Category: His Majesty’s Secret Passion

cooling, Dirty Draft, His Majesty's Secret Passion, off time

Birth Of A Book, Part Five—Getting Down And Dirty…

Christina Hollis
By Antonio Litterio

…it’s time to get creative. If you’ve been following the first four parts of this series, you’ll have a stash of ideas, and you’ll know the importance of detailed characters, and a strong basic structure. To catch up on any of the parts you may have missed, here are the links: From Thinking To Writing, Finding The Heart And Soul Of Your Book, Find Your Writing Style and The Basic Three Act Structure For Creative Writing.

All (!) you have to do now is put the advice into action, so sit down and write. Nobody can put those words together for you, and that’s the beauty of it. Your work is as individual as you are. The problem is, those words and ideas are no use to you, or anyone else, while they’re inside your head. To get them noticed, put them down on paper, or up on screen.

I’m a great believer in the dirty draft. Once you’ve worked out the who, what, when, where and why of your major characters, live with them for a while. Don’t start writing until they stop being characters, and become real people for you. Then imagine you’ve opened a vein—let the words flow fast. The important thing at this stage is to get something down. Editing your written work is about a million times easier than staring at a blank screen (and ten million times more productive), so start and don’t stop when you run out of words. Stop when you still feel you could write all night. Then your story will be so desperate to be told, it’ll keep your imagination on high alert until your next writing session.

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Once you’ve typed The End, you reach the hardest part of being a writer (since the last hardest part, and until you come to the next hardest part). That’s when you put your work away for a while. It must be out of sight, and out of mind. If it’s on a computer, save it to a flash drive, and email it to yourself as well, as insurance. Then go and do something completely different from writing. Hike a long distance path. Join a gym. Go on holiday. Do anything but touch your finished dirty draft. This break gives you and your work a chance to mellow after the ferocity of the writing process. A cooling off period puts your work, like a teenage affair, into perspective. Leave it for at least a week, but preferably much longer. If you use the time to plan, and begin writing, your next book the time will go much faster. A head start on your follow-up project is important if you want to make wiring your career.

You’ll be glad to know writers and their drafts have a much better chance of long-term success than playground partnerships. You can alter and improve your first love in written form to your heart’s content—you can’t do that with real people!

Next time, I’ll be talking about the process of reviewing and editing your work. Do you revise and edit as you go, or do you use the dirty draft method outlined above? There’s a signed copy of my current release, His Majesty’s Secret Passion, for a comment drawn at random after 9th March.

Creative Writing, His Majesty's Secret Passion, Lord Of The Rings, Three Act Structure, Wizard Of Oz

The Birth Of A Book, Part Four: The Basic Three Act Structure For Creative Writing

Christina Hollis
By Antonio Litterio
Is your story running out of control? Is your character development less of an arc, and more of a ramble? Save time and keep your plot on track, no matter how many threads it has, by finding out how to apply the Three-Act Structure to your work. 
  
I started out as a pantster—writing novels free-form, with no overall plan. A dramatic scene would come to me. I’d think about it until I’d developed characters and a plot. Then I’d write the first three chapters, followed by the last one, to make sure every loose end was tied up. After that, I’d go back and fill in all the gaps. That worked well, but what sounds like a fast process turned out to be slow in the end. Making things up as I went along meant lots of re-writing and refining. Sometimes I’d have to discard days of work when it didn’t fit with the revised storyline. Often the finished manuscript and my original synopsis might have been talking about different books, with only names and places in common. 
I needed to get organised. The 2014 RNA conference put me onto Scrivener. You can find out more about that here.

Once I got the hang of using this package, I could see the Three Act Structure (which has been used for centuries to create novels, plays and other works) fits in perfectly. The Introduction, Action and Conclusion model provides a skeleton you can build on and articulate, by breaking the action down into small segments. 

I haven’t turned into a dedicated planner overnight, plotting every move my characters make right down to the last cough and sneeze, but it’s definitely easier for me to keep my first draft on track these days. In turn, this saves a lot of time, which I devote to polishing my full manuscript. 

