On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [15]
Doing a certain amount of research before setting up your story is both necessary and wise, because it helps ensure you don't construct your plot on an impossibility or a false assumption. But beyond that, it's difficult to predict what information you'll need, so start writing and look up facts as you need them.
Waiting until vacation time rolls around so you can devote entire days to your writing is like staying off your bicycle for fifty weeks in a row and then spending the next fourteen days riding across the country. You'll be stiff, sore, and unhappy—and unlikely to look at the bicycle with any fondness in the future.
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.
RESEARCHING YOUR STORY
"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? Wrhat 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 Hobert 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