Writing tips: "Novel" Choices
1. Will your book be plot or character-driven?
Plots and characters are twins. Both are mandatory to create a good book. So is an interesting setting.
2. Do you need an outline?
My first half-dozen published novels began with an idea and I just wrote. If writing by the seat of the pants works for you, fine. Yet few persons start from Seattle to New York without knowing their destination. It is too easy to get sidetracked and never reach New York.
I now need to at least know the major highlights. Knowing that freed me to expand.
3. How well do your know your characters?
Emilie Loring, famous novelist whose inspirational mystery-romances greatly influenced
my writing, included this dilemma in Give Me This Summer.
Heroine Lissa Barclay is excited about the novel she's writing . . . until her hero pursues a clue to the mystery threatening his love interest and stops dead still at the top of a flight of stairs. Lissa goes back and reads two previous chapters. Her hero won't budge. Terror strikes. Has her imagination deserted her? Is this the end of her writing career?
"Don't be a quitter," she scolds herself. She paces and thinks. Suppose that she had sent her hero down to the street instead of up the stairs? She does and the story is off and running again. Lissa tacks a motto on the wall:
WHEN STUCK GO INTO REVERSE
"Suppose that" became the foundation of my historical novel, The Calling of Elizabeth Courtland. I asked myself, "Suppose that . . ."
- it is the turn of the twentieth century in Grand Rapids. Michigan
- Elizabeth, "Madcap Betty" Courtland is a spoiled debutante'
- her engagement is being announced
- she meets a dedicated minister and is attracted to him
- her wiles fail to impress him
- nothing sways Daniel from his intention to build a church in the wilds of Washington State. .
- he makes it clear Betty would never fit into his life and leaves
- she mopes.
- her father accuses her of impropriety
- furious, and accompanied by her faithful maid, Abby, Betty travels to Pioneer in search of Daniel
- her money is stolen on the way west
- Daniel is shocked to see her
- Betty is too proud to tell him she has no money to get home
- she becomes a waitress at the local boarding house and learns to care for Daniel
- he feels that her following him to Pioneer is just another of her madcap stunts
- sickness strikes the community
- Betty faces her greatest challenge: change from a wayward girl to a mature woman
It was one of the most enjoyable books I have ever written. My hometown of Darrington in the early days is a prototype for Pioneer. My hero Daniel Spencer is very much like my great-grandfather who built the first church there in the early 1900s. "Madcap Betty" is nothing like my demure 5'0" great-grandmother!
Photo of The Pioneer Hotel where my fictional heroine worked.
The Calling of Elizabeth Courtland
2 comments:
Seat-of-the-pants writing is both more fun and more harrowing than having a detailed plan, IMO. But we do need to know the general destination, as you say. I like novels about novelists; will have to try the one you mention, by Emilie Loring. I've never read any of her books. I do recall Elizabeth Courtland, though. Good to know she's nothing like your grandma (:
I have all 50 of Emilie Loring's books and periodically reread them. Several of her heroines are working on becoming authors; inspirational. Titles before the mid-1950s are best (that is when she passed on). Many came after but the later ones put out from notes by her family aren't as much vintage-Emilie. Favorites are WW2 era: "To Love and to Honor," "Keepers of the Faith," and "Bright Skies."
"The Little Grandma" wouldn't have approved of Elizabeth's madcap actions!
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