Technical Topic -- So how do your write relationship scenes, anyway?

Someone asked, (more or less):

I don't write Romance, but I want to add a romantic scene.  How do I do this?

A 'romance' scene falls into the category of intense, interpersonal scene.

There are many kinds of scenes. You got yer 'individual concentrates on something' scenes like 'Frodo climbs the cliff in Mordor'.
You got yer brisk, big-movement action scenes like 'George kicks the villain in the teeth' or 'Marvin drives a car really fast'.
You got your scenes of internals like 'Harold remembers his boyhood' or 'Martha plots a murder'.

A romantic scene is a two-person interaction scene. Similar interaction scenes are 'an argument', 'a confrontation', 'a persuasion', or a close, emotional dialog of any kind.
Even if your folks don't have a lot to say to each other, that's the kind of scene it is.


What are the characteristics of a close interpersonal scene?


1) Very tight focus on the other person. The corollary, that's the next point below, is a lack of focus on the surroundings.

Most visuals are going to be of the other person -- the non-POV character -- and they are going to be small details. This is where you talk about the shape of an ear lobe or the crooked eye tooth on the lower jaw. Not -- he's tall. Not -- he's wearing vintage cowboy boots.

When someone is in the most intimate zone of contact with the POV character, description includes smell, taste, touch, hearing small sounds. This is when he notices the smell in her armpits, the taste of her hair, the sound of her stomach rumbling, the fleshy mumble of his ear lobe.

You convince the reader that these two people are propinquitous by using details that are only apparent upon close contact. 
We note the small changes in the eyes or mouth that signal feelings. The POV character is intensely aware of the other person's expression.


2) We tend to leave out most description of the surroundings.

So . . . not so much talking about the semiraker and dohinki on the engineering panel. Not so much commenting on the clouds floating over the fleecy red fields of the planet Florami. Not so much dwelling on the color of the damask curtains.

This is why it's nice to put the romantic encounter in scenery that has been used before and described before. The reader already knows what the galley looks like before you move your protagonists in there and set them to making love on the counter.

This 'I have no time to talk about the color of the couch' is true in 'fight scenes' and 'intense dialog' and 'escape scenes'. If you've nailed the description down earlier -- even just walking through the place -- you don't have to sketch it in now.

3) You do add description that enhances the purpose of the scene.

This is true in any scene, of course. In an intensely emotional scene, you have one or two emotional themes you're playing with. You highlight scenery description and stage business to follow the emotional theme.

If the scene is sensual, you might describe the furs and velvets on the bed. (And yes. There is no reason space travellers wouldn't have furs and velvets on the bed.) The smell of flowers in a vase. The gems on the perfume bottle on the dresser. The ozone and mineral smell of the warm bath that's been run in the room next door.

If an issue in the relationship is the strength, lethality and touchiness of the female, your stage business might be she's chopping carrots for dinner. The glint of the knife becomes part of the dialog, symbolic of her own dangerous edge.

4) Dialog, dialog, dialog.

A romance scene is about communication between the protagonists.

Build the dialog by giving them something to talk about.

Now it might be simply 'my room or yours', but if this is an important relationship, there's probably more to it than that.

What you do here is ask yourself -- 'In this scene, what changes in the relationship?'
That's what the dialog is about.

Techniques for building this 'what changes' dialog:

-- Have a character say something true. Truth is tremendously powerful in dialog. "I hated it when you went to bed with Jerome." "I'm planning to do this once, and then walk off and leave you." "You're not really pretty."

-- Make the character sound like himself. You always do, but if there are tricks that give your character his voice, this is the time to put them in place.

-- Take some of the words the character is thinking and put them into speech. When the words are said out loud, the other character can respond to them.
If a character says, 'the sheets are cold', you have dialog about this. If he thinks about the cold sheets . . . the perception stays small and lonely.

-- Let them talk about the problem that has kept them apart for the eighteen chapters before this.

-- Let them talk, (or think,) about what happens next. (No.  Not just the horizontal rumba.  What happens next week?)


5) Dialog is couched in relationship terms.

