On Writing Romance (6 page)

Many people believe that the best writing is done in a fit of blinding inspiration, in the middle of the night and on a completely unpredictable schedule. In fact, writing is a craft, and inspiration comes most often to those who are sitting in an appropriate place, waiting for it. Readers can't tell which pieces of a story were written in a brilliant creative frenzy and which were put together one painful sentence at a time. After the book is finished, you may not remember which sections came easily and which were like pulling out your fingernails.

If you write regularly, even for just a few minutes at a time, you'll be in practice, your story will stay fresh in your mind, and you'll be in shape to take advantage of bigger blocks of time when you find them.

If you write just one page a day, you'll have a novel-length manuscript at the end of the year. Plan ahead so you can avoid the obvious pitfalls, but don't wait to start writing your story. Planning is a great way to
not
write.

“Write what you know” is good advice. When you stray too far from the familiar, you become more likely to incorporate errors into your stories — and most of the time you won't even know it, because you won't have the background to recognize where you've gone wrong. So it's important — without going overboard — to familiarize yourself with some specifics of your story's setting, culture, jobs, ethics, etc. before you start to write. You can't always write what you know, so you have to know what you write.

But what about science fiction? Or time travel? How can anyone
know
about worlds and beings that don't exist or concepts that are only theoretical? What about historical periods? You can't go back to the Wild West to watch what happened, though you can read firsthand accounts written by people who were there. But for more distant times, for which there are few or no records, how can you know how people lived, what they thought, what they ate, what they wore? What if your heroine is the princess of a fictional country? Can only a princess write that story?

Readers pick up romance primarily to experience the love story, but most of them also want to learn something about a place or a job or a time period. What they learn, they expect to be accurate.

And readers come to the story with knowledge and experiences of their own.

If what you say disagrees with what they know to be true, you'll lose credibility — and you'll probably lose the readers as well. Once readers catch an author in an error, they find it difficult to trust anything else the author tells them.

That's true whether the author gets something wrong (like calling Chicago's North Michigan Avenue the Golden Mile, when the natives refer to it as the Magnificent Mile) or just misses the obvious (like setting her story right under an elevated train track, calling attention to the proximity of the El, but never having a train rumble by and rattle the windows).

Your firefighter hero would know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide — so if you get it wrong, your readers will know that you couldn't be bothered to get your facts right. If you don't take the time to learn the distinction between a duke and a baron, between Lord Lancashire and Lord Robert Lancashire, then the readers of your Regency will think you're not smart enough to know the difference — or worse, that you think
they're
not smart enough to know the difference. Your millionaire rancher can distinguish between cows and heifers, bulls and steers, geldings and stallions — so if you have him mixing them up, your readers won't trust anything else you say about ranching.

Accurate research isn't important just for credibility. A few years ago I spent a couple of days in a medical library looking up case studies on carbon monoxide, so I could strand my hero and heroine and have them realistically sickened, but not permanently damaged. Not long after the book was published, I got a letter from a reader who had thought she was suffering from the flu until she read the story, recognized my hero's and heroine's symptoms in herself, and got treatment — just in time. Two days in a medical library was a peanut-size price to pay for saving a life.

In other words, do your research.

But where do you look, and what are you looking for? When you're drafting your book, you usually need two types of information — general facts you can use to shape your characters and story events when you're in the early planning phase, and more specialized information to ensure believability when you're in the writing phase. Let's take a close look at the various research options associated with each phase.

When you're planning your story, your first goal is to gather broad, sweeping, general knowledge about a place or a profession. This type of basic information helps you decide what your characters will do for a living, what events the story will involve, and — equally important — what sort of jobs the characters can't do and what couldn't happen in the story.

This general information typically comes from multiple sources, including many of the following:

Personal Experiences:
The best kind of research is personal experience. There's no substitute for being there — and, of course, observing carefully. Obviously, if you want to write a Civil War novel, you can't go back and live in that time period. But you can go to Gettysburg and walk the battlefield, getting a sense of distance and direction and the way the ground lies.

If you're using your own experience, make sure it's both accurate and comprehensive. Jacqui Bianchi, editorial director of Mills & Boon during the 1980s, once told of an American author who was so enamored of London during a tourist visit that she set a book there. Her heroine met the hero by tripping over a fire hydrant and falling into his arms; however, in her single week in the city, the author hadn't noticed that London fire hydrants are below ground, with the covers flush to the pavement. Though that's a fairly simple fix — the heroine could fall over any number of things instead, if she absolutely has to fall — some problems are a lot harder to repair after the book is written.

When it comes to using events from your personal experience — or, for that matter, factual material gleaned from primary sources, case studies, and interviews — it's safe, within certain limits, to have those same events happen to your characters. Just keep in mind that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.

Other People's Experiences:
The next best source, after your own experiences, is someone else's personal experiences. Find out what your friends are good at, where they've lived, and what they've done. What jobs have they held? Where have they traveled?

Cultivate sources like your lawyer and your doctor, the cop who lives down the street, the fireman who wants to sell you tickets to the annual ball. When you have a question for one of these professionals, you'll be able to phone and ask.

