Creative Writing | Write Sex

Writers Point of View for Stories – Who Gets to Talk?

Nov 102011

Who gets to talk?

Readers get attached to characters they care about and have built relationships with, just as in reality. Kill off a favorite character from your reader base and you’d better believe you’re going to hear about it! Alter that character’s world somehow and again, you’ll get feedback. But what if the hero and heroine both have something to lose? Then what do you do?

Cover for Sascha Illyvich's 1NightStand story by Decadent Publishing

Refer back to length of the story. Who has the greatest loss, and the greatest gain? Write from THAT one character’s POV and ONLY change scenes if word length allows for it and only if that character’s journey makes us feel something universal.

I recently read a story where head hopping occurred so much because the writer thought to write scenes like we see in TV. Take Burn Notice for example: We have Michael Westin, (The hero) Fiona (Heroine) and all the side characters, most notably Sam, the drunk former CIA op who we get to see frequently. POV switches don’t really occur much because the story is narrated by Michael Westin, but when we do get those changes, Westin is still narrating. That works because people need to see a lot of visuals and TV/movies allow for those shifts to occur. The average attention span is not that long.

But FICTION writing doesn’t. You’ll end up with unsmooth transitions, annoying head hopping issues that make the reader THROW YOUR BOOK THE FUCK AWAY!

In FICTION, y

ou do two things. You show the reader what YOU want them to see; otherwise they’ll see something else. And you make the story smooth. By sticking to word limit/reason for changes, you’ll eliminate guesswork in your plotting.

Some writers can get away wit

h multiple POV changes. Sherrylin Kenyon for example can, she has a built in audience that somehow doesn’t care about the change from the H/H to Ash or Stryker. So does Laurel K. Hamilton, but because she writes in First Person POV, she doesn’t have that ability. But if she wrote in third person, she could afford to change because she’s ESTABLISHED. Chances are that you’re not them. (And if you are, thanks for reading my article!)

Christine Feehan does an excellent job of keeping the POV between her hero and heroine. So does Richelle Mead. And Rebecca York. Those authors are authors who don’t write what I do, but I learn from them because they’re where I hope to be someday.

To reinforce the key points, I’ll leave with my two rules for simplification.

Tell the story from the character’s POV that has the MOST to lose
Use word length 20k = 1 character. 40k, 2 characters. 60k-100k+=3 and ONLY three.

The obvious exception would be if you have a reason for a secondary story such as the one used in Back in Black by Lori Foster where she had the main conflict going on and for what I felt was literally a second story all it’s own, but was tied together neatly by the author. That will be a different post though, when we break into deeper POV and more on storytelling craft.

That should simplify things in your stories. Happy writing!

Sascha Illyvich

http://www.saschaillyvich.com

Listen to The UnNamed Romance Show Mondays at 1 PM PST and Thursdays at 3 PM PST on www.radiodentata.com – hear from Sascha as he shares his work along with interviewing the hottest authors in today’s romance

Developing Your Creative Personality as a Writer Part II

Jean Marie Stine No Responses »

Jun 232011

Last time I had the blog we talked about developing a creative personality for the mind in writing short stories

Publishing the hottest in classic and current erotica and erotic romance

The following is a high-octane problem-buster that will make child’s play of even the hardest brain-stumpers and grind down to a manageable size even the most insurmountable dilemmas. It is a development of ideas pioneered by Tony Hodgson, and others.

It’s based on the well-established finding from psychological research that the more different perspectives we bring to a problem, the more ideas we are likely to generate and the more complete our perceptions of it.

You’ve heard of seeing the world through ‘rose-colored glasses’, which cause one to see only the sunny side of things.

Imagine the effect of seeing the world through ten different pairs of colored glasses — one for each hue in the rainbow (and each different spectrum of our mental processes).

Regardless of how difficult the dilemma, you’ll have found the answer long before you’ve tried on the tenth pair. By examining a challenging circumstance through each set of ‘colored glasses’ (each different mental perspective), we achieve a complete, rather than a partial, view, and engage our minds to consider it far more deeply.

Here are the TEN COLORS

*White – cognitive, the way our mind functions when we are learning, thinking, increasing knowledge or understanding.

* Grey – factual, the way our mind functions when we are absorbing information, scanning for important and critical data.

* Yellow – opportunistic, the way our mind works when we view possibilities from a sunny cheerful, optimistic, positive point of view, and see how we can capitalize on and make the best of events and situations around us.

* Black – critical, the way our mind functions when we are serious, skeptical, analytic, seeing the potential problems on the road ahead.

* Green – creative, the way our mind functions when it sends up the shoots of fresh, new imaginative, creative, innovative new ideas.

* Brown – practical, the way our mind things when we are being down to earth, thinking things through logically, incrementally, objectively, within existing systems and assumptions.

* Blue – holistic, the way our minds work when we are looking at the big picture and engaged in strategic planning.

