In my continuing saga of hoping to someday finish my current work in progress, I took a half day off from work on Monday, determined to make some progress. I got up about an hour later than usual, and basking in the luxury of not having to go into the office, lolled about in my pajamas, working on the Sudoku in the day’s paper, until TPM (The Plot Master a/k/a hubby) went off to work for the day.
After exercising and showering, I got down to work. It was only 10 a.m., and I felt like I’d been released from bondage—hours and hours of free writing time before me.
I think I reported in a recent post that I’ve been making decent progress, averaging about 250-500 words in the morning before work (which is incredible for me). But something happened that morning that slowed my progress.
I’m working on the sequel to my first book—a dark and gritty look into the world of sexual slavery, with some consensual BDSM mixed in there. The sequel, which picks up the story about six weeks after the end of the first, is supposed to be a suspenseful, thriller-esque story with a continuing romance.
But on Monday, everything I wrote was just awful, or lackluster at the best. No emotion. No grit. No suspense. In fact – help me, please – everything came out kind of slapstick-y!
In my quest to diagnose this condition, I put the laptop aside and did another 30-minute workout, figuring maybe increasing the blood flow to my brain might bring an epiphany. It did not (although I burned calories!), and I struggled to write for the rest of the day.
When I went to bed that night, though, and settled in with my Kindle for my pleasure reading, it hit me. My writing that day was similar in style and tone to the book I’m reading! It’s a contemporary romance by a national best-selling author with probably 30 published books in several series. She doesn’t write slapstick-y by any stretch, but she does use physical situations in humorous ways. I do believe I was channeling her tone and voice while writing that morning. (If only it were as good as hers, I’d switch genres!)
It reminded me of a trip to Disney World when I was 16. I’m a native northeasterner with no discernible accent. I encountered a lot of southerners at the park, and at some point, I started subconsciously mimicking their accents. I forced myself to stop when I unintentionally offended one of the performers, a really cute teenage guy from Georgia (blond, blue eyes, nice muscles...I’ll bet he grew up into a fine looking man...).
Anyway, either I’ve transferred that tendency to my writing voice, or my overall mood (happy, relaxed) prevented me from going to the dark place the story calls for. Or maybe it’s a combination of both.
So now my question is, how do I turn off these subconscious voices in my head? Am I destined to finding my own voice only in the pre-dawn hours, when the world is dark and I’m exhausted from the drains of my every-day life?
Is my writing voice hopelessly schizophrenic, helplessly bound by the time of day or by mood?
Disgusted, I told myself that “professional” writers are supposed to be able to power through these glitches and make it work, and that’s what I’ve been doing—at least the powering through part. I can’t say I’m making it work, but that’s what second and third and fourth drafts are for. Right?
Eventually I’ll be in a dark enough mood, I’m sure, to get back to normal.
If any of you have experienced this phenomenon and figured out a way around, I’d love to hear your tips!
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Leah writes stories of mystery and romance – or goofball slapstick, depending on her mood – and the power of love. Learn more at leahstjames.com.
No, I don't mean your heroine is a shameless tart. I'm talking about frequent, almost random head-hopping in fiction. After having been schooled in the highly-focused point of view promoted in modern romance fiction, I thought head-hopping was a thing of the past. Oh, no; not so!
For the past couple of months, I've been doing most my leisure reading outside our genre. I think it's healthy for a writer to expand her exposure beyond her own genre, but also--and there's no gentle way to put this--I'm bored with romance.
First, I chose a contemporary village mystery set in Quebec. I enjoyed the setting,exotic but not too much so, and the plot was sufficiently intricate to keep me guessing. However, the author made a habit of popping in and out of characters' points of view for a paragraph or two here and there. And these weren't just the major characters, either. There was a large cast of characters, and nearly every one managed to score a brief place in the sun. By the time I was half-way through the book, my head was spinning. To be fair, this was the author's first book, written a number of years ago. She's become very successful, and I need to read a more recent volume in the series to see if she's still doing it.
My most recent read was a VERY long literary novel written by a well-known and well-regarded Minnesota author that followed the life of an ordinary woman in a small town in Minnesota from the turn of the twentieth century through the nineteen fifties. To my amazement, this author did the same thing--giving a POV paragraph to whichever of the umpteen characters struck her fancy, seemingly willy-nilly. This woman has also been writing for many years and has won a number of awards.
When I first started writing twenty-seven years ago, the issue of POV was largely ignored in popular fiction and certainly in romance. Nora Roberts ignored it, so I ignored it, too. I wrote intuitively; I wrote what I read. It was only after joining RWA and my first critique group in the mid-nineties that I was introduced to the term. I will always be grateful to the leader of that group, who patiently explained and corrected my manuscript until I figured it out.
Most romance writers these days employ deep, third-person POV because it is best for conveying characters' feelings, and that's what we strive to do. Neither of the books I mentioned above focused on feelings, but that's the primary reason our readers buy our books. I know that even if I decide in the future to experiment with other genres, I'll stick to limited, deep POV. I can't imagine writing any other way.
I wonder if the successful authors I mentioned write the way they do because they've always written that way and their editors don't try to change them, or if POV isn't important in other genres the way it is in romance. What is your experience reading outside our genre? Do you think POV matters, or is it merely a stylistic technicality we get wrapped up in when we should be concentrating on the meat of a story?
Alison
www.alisonhenderson.com