Keep track of what you hear at cocktail parties or the water cooler. Your coworker's reminiscences about his year in the Peace Corps may not fit into a story right now, but there'll come a day when you need specifics, and then you'll know who to call. (And if the person you need to ask already knows who you are, you won't face the problem one writer did when she phoned local drug investigators and asked how much cocaine would fit in a standard adult casket and what the street value of that amount would be.)

Most people are flattered by requests for information and eager to help, especially when you say you're asking because you want to portray their profession or experience correctly.

Often the most helpful information pops up when you give your sources a basic scenario you'd like to use, because they'll do their best to tell you what's possible and not possible, and how to bend that specific event to make it work in your story.

Primary Sources:
If you don't know anybody who's been there and done that, look for primary sources — materials written by the people who actually lived through the experience. The best written sources are both original (written by the people who had the experience) and contemporaneous (written at or close to the time of the event, rather than as a memoir years later, when memory has faded).

But primary sources are useful not only for researching historical novels but for creating contemporary settings. For instance, autobiographies can shed light on today's professions. When a person writes about how he learned to do his job, he doesn't just detail his successes; he talks about the pitfalls and pratfalls as well — the most challenging classes, the tricks played on him by his co-workers. Those details offer fertile ground for the writer's mind.

Look for accounts of direct personal experience, not speculation by an outsider, interpretation after the fact, or self-serving memoir.

Case Studies and Interviews:
Case studies and interviews, like primary sources, are accounts of real events and real people, though they usually aren't written by the people who actually lived through the events. A case study includes interpretation by an authority or expert. While conducting an interview, a reporter or other interviewer guides the interview subject to share the most interesting bits of information about his experience.

Case studies can be particularly helpful when you need medical details. If you want your hero or heroine to come down with a disease, look in the library of a nursing school or medical college. You'll find volumes detailing real patients' symptoms, how they were diagnosed, what the treatment was, whether there were complications, and how the cases turned out.

Textbooks, Guidebooks, How-To Books, and Instruction Manuals:
Textbooks can give you a quick survey of an enormous field of study and direct your further research efforts. Browsing through a textbook will give you ideas about what a character who specializes in that field would be good at — or not be good at. New textbooks are expensive, but you can often read them in college libraries or buy fairly recent textbooks at charity used-book sales, where they often go for a dollar or less.

Guidebooks give elaborate details about geographical locations — how likely it is to rain there in October, how hard it is to get a cab, what political stance is held by the local newspaper, what strange things you might run across in a local museum.

How-to books can be a great source of ideas for creating action for your characters. If your hero is fixing a faucet while talking to the heroine, a how-to book can give you specific details that make the picture realistic for the readers.

Instruction manuals give information about a product, which may or may not be useful — but the troubleshooting section is full of ways to complicate your character's life.

A particularly helpful resource for most romance writers is an old etiquette book. Editions from the 1920s and earlier go into elaborate detail about things like running a big household, giving dinner parties, following courtship rituals, and training servants. That information can be useful not only for authors of historical novels but for those writing contemporary romances that involve wealth, glitz, and glamour.

Children's Nonfiction Books:
If you're looking for a quick way to familiarize yourself with a subject, look in the children's or young adult section of the library. Nonfiction books written for young readers tend to be well organized, specific, and factual, giving the main points without drowning readers in details. If you want to set your book during the Revolutionary War but you're not sure exactly when and where, the children's section of the library is a good way to get an overview.

The children's section won't offer all the depth you need, but you can find out the basics in a short time. Once you figure out which direction you want to take, it will be easier to locate the specific materials you'll require.

Fiction:
Some authors of fiction are so meticulous with detail that they could write the handbook for their subject or historical period. Others aren't nearly so reliable. If you've picked up some general knowledge from reading fiction, don't count on the author being correct — check everything out yourself.

Other Media:
Details from audiotape and film can give your readers a realistic, I-am-there feeling that can increase the emotional impact of your story. Remember, though, that video and film are only as good as their source material and editing. Whenever possible, go the extra step to check that the producers got the facts right and that they reported the entire story.

One problem with using tape and film is that, without elaborate editing equipment, it's more difficult and time-consuming to find a particular moment, picture, or quotation on tape than to simply look something up in a book index.

The Internet:
The Internet is a phenomenal resource, one that can be overwhelming to the researcher. Unless you strictly limit your searches, you're apt to be buried in references. Most of the references will be less than useful, and all will tempt you to surf instead of working. But if your search terms are precise, the Internet can be the best place to find arcane, specific detail. It's less useful, however, for the sort of general exploratory research you need to do before starting a story.

As with film and video, material on the Internet is only as good as the source. Make sure to check out the data before assuming it's correct. There are many professional-looking but inaccurate Web sites.

The Internet can be an excellent way to borrow personal experience. Putting out a question on a bulletin board may bring back precisely the detail you need about a job, hobby, or geographical area. Again, consider whether the source is knowledgeable and reliable.

A comprehensive list of interesting and useful research links is available on
www.leighmichaels.com
.

It's easy to get so caught up in study, trying to learn everything there is to know about a subject, that you never get your story off the ground. That's why it's best to save the more detail-oriented research until after you've done the general research and started the writing process. Specialized research strategies enable you to search for specific facts or bits of information you may not realize you need until you're deep into your story. What might prompt you to dig a little deeper? Check out the following: