of Dreams. You can find my guest post here: A Writer’s View: Michelle Garren Flye. Don’t forget to stop by every Monday through the end of November for a link to my next blog tour stop!

How a chronic beginner finishes writing a novel

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I have a confession. I’m a chronic beginner. I have loads of interests, and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to indulge a lot of them. However, I have to admit something. I never stick with something long enough to get really good at it. If I look over the past few years, I see myself enjoying lots of really cool hobbies. Horseback riding. Tennis. Sailing. I love all of them. So how come I can’t stick with any of them long enough to become good at them?

I found the answer in a friend of mine who owns horses. She loves horses. She lives horses. She rides really, really well, competes when she can, and is so comfortable around the enormous beasts they’re like another limb to her. She was meant to be a horsewoman.

Part of me envies her. I love horses. When I have time to ride, I really, really enjoy it. I even competed once. It was fun and terrifying all at the same time. I think I got a pink ribbon. Not sure what place that is. Seventh?

So how come I can’t be a horsewoman?

But I know the answer. It’s the same reason I don’t haunt the tennis courts or go sailing every weekend or even kayak, bike or garden as often as I probably could. I’m a writer. When I’m at my keyboard with the words flowing, I’m happier than I could ever be riding a horse. The chronic beginner in me becomes a finisher in the quest to achieve that transportation that comes when I’m writing well. It’s not even that hard to write 40,000 to 50,000 words if I let all my other hobbies go. If I let everything in my life go, I could probably write Michener-size novels.

Of course, that’s not going to happen.

I mention this because I just wrote the last line in the romance I’ve been working on for a while now. Since before summer started, actually. It’s a good feeling writing that last line, even when I know the story still needs a lot of work like this one. I’m still working on it, but I know how the story ends. I finished it.

Music that isn’t mine or why there’s a gay woman in Where the Heart Lies: About Lulu.

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I’m sitting here in my house listening to music that isn’t mine. We’re having work done (leaky windows), and the workmen have music. It’s good music, and I know you need something to listen to when you work, so I totally understand and don’t mind. But that music that isn’t mine got me thinking.

Why did I decide to put a gay woman in Where the Heart Lies? Heaven knows when I was writing her character, I felt like I was listening to somebody else’s music.

Lulu is a divorced mother of a five-year-old girl who befriends Alicia when Alicia moves to Hillsborough. Lulu is tough. She divorced her cheating husband and took over his sex shop in the heart of downtown Hillsborough. (Okay, there is no sex shop in downtown Hillsborough and probably never has been. I made it up, so don’t go looking for it!) Lulu worries about how her sexual orientation will affect her daughter, whether she grows up with one mommy or two. She’s able to shake off the disapproving looks and whispers that follow her around. She’s not a gossip, but she does enjoy the power of knowing who shops with her, and she hates the fact that her mother thinks her ex-husband “turned” her gay but she’s resigned to it.

Freud would probably say that Lulu is a part of me, but I don’t think that’s right. I think Lulu is a conglomeration of the things I’ve learned about the gay community over the years, even from my limited contact. Because I listen, I can hear their music, even though it isn’t mine.

I wish we could all remember to listen to other people’s music. Whether you’re ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative or (like me) somewhere in between, listen. Every community, every family, every individual has music and a story. Listen to it. The music may not be yours, but you might appreciate it, even if you don’t enjoy it.

Changing focus: From a novel to a short story…

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Let’s get something straight first. I don’t have a master’s in fine arts. My degrees are in journalism and library science. Two very fine degrees, to be sure, but sometimes I feel like I’m feeling around in the dark when I write about writing. I know the basics. I know how to plot a story, I know how to characterize and how to describe. I’m very good with grammar and my self-editing skills are improving. But when it comes to story arc and some of the finer points of writing, I go by instinct.

It took me almost forty years to write a decent novel. Before that, I played around with short stories and flash fiction…mostly flash fiction, or stories of 1,000 words or less. Finally I got up the courage to write a novel. Weeds and Flowers was my first novel, written in a series of flash pieces because I was too scared to attempt to write a novel the traditional way. Then I wrote Winter Solstice and put it away for several years. Finally, I wrote Secrets of the Lotus and decided it was good enough to publish. Fortunately, I found a publisher (the wonderful Lyrical Press) that agreed with me, and after I re-worked Winter Solstice, they published that one, too. Now I’m on my fourth novel with Where the Heart Lies.

So how much of a shift in focus does it require to write a short story after you’ve written a novel? A lot. I played around with short romances a little. I even won third prize in a romance short story contest with “Life After” (available in The Best of All Sins: Stories of Love & Heartbreak). Short romances are really tough to write because you have to avoid “fast forwarding” too much. Fast forwarding can be either skipping over a lot of scenes you’d normally put into a novel or just having two people fall in love too fast. We don’t live life in fast forward, and while it’s okay to skip the boring parts, you still need your story to make sense. I guess that’s where the story arc comes in–if you’ve got an MFA, anyway.