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I’ve created a template on Scrivener which includes divisions within the basic Three Act Structure. Most are self-explanatory. You don’t need to write scenes for all the headings—in fact, it would be a very bad idea to follow this template down to the smallest detail. In trying to fill every box, you’d end up producing the literary version of a painting-by-numbers, rather than your very own Mona Lisa. 

As you write, you’ll find some sections will merge. The order will change, and the lines between some will  blur. You might want to skip some altogether, or change the order within the acts. Do whatever suits you, within the basic story arc of scene setting, followed by action and rounded off by conclusion.

Here are the basic headings I work with:

ACT ONE—This introduces your story world and characters, and sets up all the drama to come. 
Scene setting: The trick is to drip feed information about the who, where and when of your story. Don’t drop it in lumps. Personally, I like to start with a bang, such as the “shark attack” in His Majesty’s Secret Passion.
Inciting Incident: A stranger comes to town is a classic opening. You could also use an accident, a letter, or a misunderstanding.
And So…For every action there’s a reaction, as Isaac Newton said. Keep that in mind as you move forward, heaping up troubles and questions for your characters to confront.
What happens then? Don’t forget to add variety to the ups and downs in your story. Give your reader time to catch their breath, and reflect on what’s been happening.
Pressure Builds: Once you’ve got your characters up a tree, throw rocks at them. 
Force: As you make things worse for them, they are forced to take more action
Plot Twist/Revelation We know where we are, and who we’re dealing with. Or do we? Throw in another development to increase problems for your hero.
George M. Hill Company, Via Wikimedia
ACT TWO—Action stations! This act should make up the bulk of your story, powering it along with increasing drama, and working on the tension.
All Change: This is the point where Alice has gone through the looking glass, and Dorothy isn’t in Kansas any more. There’s no way back. They’ve got to create a new  existence, and fresh ways of thinking.
Learning: Your characters get to know their new world.
Back And Forward: Draw contrasts between their old life, and the new rules they are learning.
Tension Builds: Foreshadow future disasters. In The Lord Of The Rings, Gandalf rages at Pippin for doing something as simple as dropping a stone down a well. We’re told that’s not a good thing to do in a place like the Mines of Moria, but we don’t know why. Yet…
Breathing Space: The contrast of action and peace. Your readers and heroes can all take a rest, but just when they least expect it—
Bang! More trouble arrives, and it’s big.
Action Your hero throws themselves into the situation. This is a fight to the death, either physical, mental, or both. It takes all their resources and ingenuity to cope.
Reapplication: This is it: hero must make one last huge effort, and dedicate themselves to getting the ultimate prize of true love, treasure or whatever else you’ve dangled in front of them. This means death—or glory!
ACT THREE—This is the climax and conclusion of your book. Everything has been building towards this point. 
More Trouble/Another Crisis: Things are getting worse and worse.
The Black Moment The point when a romance seems doomed, all projects are heading for disaster and there is (apparently) no way out.
Hidden Powers The hero delves even deeper inside themselves to draw on resources they didn’t know they had.
Last Big Push toward reconciliation, or the final battle.
And Finally… It’s all over.
Look Around: Characters take stock of their new story world, relationships and their changed understanding of themselves.
Climax: the big reconciliation, or reveal.
Resolution: This is the place to give your characters their Happy Ever After moment, or let them announce their determination to stride forward into Book Two of a series. At least give them a satisfying conclusion.

There are lots of possible variations on this basic layout, but this one has worked well for me. It’s the way I kept Sara and Leo heading for their happy ever after in His Majesty’s Secret Passion, despite all their troubles, and reversals on the way. 

Do you plan, or write freestyle? How do you fancy working in a different way?