Dialog is always responsive, of course. That is, when something gets said the returning words are an answer.

In a relationship scene, the words do not merely respond to what is said. Each bit of dialog is also responding to where the relationship is right at that moment.

She: Where did I leave my car keys?
He: On the table.

versus

She: Where did I leave my car keys?
He: Here. No. Don't get up. I'll pass them to you.

That moment, the relationship is at a place he wants to give something to her.

He: A little onion. A few olives. That's done. Pass me the crisper.
She: Here. I'll take it out to the table.

versus

He: A little onion. A few olives. That's done. Pass me the crisper.
She: Here. That looks remarkably tasty. I'll take it out to the table.

Because she's thinking how tasty he looks.

I do not mean you fill the conversation with innuendo. You just take into account that people talk to each other differently when they are in a romantic situation.

6) Because a romantic relationship scene is about sexuality and sensuality, describe the internal physical response of the POV character.
Try not to be purple about this.

And the POV character sees signs of sexual response in the other person.

7) Direct address.
Mostly characters do not address one another by name. The usual advice is to pull these direct address names out -- and very good advice that is.
In a relationship scene, though,  I think he can call her Sue-Ellen or Gigi once or twice.

8) Pacing is generally slow in relationship scenes. There's lots of talk. You get a pause now and then. Lots of internals.

You can slow pacing with a few complex and longish sentences interspersed into the page, or by adding stage business that the reader will see as taking a long time.
'He crossed the room and then paced back again.' is nine words.
'He hunted the shelf till he found the dictionary.' is also nine words -- but that action is going to slow the reader's perception of the pace of the scene.

When you get to scenes of actual sexual activity, the pace should pick up for at least part of the scene.
This sort of scene benefits from noticeable changes in pacing.

9) It is a Romance genre convention that POV can be switched once, or more than once, in sex scenes. This gives the reader two POV glances at the same material.
Not by any means necessary, but something to think about.

Technical Topic -- How much abuse

Someone asked elsewhere . . . 

How much physical abuse do we put the character through?

To which I respond . . .

A reader is probably less interested in the abuse per se --
than in what the abuse means to the character
and how the character reacts.

The interior of the scullery boy plotting revenge in a I'm going to pee in her soup before I bring it to her way while he nurses his aching head and scours the pots
is actually more interesting than the cook hitting him over the head with a spoon. Boink ouch boink ouch pain suffering.



The underlying problem with hapless suffering, in a story sense, comes when it happens to someone without freedom of choice.
Abuse or pain endured is, (like a typhoon or a swarm of army ants or crippling illness or crop failure or the Empire at war,) a story problem.
Story is character choices and character action.
Story is the character doing stuff.

Starving to death on the farm is story problem.
Jack climbing the bean stalk is story.

The wicked stepmother and step sisters is story problem.
Cinderella making her own dress to go to the ball is story.

Pollyanna losing her family is story problem.
Pollyanna choosing to look on the bright side is story.

It isn't about suffering. It's about agency.

If your protagonist is acting and choosing, then the sufferings spotlight the importance of his choices. It's story. Go ahead and abuse the poor protagonist. Frodo's sufferings on his trek through Mordor are story.

In Frodo's case, suffering raises the stakes.  Privation and pain make the protagonist's courage or innocence or steadfastness shine.  But we don't mistake the suffering for the story.  We concentrate on what tells story.

The 'story' in Oliver Twist is not about Oliver starving to death in the workhouse. It's about Oliver standing up and saying, 'Please, Sir, may I have some more?"


This is why the protagonist's stay in the kitchen under the heavy hand of the spoon-wielding cook or the child growing up with a sexually abusive uncle will often be introductory to the story.

The reader is given enough background to emotionally understand why Cedric-the-cooksboy is desperate enough to run off in the middle of the night through war-torn Madreltonia or why Albert-the-schoolboy poisons his uncle's tea. Then Cedric and Albert get on with the business of doing something instead of being somebody's punching bag.

New Look for the Blog

I changed the design of the blog
as you see.

Y'know how sometimes you go out and buy a new car because you are just in love with the idea of having a shiny new car with really sleek lines and good gas mileage and, like, tailfins?