My second romance short story “Agapi Mou”, was as successful as my first. It appears in the romance anthology FOREIGN AFFAIRS, which goes on sale in ebook format from Turquoise Morning Press next week and in print a month later. “Agapi Mou”, which means “My Love” in Greek, follows the romance of Myron and Lisa and takes place on a vineyard in eastern North Carolina. Myron and Lisa have known each other for several years. Lisa owns the vineyard that grows the scuppernong grapes that Myron’s winery in Greece uses to make scuppernong wine. Circumstances have kept them apart but on one of Myron’s visits, a simple kiss awakens their attraction to each other. Is the attraction just eratos (erotic love)…or could it be agape (true love)?

FOREIGN AFFAIRS also features stories about other hot men from foreign countries by exemplary romance authors (with their heroes in parentheses) Karen Booth (Antonio from Italy), Karen Stivali (Daniel from England), Georgia St. Mane (Logan from England), Sidney Bristol (Luc from France) and J.M. Kelley (Declan from Ireland). Look for more about these authors and their stories in the coming days.

Goodreads, Reviewers and Authors

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Recently there has been some flap in the news about “Goodreads Bullies”. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, here it is (as I understand it) in a nutshell.

1. Some Authors have received some less than flattering reviews on Goodreads.
2. Some Reviewers have been accused by some Authors of being bullies.
3. Some Authors have started a website designed to bully the bullies.
4. Some Reviewers take objection to this because the founders of the website are “outing” them or publishing their personal information like names, addresses, phone numbers.

Okay, that’s it. It’s a pretty simple case as far as I’m concerned. Under no circumstances is it okay to bully someone online and writing a review, even a snarky one, is NOT bullying, but giving out someone’s personal information most definitely is. Authors have to be able to take criticism. Reviewers don’t. Reviewers are readers and (hopefully) their opinions are mirroring what’s out there in the real world. If we don’t want to know what readers think of what we write, we shouldn’t read reviews. Period.

Now that that’s said, I’d just like to say one thing to Goodreads reviewers. There’s a sort of perception that we as Authors are supposed to ignore the reviews posted about our books. We’re not supposed to acknowledge them in any way, shape or form. I didn’t realize this at first. When WHERE THE HEART LIES first started garnering reviews on Goodreads, I made a point of thanking the reviewers, even when the reviews were less than flattering. I’ve stopped doing that because it’s my understanding that it makes the reviewers uncomfortable. It’s kind of like eavesdropping, I guess.

What I want to say, though, is that even if I’m not responding to the reviewers, it doesn’t mean I’m not paying attention. Hello! I’m a person. I’m a writer. I write what’s in my heart and send it out to be trampled on as you guys see fit. Yeah, I’ve thickened my skin on purpose over the years, but every now and then the snark gets under it. At times I even allow myself to shake my head and slam my notebook computer screen shut. Once or twice I even put my head down on top of my shut computer and swore I’d never open it again.

Ten seconds later, I’m over it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not listening. I hear what you say over the tapping of my computer keys. We all do. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t give your honest opinions about what you read. You definitely should. But don’t make the assumption that books are written by computers. Books are written by people with hearts.

Vanishing literature or just disappearing ink?

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I recently read an article about a book with disappearing ink. You can read about it here: “The Book That Can’t Wait”. I’ve pondered this concept for the past week, and I have to admit I understand why the publisher’s first print run sold out.

Let’s face it. I’m already writing less-than-permanent novels, as are many writers. I have no illusions about my creations, and I’m not sure many other writers should, either. If I look at the shelves of my library, I see my favorite authors. Anne McCaffrey, L.M. Montgomery, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling… I have some signed books from friends. I have a lot of poetry and folklore, some mythology, a few reference books. In short, I have sought my most permanent way of preserving the books I really care about.

My Kindle and Nook and iPad are a different story. They’re cluttered with anything that catches my fancy or needs to be read to keep up with my chosen genre. My books are on these devices. And you know what I’ve come to terms with?

One good EMP will wipe them all out.

When I first heard about The Book That Can’t Wait, I thought, “Oh my God, here I am fighting to get my books published, longing to have them in print, and these authors let a publisher put their stories into a book with vanishing ink? What’s wrong with them?” Now I sort of see their sacrifice as a show of solidarity with the rest of the changing publishing world.

So what’s the point? This is my take on it. If you think of the great post apocalyptic movies, a lot of them show a library somewhere. A library of printed books that are all that’s left of the literature of the world before. What books from today’s market will inhabit those shelves when so much of the “printed” word is electronic?

Or maybe the lesson is this: Read your e-books now. Who knows what will be left when the last Kindle is gone?