MONDAY MUSINGS—LETTING IT FLOW

The first Wednesday of the month is IWSG. This month mine will be on Monday, instead of Wednesday as I have Holly Jacobs visiting.

Holly’s topic will be on writing category romance. Category writing sounds easy to break into but ask any successful author and they’ll tell you a different truth. Stay tuned for her visit Wednesday and Joanne Kennedy and her cowboys on Friday.

IWSG:

I have great story ideas and a lot fun ideas of what if...?  I’ve played around with different genres to stretch and learn. I’ve also been challenged by writing friends to write in a different genre. The ideas are there. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t even have a problem verbalizing the story outline including characters. But recently, somewhere between orally sharing a couple scenes that have been living in my head as well as the general outline of that story and putting them in words on the page… I run into a problem.

I didn’t used to have this problem. I just told the story. It was like my fingers took dictation from the scenes in my head and I’d surface several hours later thinking, wow, what a ride! It wasn’t ever perfect, but who cared? I was totally involved in the story and having fun.

Most of my life writing has taken place in solitary. No writing buddies or writing conferences just me and the story.  Professionally, I’ve written for radio, newspapers, and magazines and had no problem with editors slashing my copy and no problem coming up with something good in a short period of time to meet a deadline. Meeting other professionals and pitching ideas or marketing a company? No problem.  Then I decided to go back to college. This was only exception to not being around other fiction writers. I had a solid English background (previous college) but needed current credits so I took various writing classes as electives for my English core. Writing has always been fun and easy for me, so why not?

I don’t say this as a pat on my back and oh, look how good I am.  It’s a matter of knowing your strengths and recognizing your weaknesses. Some of this is reflective thinking on what happened.

What changed? 

How did that dam get between my fingers and the scenes in my head and getting it on the paper? How did I lose that flow?

I have a good friend who tends to tell it like it is and doesn’t pull any punches. She’s writing professional and published. We go back a lot of years. She’s seen quite a few of my stories (and has harangued me for not going for publication). We were talking about my problem and I asked for her input. She’s one of those types you don’t ask unless you really want hear truth. What she told me was this.

You’re getting too bogged down with the rules of today’s fiction writing. It stifles you and you’ve lost your relaxed writing zone. The joy of the story. I actually want to strangle you because you aren’t writing how you talk it or like you wrote in story [A or B]. I loved your proposal which had zing and your rich voice was so clearly present. You're pushing too hard to make [your writing] fit into a nice little mold. Let it flow out naturally. I know if you wrote this story the same way you explained it to me, when you weren’t concerned about rules, it would be very powerful.  I think the worst thing you did, for your writing, was entering contests with all these wanna be writers critiquing and judging it.  These people have you writing like you're writing a textbook.

Sia, just tell the story and forget about the rules and making it perfect on the first draft. If you beat yourself up over every sentence you will never get the story out. It makes you stiff. Mistakes in grammar can be fixed later but you can’t fix stiff and boring. I want you to write this story without filters. Write it like you were telling me the story. Show me what you see in your head.

That’s a lot to think about. She made sense and I understand where she’s coming from. God knows, she’s seen a enough of my writing over the years to see the difference. Now, all I have to do is figure out how to turn off my inner critic and connect again with the flow of my characters and my story.

Sure. Got it.  Simple, right? (Cue maniacal laughter).

IT STARTED WITH TEARS

My guest is, historical romance author, Gwyn Cready. She has a fabulous Scottish tale of love, laughter, and tears--that's just the book. How she began writing seriously is yet another tale of tears, but I'll let her tell you about that.

Sia says to share the laughter and the tears, so I’m going to share the story about how I became a writer. It’s something I get asked whenever I do a talk, and I understand why. I’m always fascinated about how people ended up in whatever profession they’re in. 