This is not what I'm doing here.

Or sometimes you buy a new car because your neighbors keep walking by and saying, "When are you going to get rid of that scrap heap?"

Which is why I'm updating the website
at considerable effort and inconvenience and not a little personal expense.

But that is not why I changed the blog.

Sometimes you get rid of your car because vandals have come by and set it on fire and painted obscene mottoes all over the carcass and let the air out of your tires.

That's why I changed the look of the blog.

For reasons which will remain forever unclear, but are probably related to something abstruse and technical Google did with how it uploads stuff to Blogger,
lots of Blogger folks suddenly started getting black spaces and white triangles and exclamation points all over their blogs.

Doubtless dead-black-and-exclamation-marks have a design purpose.
Not for my blog
so much.

I put up with a long black column slashing down the left side of the blog for a couple days.  I joined discussions and listened to the usual fixes that everybody promised would work, that did not work for me.  I played with the code of the blog, which is always dire and trying and in this case also did not work.

I became distressed.

So I changed templates.
This is something I've been avoiding for years,
because something usually goes wrong when you mess with stuff.




That is why I have a new design.

Finished the Page Proofs.

Finished the page proofs of Black Hawk.
I turned them in yesterday.

Yeah!!!

A book is not finished when you turn in the manuscript.  The book is done when you turn in the corrections on the page proofs.
This is why I don't celebrate sending in the ms.  But tonight, we went out to dinner at a nice Italian restaurant.

Now, I can let my fingers unclench on the manuscript.  I can let it go.

And I can now direct some more energy to this website banner problem.

Page proofs are also called galleys.  What you're doing when you go over the page proofs is you look at the actual pages the way they will appear in the book.

You have to find all the typos.


It is like finding Waldo.  For 300 pages.  Under a deadline.

You have one last chance to catch the place where your character walks across the room and opens the window and then three pages later somebody else opens the same window.  You have to make sure it's clear who's speaking the next piece of dialog.

You look at it word by word by word. 

When you finish this process there is not a great deal of your brain left.

Keeping It Clean -- Georgian and Regency Bathing Customs

Talking about Georgian and Regency bathtubs, here, and the joys of getting clean. 

 
There is a general view that historical people were rather dirty, there being a dearth of historical folks getting up at six and grabbing a bar of soap and popping in to warble un bel dì vedremo in the shower.  I'm afraid we all feel rather smug about our acres of colored tile with the running hot and cold.

How clean were they?  The townsfolks as they merrily hung aristos from the lamposts, Ninon de l'Enclos, Voltaire, (Did you know Ninon left money in her will for the 9-year-old Voltaire to buy books?) Napoleon, Jane Austen, the kitchenmaid grinding coffee in the morning? How clean were they?

For more, follow the post over to Word Wenches, here.

Website design

 I'm working on the banner for my updated website.

Not that I'm going to actually do the banner thing myself, you understand.  This is just me trying to communicate a 'feeling' to the website designer.

Since there are all kinds of visually skilled folks out there . . .  can you give me some opinions?  What's the direction to go with this?  What's the working idea?

Oh . . . these are photos I mostly don't have rights to, so I'm just using thumbnails and I'm going to pull the banner designs after a bit. 

The person who gives me the most help with this, (it's one of those subjective thingums,) gets a Black Hawk ARC, as soon as I actually get some.






********************

Let me go add another one here:

*******
Going down to add a modification of the design above.  This one is meant to sorta break outta the box.  Don't know how technically feasible it is.

*****
Looking at making the concept punchier . . .  I've added red to it.
It is not just straightforward and easy to add add red to a dress, so It's all a little clumsy.

I think this is a bit too much red.  Maybe a gentler pink on the dress.
Or . . . there's blue.  Let me try blue.

Blog Philosophy and that kinda thing

I'm bringing this up from the comment trail, because it's a sizable piece of writing and, after all, why not?


This is about the use of a blog, for a writer:

I hate to say this, but I don't think you attract readers by posting a blog. 

