On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [57]
I wriggled experimentally. I was in a small, closed space. I was lying on something hard, but the sides of my little cage were padded. ...
I wriggled some more, then had a brainstorm and sat up. My head banged into something firm but yielding, which gave way when I shoved. Then I was sitting up, blinking in the gloom. ...
Then I realized I was sitting in a coffin. ...
I nearly broke something scrambling out. ... I burst through the swinging doors and found myself in a large, wood-paneled entryway. ... At the far end of the entry was a tall, wild-eyed blonde dressed in an absurd pink suit. She might have been pretty if she wasn't wearing orange blusher and too much blue eye shadow. ...
The blonde wobbled toward me on cheap shoes—Payless, buy one pair get the second at half price—and I saw her hair was actually quite nice: shoulder length with a cute flip at the ends and interesting streaky highlights.
Interesting Shade #23 Lush Golden Blonde highlights. Heyyyyy ... The woman in the awful suit was me. The woman in the cheap shoes was me! I staggered closer to the mirror, wide eyed. Yes, it was really me, and yes, I looked this awful. I really was in hell!
Davidson's heroine has a great reason for looking around carefully and noting details, since her surroundings are like nothing she's ever experienced. And although the author employs an overused device—the heroine catching sight of herself in a mirror—as an excuse to describe her, Davidson has added some wicked twists. Her heroine literally being caught dead in a suit, shoes, and makeup that she would normally never have worn makes the cliche fresh and new.
SHARING DETAILS
How do you share the details of your all-important story with the readers? There are five main ways:
1. Narrative: describing what happens in more-or-less sequential order.
2. Exposition and Summary: telling about or recapping the action rather than showing it.
3. Flashback: showing a character reliving an event that happened before the current story.
4. Introspection: detailing what the characters think.
5. Dialogue: sharing what the characters say.
We'll look at dialogue and introspection in chapter twelve, but let's take a closer look at narrative, exposition and summary, and flashback techniques.
Narrative
Straightforward narrative involves presenting events to the readers in the same order in which they occurred. In its simplest form, narrative is almost a list. Narrative is what the Red King from Alice in Wonderland wanted when he said, "Begin at the beginning, go on till you come to the end, and then stop." It's the technique a first-grader uses to tell you what he did at the zoo: "First I saw the giraffes, then I rode on the elephant, and then I petted a goat and he tried to eat my sleeve."
The action is much more complex in romantic fiction, of course, but the principle for presenting it is the same. Close your eyes and watch the scene in your mind as it unfolds. What happens next? What do your readers need to know in order to understand the scene? What details will help them picture the location, characters, and events?
Have you ever struggled to make sense of a story told by a scatterbrained individual who started the tale in the middle, left out the most important facts, for got the punch line, and kept saying, "Oh, I forgot to tell you ..." or "I guess I should have said ..."?
If so, you appreciate the value of straightforward narrative—simple words, simple (though varied) sentence structures, and events coming one after another
in the same sequence in which they actually occurred. Using simple words and uncomplicated sentence structure does not make a story dull. In fact, straightforward writing is more difficult to compose well than more complex and literary flights of fancy because every word counts. Writing so the story will be easy for the readers to comprehend is not a simple task.
Everything in Order
When you're writing, keep in mind the order in which things actually happen, and follow that order.