To Kindle or not to Kindle?

Finding Writing Themes in Nature

When I get stuck for an idea, especially for a new book I take a walk.  I am sure to run into something thought provoking on the 150 acres we don’t farm anymore.

For example.  Nature takes things back what you are not using them.  Anything that isn’t mowed for a year starts the progression from grass and ground berries to Russian olive and multiflora rose and then to trees, usually oak, walnut or hickory in our case.  The theme: Control is an illusion.

Change is constant in nature.  When a character returns to a setting it will seem smaller, the trees bigger and if enough time has elapsed they will not recognize their old home at all.  The theme: Look back but not with regret.

Everything has a season.  One month a field is full of dandelions and violets.  These are replaced by buttercups and dame’s rocket.  Then the summer daisies and butterfly weed, and so on into fall.  But you know all those plants will be back again next year in the very same places.  The theme: Have faith in the constancy of the annual cycle of life and death."

Natures keeps her mysteries.  You find a little animal skull and try to imagine how it got on this path where you have walked before and not noticed it.  You concoct scenarios that include nefarious foxes and meandering porcupines, but you will never really know how the critter met its end and who carried the skull.  Don’t imagine you will ever guess correctly.  The theme: Chance rules all.

The outdoors are full of surprises, but never when you are carrying a camera.  Having a fawn leap out in front of you or a flock of young turnkeys run by is not unusual, but it never happen when you can get a picture, so you have to be good at taking snapshots with your mind.  The theme: Live for the moment.

That’s a lot to get from a hour’s walk.

Writing Tip: Practice Action Dialogue Tags

I know that he said is supposed to be nearly invisible to the reader but action dialogue tags can move the story forward in a second plane.  You can have the characters arguing but also riding around a park.  It’s the action tags such as spurring her horse or tightening his fist on the reins that conveys the emotion of the characters.

Even if they are just having tea, every hesitation and clapping of a cup into a saucer shows character.  Of course you don’t want to distract from the importance of the dialogue, but readers stash the action tags in a separate part of their brain, I think, the one that say, "Aha, I knew he was lying," or "She’s beginning to care about him."  It’s almost like writing the story on two different levels.

In reference to
http://jenyfermatthews.blogspot.com/

Regency Writer Masters Deep POV But Can’t Give up Her Historical Fix

After writing seven Regency-set historicals for Harlequin as Laurel Ames and four for Pocket Books as Barbara Miler, I was in despair at the shrinking Regency market especially since I wanted to try my hand at traditional Regencies.  Was it me who had caused Regency sales to drop off?  I went back and reread all my historicals, looking for reassurance that my career was not a fluke, and that I am leading students in the right direction.

It was a relief to discover that I still love my characters and frequently I surprised myself with dialogue or a plot twist I’d forgotten.  You really start to wonder about your memory when you are twenty pages from the end of one of your own published books and wondering how you are going to wrap everything up.

The only unpleasant surprise was that I had not mastered point of view until I had been writing for seven years.  Since I started back through the books in reverse order the change was reassuring.  The early books are still good stories, but I used to change POV too frequently, give POVs to not just secondary characters but minor characters as well, including a couple or horses.  I had even slipped into the dreaded omniscient POV.

Noting when I did these things leads me to some conclusions.  Mastering deep POV is linked to mastering showing rather than telling and avoiding back story.  Any time I summarized past history I was tempted to tell it and get it out of the way, floating from one POV to another as needed.  Now I treat back story like old wine.  I don’t get it out often and serve it in small doses only to readers who have gotten to know the characters already.  This has the added advantage of making each book a mystery.  The reader has to wonder about the character’s internal conflict and try to guess until I show them what makes the character tick.

Although it’s sometimes necessary to present an opening in omniscient POV and zoom down to the characters, this camera-like opening is easy to avoid if you have mastered deep POV.  It’s best to start the book deep in the POV of one of the main characters and with a line of dialogue even if they are talking to themselves.  This is natural if you know the characters really well before you start writing the opening.

I take my heroines on walks with me and work out their personalities and quirks as the dogs and I explore the farm.  The heroes I take to bed with me, usually after they have fallen off a horse or been shot.  That’s when they introspect on their past the best.  A good dose of regret can hint at a inner conflict and make the man more mysterious than labeling him as such.

By the time I start the book I know both major characters and can write a scene with valid emotion to it.  It may not reveal the deepest problem the character has, but a longstanding one is good.  I also give my characters enough family to be provoking.  If a character is a orphan they still need secondary characters to aggravate them.

And finally I have figured out how to eliminate the minor POVs by having the POV character guess the thoughts or emotions of the minor characters for the reader.  Of course the POV character can also read in the other main characters’ faces and actions any nuance not delivered by dialogue.

Mastering deep POV means knowing when to go shallow as well.  During action scenes or when the character is hiding something, you stay in shallow POV.  It provides a contrast to those plunges into deep POV when the reader can really empathize with your character.

Cerridwen came to my rescue by publishing Music Master last October and now Two Hearts last month.  Of course I publish in other genres, including a series of cozy mysteries, a middle grade series and a paranormal that still freaks me out.  (Cerridwen will also publish Eye Walker, the paranormal detective series no one wanted to look at.)  But the Regency is my home.  I don’t know if it’s the language, the clothes or the horses; I just feel like I fit in there.

E-publishers both keep alive small niche markets and take chances on the bizarre or innovative.  Most of the recent trends have come out of the e-publishing marketplace.  The large publishing conglomerates are too ponderous to switch gears fast.