Once you HAVE readers you can remind them about your new books.  You can make the reading more fun. You can lay down content that doesn't fit into the books but you're still in love with. 

You can do the whole self-expression thing about how you feel, which is liberating and useful to other writers who are going through the same trials and a great relief to your family who don't have to listen to you whinge and I suspect everybody reading the blog skips this part anyhow.

But I don't see a blog as a way to garner new readers. 
I may be alone in this.
And I am not what you might call a promotion maven.
So you should not necessarily listen to me.

All that said,
I love blogging.

What it is . . .
We depend upon the immense generosity of the internet.  Our research on-line depends on information posted by thousands of people who work without any expectation of return.
When we blog, it's payback.

If you're going to blog anyway, my advice would be to pick a theme you're passionate about and make your blog a creature of your love.

It's nice if you're interested in some topic vaguely related to the kind of books you write.  You could get synchronicity.  It might be that folks who come to read your postings on pirates or the labor movement in 1930 will pick up your 1760 pirate book or your labor-leader love story.

If your bliss is knitting or raising koi, I think you gotta blog about that for its own sake.



Life is too short to spend your time promoting.
Write about something important.
If you make your blog an advertisement for your books, nobody's going to come anyway.

The Wine Glass Over the Water

The Wine Glass over the Water

God bless the King
I mean our faith’s defender.
God bless — no harm in blessing — the Pretender.
But who Pretender is, and who is King —
God bless us all — That’s quite another thing.
          John Byrom

Joanna, here, talking about an interesting sort of drinking glass our hero and heroine might have encountered in their travels through Georgian or Regency England.
The Jacobite Drinking Glass.
These are wine glasses that form a body of distinctive Eighteenth Century artwork.

We have these through a confluence of lucky chances.

First off, by 1700, English glassmaking was particularly advanced. 
A century before, the champion glassmakers were Venetian. The best glass in England was made by imported Italian glass artists, working by Italian methods.

This changed when the English developed flint glass.  'Flint glass' contains a high proportion of lead oxide, an ingredient that makes for tough, workable, clear-as-water product.  Excellent stuff, in short.  And it was an English specialty.


Continues here, at Word Wenches

You know you're on deadline

Wednesday afternoon, at three o'clock, I turned in the editorial revisions of Black Hawk.   Now I await the copyedits.  We are just moving along at a rapid clip.  And Black Hawk is scheduled to hit the shelves on November 1.




You know you're on deadline when:

-- The refrigerator is full of boxes of Chinese carryout.

-- The milk is sour.

-- There are no clean clothes.  There are no clean dishes.

-- You find yourself mentally moving the commas around when your daughter speaks.

-- There is no dog food.  There has not been any dog food for some time.  No one is saying what the dog's been eating.

-- Your three koi have mysteriously transformed into four goldfish. 

-- Every surface of every room in the house is covered with stuff.

-- The rug is the color of cat hair.  It didn't used to be.

-- A cold, stiff, mummified piece of pizza lurks in the toaster oven and nobody remembers putting it in there.

-- You have 1687 messages in your inbox.

-- There's a pile of newspapers at the bottom of the drive.

-- Outside, in the planter, the mint has died.

-- Your head is stuffed with something.  Styrofoam?

-- You do not merely fall asleep sitting up.  You fall asleep standing.

-- Someone asks, "Is this the book about Adrian Hawker?" and you can't remember.

-- You hurt.  Everywhere.  The words carpal tunnel syndrome are mentioned.

-- Your desk is two feet deep in advertising flyers and bills.

-- The nice people from the electric company are calling to discuss nonpayment of some of those bills.

-- When somebody speaks to you, there's a half second lag before you reply

-- Your feet stick to the kitchen floor.

-- You plan to hire somebody in a HazMat suit to clean the refrigerator.

-- The Dust Bunnies have declared your house to be a Dust Bunny Republic.  They are printing up postage stamps.

The Oldest Memorials

Talking about the battle memorials our Regency Folks would have known.

The oldest ones . . .