There’s a signed copy of His Majesty’s Secret Passion on offer for a comment picked at random after 16th February.
His Majesty's Secret Passion, Jewel Under Siege, Pantsing, Planning, Scrivener, Snowflake, Three Act Structure

Birth Of A Book, Part Three: Find Your Writing Style…

Christina Hollis
By Antonio Litterio

Does your novel have a beginning, a muddle, and an end? Do you want to find out the secrets of a well-rounded, satisfying story? First, discover what kind of writer you are by answering these 3 simple questions:

1.     At the supermarket, do you:
a)     dash round grabbing the first things you see because you’ve run out of food, time, or both
 or
b)     Visit once a week at exactly the same time, with a list (and a full stomach).

2.     Fancy a holiday?
a)     Yay! When do we go? I love surprises!
or
b)     No, thanks. Every year I rent the same little cottage for two weeks in August, in a place where all the locals know me.

3.     Is your working day…
a)     A roller coaster of triumphs and disasters, with snack and/or cigarette breaks here and there to liven up the mix
or
b)     A production line of completed tasks and problem solving, and you always get ready for the next day’s work before you leave.

If you answered a) to those questions, you’re more likely to wing your way through your writing, without much forethought. Answering b) means you like the order outline and planning brings to your life. I’ve written successful novels using both methods, and each has their good and bad points.

ADVANTAGES: Just sitting down and letting the words pour out is a great way to get a first draft finished in record time. If you’re a planner who’s written their way into a cul-de-sac, letting your mind wander and writing free-form for a change can pole-vault you over your problems.

DISADVANTAGES: You don’t jump into a car without some idea of where you’re going (I hope). Winging it while writing might turn your original short story into a 100,000 word epic, which still has no end in sight. On the other hand, if you’ve planned in so much detail any suggested revisions have you reaching for the gin bottle, you’ve lost sight of the release (and enjoyment) writing can bring.

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I wrote my historical novel, Jewel Under Siege, without any formal plan. Researching a non-fiction project on the eleventh-century daredevil, Robert Curthose, I discovered 3 things:

–  Robert would make good comic relief for a serious story,
–  Not all mediaeval ladies culled florets and sighed in solars—some rolled up their sleeves and ran successful businesses, and
–  Talking rather than fighting is the best way to counter ignorance and bigotry.

I sat down and blasted my way through the first three chapters, and then wrote the last one. This was to give me an idea how my characters would get their Happy Ever After moment. Then I went back and filled in the thousands of words which were missing from the middle of the book.

With the first rough draft finished, I put the manuscript aside for a while to let it marinate (to find out why this is always a good idea, however you write, take a minute to read this).

In second and subsequent drafts of Jewel Under Siege, I tightened everything up, made sure timings agreed and all the continuity was right. By the time it was published, I’d had a whale of a time, but the whole process took me several months longer than the writing of my next release, His Majesty’s Secret Passion.

Before starting to write His Majesty’s Secret Passion,  I spent a lot of time thinking how the internal conflicts of Sara, my career-obsessed heroine, could strike sparks off hero Leo, a man who has abandoned his own career for the sake of family loyalty. Once I’d filled out a sheet of details for both Sara and Leo, I was ready to start my first draft.

Send an email with the words Character Sheet in the subject line to christinahollis(at)hotmail.co.uk, and I’ll send you a copy of the detailed form I fill in for each of my fictional characters. 

Order your copy here http://amzn.to/14udZUC!

I’ve written here about the joys and woes of the Scrivener writing package. It’s a kind of virtual filing cabinet where you collect every link, image and note you need, and produce your manuscript, all in one place. You can have hours of fun naming folders and dividing every chapter into individual scenes, complete with sidebar of notes for each one. If you use the basic Three Act Structure for your novels—I’ll be talking about that next time—writing sessions become an easy matter of opening your Scrivener project and seeing at a glance what you should be doing next.

I’m a Scrivener devotee, but I’ve also used Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake system with success. This is a more free-form approach. You start by identifying the big idea at the heart of your novel, then gradually add layer on layer of more detail. In the same way every snowflake is built up of simple shapes, your book grows organically into a novel of many facets. I like Snowflake a lot, but Scrivener stops my desk disappearing under a sea of Post-It notes and scrappy bits of paper!