I have a friend who went into advertising because he wanted to be like Cary Grant in North by Northwest. When I went to graduate school in business, I wasn’t sure what I’d concentrate in until I went to a talk given by a brand manager from Frito-Lay. The brand manager was talking about the launch of a new ridged potato chip called O’Grady’s, and the company has launched with a plain version and a Cheddar version. One of the students in the audience raised their hand and asked why the first flavor after plain was Cheddar. The brand manager looked around, a bit surprised anyone would even have to ask this, I guess. “Oh, honey,” she said, “the cheese-flavored segment is the fastest growing segment in the salty snack market.” And that’s the moment I knew I had to become a brand manager.

So I did. And life was good until, my younger sister, Claire, died without warning. She was 31, and my only sister. I was devastated.

I wanted to do something to honor her memory. My sister was a photographer and a poet—a hippie punk rocker with floppy hats, gypsy skirts, and patchouli perfume. We couldn’t have been more different. In a perfect world, or perhaps a different world, I would have named a child after her. And if my husband and I had had no children or even just one child at the time of Claire’s death, that’s what we would have done. But we’d already had our two and didn’t want a third, even to honor my sister. So I thought about what the next best thing to do to honor her memory might be, and the answer was obvious. The next best thing would be to try to create a piece of art and dedicate it to her. And since the only talent I had that even approached something like art was writing. I couldn’t paint, draw, sculpt, dance, act, design or build. But I thought I could maybe try to write a book.

 I had recently read a book given to me by a friend, a book that affected me more than any other book I’d ever read. It was a sweeping love story with the bravest, most honorable man I’d ever encountered in a story. And he fell in love with a woman named Claire. The book was Outlander. I’d never read a romance before, and I didn’t even know I was reading one until I had to hunt down the sequel in the bookstore and couldn’t find it under “Fiction.” In one of the last conversations I had with my sister, I joked with her about Outlander because the man in the story was named Jamie, and my sister had dated a Jamie for many years. Jamie and Claire. Claire and Jamie. I told my sister I’d lend her my copy. I never got a chance.

Within a month of my sister’s death, I started to write a romance novel, and if I was ever lucky enough to get it published, I would dedicate it to my sister.

That was 1997. For six years, I wrote when I could in the evenings and on the weekends. My kids and my job required a lot of my time. When I finished the book in 2003, I sent it out and found an agent. She tried to sell it for a year and a half to no avail. She encouraged me to write a second one.

The first book had been a historical romance requiring a lot of research. I decided I could leverage the research I’d done but still write faster if I tried my hand at time travel romance instead. I also found that a heroine from the present day allowed me to write in my own voice, which turned out to be a rather funny one. I finished the second book in “only” two years. My agent loved it, and it sold it in a two-book deal. That was 2006. In January, 2008, Tumbling Through Time came out, ten and a half years from the time I started writing. The dedication read, “For Claire, who would have laughed.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

From RITA winner Gwyn Cready comes a Scottish borderlands time travel romance perfect for fans of Outlander

For Duncan MacHarg, things just got real…

Battle reenactor and financier Duncan MacHarg thinks he has it made—until he lands in the middle of a real Clan Kerr battle and comes face to face with their beautiful, spirited leader. Out of time and out of place, Duncan must use every skill he can muster to earn his position among the clansmen and in the heart of the devastatingly intriguing woman to whom he must pledge his oath.

Abby needs a hero and she needs him now

When Abigail Ailich Kerr sees a handsome, mysterious stranger materialize in the midst of her clan’s skirmish with the English, she’s stunned to discover he’s the strong arm she’s been praying for. Instead of a tested fighter, the fierce young chieftess has been given a man with no measurable battle skills and a damnably distracting smile. And the only way to get rid of him is to turn him into a Scots warrior herself—one demanding and intimate lesson at a time.

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Gwyn Cready is the RITA-winning author of sexy, funny romance novels. Her newest book, Just in Time for a Highlander, is the first in the Sirens of the Scottish Borderlands series. In the book, a young but determined clan chieftess seeks a strong arm to help her command her clan, but when a fortune teller's spell goes awry, she finds herself with a dashing man from the twenty-first century instead. Find out more at cready.com