We don't know what sort of memorials were raised to fallen soldiers in Britain in the very earliest days.  I like to think Silbury Hill might be one of them.  Silbury Hill is a huge mound of earth -- chalk and clay -- built on the Salisbury plain near Stonehenge four thousand years ago.  I've always wondered if it was homage and memory of some prehistoric leader.


Monuments we can date with some certainty go back to the 800s.
Here to the right is the back of a Pictish Stone at Aberlemno Churchyard in Angus, Scotland.  We see men wearing helmets, carrying spears, shields and swords battle on foot and on horseback.  

Another stone, on the left here, is the Suenos Stone, in Forres, Scotland.  It was one of a pair of obelisks described on maps as late as 1789 as "two curiously carved pillars". This to the left is a drawing made in 1861 of the surviving stone.  Below is a close view of the side.  We see the sinuous vine patterns similar to those found in the Book of Kells.

Panels on the back, so much worn the detail is all but gone,  show battle scenes of horsemen and foot soldiers and, possibly, men playing long straight musical pipes.
What battles do the stone tell of?  Who fought?  Viking, Pict, Gael, or  Northumbrians?  We can't be sure. But the Suenos Stone and the Aberlemno stones were carved with all the art of their time and raised in the honor of those long ago warriors.


Read the rest at Word Wenches  here

Brenda Novak's auction

Every year, Brenda Novak runs an auction to raise money for diabetes research.   It's a good cause.  This year I contributed a gift basket.

Go to here.  for the Brenda Novak Auction.



The  Joanna Bourne basket (My Basket!!  See.  My basket!!!)
is item 2116660.  

So many lovely things to bid on. 

Jewels!!

 See 2154315 2174878   2156649 
2125526  2078380  2152053
2157817
That's a vintage silver necklace.  1920.
2095303  -- I like this because it is a set of three earrings.  So few sets for those of us who have three ears. 


Or consider the random joy of a crocheted tissue box 2152030. 
A box of a bazzilion boxes  2157798
Funky keyboard stickers  2195979 
Or an e-reader  2160553 and  216055





  We got manuscript critiques.  There are wonderful author crits out there -- Julia Quinn, Madeline Hunter ..  just search 'critique'

But every one of these below is less than $100 (right now.)

Christine Wells, Anna Campbell, Courtney Milan, Candace Hern.


 2069562, 2170745 , 2059148 , 2069564



What are you waiting for???

Technical Topic: Finding an Agent for Romance

Someone writes:
"I've finished my Romance manuscript.  Now I'm looking for an agent.  How do I find one? 




Congratulations on finishing the manuscript.  You are now part of the 'finished your manuscript' fraternity.  Only one person in a hundred who says, "I'm going to write a book" makes it this far.  I am so glad you picked Romance.  The world needs more great Romance stories.

As to finding an agent . . . 

There are a couple of books that list agents.  Writer's Market and Jeff Herman's Guide are the two standard.  Most libraries carry them, but it's probably worthwhile owning one or the other. 

I used my own copy of one of those books to make marginal notes of information I found in many sources.  It was my 'central file", as it were. 

I could cross through agents who flat-out didn't handle Romance.  When I tracked down the agents of my favorite writers, I could add this information right in the Guide.  When I googled agents and read interviews they'd given, I wrote my impression of their outlook and personality in the guide. 

It kept everything nicely in one spot.

Another source of agent information is Agent Query here , which will give you a quick, partial list of Romance agents.  Between the two books and the online source, you'll find more agent names than you can shake a stick at.

The trick is finding the right one for you.  You and your agent are going to be together for many years.  You don't just want 'an agent'.  You want an agent who is both good and right for you.

Preditors and Editors here is a good spot to 'vet' your candidates, as is the Absolute Write Bewares and Background Checks Forum here.   This will help you eliminate the outright frauds and the incompetents.  Remember, being listed in the Guides or Agent Query and having a website is not a guarantee of quality or honesty.

Absolute Write also has sections for asking questions about agents and query letters and is just a generally excellent spot for a writer to hang out. 

moving right along . . .
It's worth subscribing to Publishers Marketplace here for a few months.  PM lists many of the sales agents make to publishing houses.  It will tell you which agents have sold and the sort of books they're selling.  It is by no means exhaustive -- many excellent agents don't supply information there -- but it's another source of information.