If you don’t want to use a commercial word-processing package like Scrivener or Snowflake, try making a simple “And Then” list of all the important and exciting events in your story. This way you can make sure you’ve got plenty of page-turning action, and juggle the order before you start writing.

Here’s the “And Then” list I could have used for the beginning of His Majesty’s Secret Passion‘s first chapter—

Sara—shark attack? And then…
Leo saves her, and then…
She’s embarrassed —it was a false alarm. And then…
Attraction tussles with suspicion, until…
Leo’s distracted by his jealous PA, but…
He’d rather help an injured woman than socialise, although…
Sara’s recent history makes her put up barriers, and so…
Leo takes direct action…

There’s an added benefit of this type of brief list. It makes creating a detailed synopsis easy later on, when you’ve settled on the content and order of your story.

When it comes to writing, are you a free spirit, or a planner?

A Christmas Carol, characterisation, Ebenezer Scrooge, Gone With The Wind, His Majesty's Secret Passion, Leo Gregoryan, Sara Astley, Scarlett O'Hara

Birth Of A Book—Part Two: Finding The Heart And Soul Of Your Book

Christina Hollis
By Antonio Litterio

What do the names Ebenezer Scrooge or Scarlett O’Hara mean to you? Whether or not you’ve read either A Christmas Carol or Gone With The Wind, I’ll bet pictures of a mean old man, or a wilful Southern Belle jumped straight into your mind.

Scrooge and Scarlett were so perfectly drawn by their respective authors, Charles Dickens and Margaret Mitchell, we feel we know them. Their characters stay with us once we’ve finished a book, and long after we’ve forgotten its plot.

If you read the first part of my Birth Of A Book series (which appeared here), you’ll have been collecting your thoughts and making plenty of notes. A good fund of ideas stops you being stunned by your first sight of a blank sheet of paper, so by now you should be raring to go.

Before you tap out your first words, you’ve got one more job to do. Characters give your work heart and soul.You might have a plot all planned out in your head, but if your central figures don’t capture your reader’s imagination, your book may be abandoned after they’ve read your first few pages. Readers need to care enough about your hero to follow them through the ups and downs of a story, which might be hundreds of pages long. Use the three C’s—Characterisation, Credibility and Consistency—to keep your readers keen.

CHARACTERISATION

Take the time to build up a detailed picture of your main characters. I used to work in Marketing Research, and used customer profiling  to build up a picture of our clients. When I started writing novels, the sort of forms I’d designed in my office job came in handy for making sure my fictional people had a good grounding in reality.

Start off by cataloguing your character’s appearance. It’s a bit of a cliche to make heroes perfect and handsome, while every villain is rotten to the core and ugly with it, so mix and match. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo, managed some heroic deeds, while Paul Freeman’s handsome Bellocq in Raiders Of The Lost Ark was a mercenary with no morals.

Create a complete fictional past for your characters, right down to the pets they kept as children, and the schools they attended. Wondering why that’s important? Imagine the contrast in outlook a strict faith school gives, compared to one where free expression rules. How someone reacts to rules and regulations early in life sets the scene for conflicts later on.

What does your character do when they have some spare time? How do they relate to other people—are they sociable, or a loner? Do they hate their job, or are they the sort who loves their work? Do they do voluntary work? The more questions you can invent, the more detailed your characterisation will be.

Send an email with the words Character Sheet in the subject line to christinahollis(at)hotmail.co.uk, I’ll send you a copy of the form I fill in for each of my fictional characters. 

Coming Soon!

CREDIBILITY

Nobody in real life is perfect, so give your hero a flaw or two. It makes them more human, and three-dimensional.

To go back to Ebenezer Scrooge, he’s a horrible character. What is there to like about someone who hates Christmas, and treats his poor overworked, underpaid clerk Bob Cratchit  like a slave? Well, not much.  But there can’t be many people who haven’t been in such a bad mood they wanted to turn down an invitation from an over-jolly relative, or scowled at the sight of yet another expensive charity advert produced by big business and “posed by models”. Dickens has recognised faults we all have, packed them into one man, then magnified them to create the monster Scrooge.

Scarlett O’Hara has faults, too. Most people have bent the truth, been stubborn, or shallow, at some time in their life. Anyone reading about her may be driven mad by some of the things she does, but deep down they’ll recognise what it’s like to be young and capricious.  None of us alive today lived through the American Civil War, but we all know what it’s like to feel hard-done by, or to be overtaken by some mad yearning. Scarlett’s turmoil is far more outrageous than ours, but it still has that kernel of familiarity.  That’s one reason why we read to the end of the book.

CONSISTENCY

The way a character develops (for better or worse) during a story is all part of the roller-coaster ride  which keeps us hanging on right to the end of the line. It’s important these changes happen in a believable way. That’s not to say each chapter of your book should be a similar-sized step along the character arc, pointed out with neon signalling. Mix up the big ways and small ways. Your character may be caught up in a national disaster, or they may not be able to pay a gas bill. The way they react to these situations may be completely transformed over the course of your book, but be careful their reactions and attitudes don’t see-saw too wildly in between, unless there’s a cast-iron reason. In my next release, His Majesty’s Secret Passion, Leo manages to unwind stressed-out Sara a bit at a time. Gradually, they reach the point where her fury at uncovering the secret Leo’s been keeping from her is defused by the way they must both adapt to changing circumstances. All through the book their attitudes to each other soften, but although this happens at different rates at different times, they always behave in character.

To keep up with the progress of His Majesty’s Secret Passion, visit my author page here and click on the “like” button for updates.

creative process, His Majesty's Secret Passion, Princes Of Kharova, Writing

Birth Of A Book, Part One: From Thinking To Writing…

Christina Hollis
By Antonio Litterio

Where do you get your ideas? is the question every writer gets asked, all the time. The answer is so simple, once you discover what it is you’ll never believe it was so hard to find. It’s in your bath. Or at the top of a tree, the bottom of a bucket, or…anywhere, and everywhere. You get the idea.

Think about the person who asked that question. They’ll have channeled a million thoughts between getting up in that morning, and putting an author on the spot. Any one of those thoughts has the potential to become a funny story, a furious rant, or even a novel.

Imagine you got caught by a traffic warden, because you were five minutes late back to the parking bay. You were delayed because you couldn’t catch your dog. If you wanted to write a romance, imagine a handsome guy came to help you. Your dog bit him, and…

…Or if you wanted to write a thriller, maybe your dog ran away because he got the scent of…what? Drugs? A body? An escaped tiger?

There are three or four embryo ideas developed from an everyday situation that could happen to anyone.

Coming Soon…

The only difference between someone who writes, and someone who quizzes writers is that one notes everything down to use in evidence…or at least, for inspiration. Get yourself in the right mindset, and you’ll find inspiration everywhere. The internet, TV and radio are good launch pads. The lyrics of a song that make you think, a local headline that intrigues you but never makes the nationals, they’re happy hunting grounds for the author.

His Majesty’s Secret Passion, the first book in my current series, The Princes Of Kharova, sprang from a competition asking for the first ten pages of a romantic novel. I’d just read this article in Time Magazine about an alternative heir to the English throne. The real-life Mike Hastings wasn’t remotely interested in staking his claim to Queen Elizabeth’s crown, but I couldn’t help wondering how unhappy he’d have been if he was forced by circumstances to take on the job. Escapist romance demands exotic locations, independent women, heroes with issues and an aspirational feel. My initial idea soon developed into an overworked career-woman forced to take a holiday for her health, who is thrown together with a dedicated doctor who had to abandoned his studies for the sake of family loyalty.

By making loads of notes, I developed my initial thoughts into the basic framework of a novel. This all happened in my spare time, before I sat down at the computer. Once there, I had to flesh out my hero and heroine. The best way of doing that is to create character sheets for each of your major characters. I’ll cover that next time. Until then, keep up to date with  His Majesty’s Secret Passion and the other titles in the Princes of Kharova series by visiting my Author page on Facebook, and clicking on the “like” button.