Another useful line of approach in your agent search is to look at folks who represent writers whose work has something of the flavor of your own.  This is good to do with long established midlist writers, of course, but you might look especially at debut writers whose work you admire.  They'll have agents who are taking on new clients. 
To get the name of an author's agent, check the acks page of their books, or google "author name + agent + literary".

I'd suggest a Romance writer with a completed manuscript join Romance Writers of America for a year.  Join your local chapter.  Join some of the online, special-interest groups.  You will meet other authors, which is reassuring in the sense that we are all in the same boat.  You will meet published authors who can give you advice.  And, with luck, you will make friends.  

For information on query letters, see Miss Snark's Blog here and Evil Editor here.   

Finally, if you plan to submit to some publishing houses -- Harlequin, for instance, and all of the e-pubs, you do not necessarily need an agent right now.  You can submit directly to HQN, e-pubs, Avon and Tor.

I wish you the very best of luck.

The Dutch Cover

Excellent Reader Danielle, tells me the Dutch version of Forbidden Rose is out.   That's a bright and pretty cover, isn't it?

Find it all in Dutch, here.  I think it can't be delivered yet, but that may lie in the future.  I am so delighted to be in Dutch, not least because Holland is such a wonderful place.

Babelfish is surprising little help in translating the blurb at the site.  I do not think I have ever been so confused.

The title means, 'Treason Me Not' which I rather like.

ETA:  Wonderful Dutch reader, Saskia, writes to tell me the title should be translated 'Don't Betray Me'.  Isn't that cool?

Historical Trivia

Just as butchers doubtless have interesting bits left over from cutting up the good meat and bakers have the odd candied fruit or eggwhites they can't use in the day's batch of pastries, Historical Romance writers pick up lovely bits of trivia they can never use in the books.

Today at Word Wenches --

The Bizarre Byways of Research
 

A goodly while ago, Pat Punt asked the Wenches to 
 
. . . share some of the strangest trivia they have come across in their research.  Having done my share of surfing the 'net, I have encountered many a fact stranger than fiction.   Their experience must be even more bizarre.

Bizarre does seem an appropriate description for what we come across.

  From Pat Rice:

The only trivia I remember is from my childhood. I play a mean game of 60's Trivial Pursuit.

But I just recently wrote about the poisonous green paint that might have killed Napoleon (Kill Your Hero with Regency Wallpaper)  and given a whole lot of other people pneumonia, asthma, and the winter blues.

But the one bit of history that sticks clearly in my mind—probably because it affected the area where I lived for twenty years—is the Mississippi flowing backward during the 1811 New Madrid earthquake. Can you imagine how powerful an earthquake would have to be to send the mighty Mississippi backward? And weirder yet, Shawnee tribe leader Tecumseh and his brother predicted the earthquake before it arrived. For some other weird stories about the period: see here.


From Mary Jo Putney:

Lord Uxbridge’s Leg

For the rest . . . head here

Cover Cafe Contest

The 2010 Cover Contest is on!  Here.

This is always fun.

Every year I go there and sigh over all the beautiful and excellent covers. 
Alternate Reality is always breathtaking.  I get envious.  The paranormal folks get the best covers.  Why?  Why?  Why?

Then I head straight for the Worst Covers of the Year.  Because there is great snark involved.
I sympathize with the authors, but I can't help myself.

Anyhow.  Forbidden Rose is in the 'Two Cover' category which delights me because I think that is a beautiful cover.


The information given about artist is limited to --  Artist: Cover Art by Lott Reps; (They are here.)  Cover photo by Shutterstock; Cover design by Springe Design Concepts LLC (Penguin Group, USA)  

I love that stepback cover on TSL.

Stepback by Judy York

mass market cover by Judy York

 I do not know exactly which artist at Lott Reps did the Forbidden Rose cover.


Alan Ayers, here,  did the trade Spymaster's Lady cover.  Judy York, here, did the mass market Spymaster's Lady.

The Alan Ayers trade cover