* Orange -molecular, the way our mind works when we are attempting to throw light on the individual parts of something, either to identify or place them.

* Violet – directive, the way our mind works when we are thinking about crucial aims, objectives, decisions, when we have arrived at a turning point or crossroads, and have to make a gut-level choice about what it is we truly want.

* Red – Opinionated, the way our mind works when we are offering our own view or seeking the views of others, and either arguing our position, debating another, or melding the two together to achieve a greater understanding or consensus.

Next time we’ll cover the last lesson from me on Developing your Creativity

DEVELOPING YOUR CREATIVE PERSONALITY Part I

Jean Marie Stine No Responses »

May 052011

Clearly, if you are reading this and interested in writing erotica (or just writing) and have ideas about things you would like to write about, you have a creative personality.

Science has discovered everyone and anyone can be creative. Creativity has nothing to do with IQ. We all have creative elements in our personality.

Psychology has delineated eight characteristics shared by most creative, problem-solving people. Amazingly enough, all these personality traits are cultivable skills anyone can develop.

According to creativity maven Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, former Chair of the University Of Chicago Psychology Department, his research revealed that creative people possess the following paradoxical matchings of traits. They are:

1. Smart yet naive

2. Playful yet disciplined

3. Imaginative yet realistic

4. Extroverted yet introverted

5. Humble yet proud

6. Passionate yet objective

7. Iconoclastic yet traditional

8. Experiencers of both intense pleasure and intense pain

9. In touch with their female side and their male side

These nine characteristics are the key personality components that engender creativity. As a writer you likely recognize a majority of these in your own personality.

Csikszentmihalyi’s research also suggested it is possible for people with creative personalities to increase these elements, and hence increase their own native creativity,

If there are times when you are stuck on plot, scenes or character actions and reactions, if there are times when you run out of ideas, or have ideas you can’t seem to make gel, you might give the three exercises that follow a try. These exercises can help you develop the nine qualities listed above and make you a more creative person than you may have dreamed you could be. They will not only help you solve problems with plot, structure, and characters but will enhance the creative side of your personality.

CREATIVE PERSONALITY EXERCISES

1. FROM MENTAL ZERO TO 60 IN SIXTY SECONDS

People often say, it’s a hopeless. My mind has gone completely blank. I can’t think of a thing. They want to know how to get their brain in gear, when it is worn-out, clouded, or simply won’t start.

The following three step strategy was developed for my workshops. No matter how blank your mind feels, it is guaranteed to catapult your brain from Zero to Sixty in half-a minute or less.

Step 1: Eliminate mental static.

Step 2: Focus on the problem.

Step 3: Ask yourself the following pairs of questions:

1. Ask yourself, what are the key issues?

2. Ask yourself, what seems most trivial?

3. Ask yourself, what aspects of it you feel positive about?

4. Ask yourself, what aspects of it you feel negative about?

5. Ask yourself, what seems to be the biggest obstacle?

6. Ask yourself, what seems to be the smallest obstacle?

7. Ask yourself, what aspects seem most confusing?

8. Ask yourself, what seems clearest?

9. Ask yourself, if there is any important fact you have a nagging question about?

10. Ask yourself, what facts you are most certain of?

11. Ask yourself, what’s the best result you can imagine?

12. Ask yourself, what’s the worst?

By the time most people are even part way down this list, their minds have caught fire and they are already generating ideas, possibilities, and solutions. When it’s my turn again to share the blog we’ll begin to delve deeper into the mindset and examine color schemes of creativity and how child’s play can really bring out the creative person in you.

Plot for Romance Stories Part II

Write Sex 3 Responses »

Nov 112010

By Sascha Illyvich

In our last article covering plot for romance stories, we discussed a three act structure to achieve our story. That three act structure carries us regardless if we’re writing 30k or 100k. The main determining factor lies in where your plot is. If it’s erotic romance, we already know that the focus is on character growth through inciting incident all the way to climax and that sex plays a huge part in that.

In fact, sexual interaction drives the plot by developing character growth. M. Christian has done a nice job of giving us a reason to label ourselves or not give a shit but when it comes down to the truth as writers, we’re only concerned with two things: Telling a great story and finding an audience that loves our great story.

To extend plot from a 20k story (where we focus only on the major acts) we add intrusions into our plotting.

Take for instance a basic story outline from earlier:

Act One: Inciting Incident – What is the eternal incident that brings the characters together?
Act Two: Crisis/Ordeal – This is where we begin to throw internal issues of the characters into things.
Act Three: Confrontation – Our characters confront the issue and deal with it. If it’s an action story, a villain and H/H all share the same issue only the villain either dies a megalomaniac or fails to learn the lesson after it’s too late.

That will get us through about 10 to 20k worth of words. Now let’s go for a larger market (the novella market)

Not only do we have our major acts, but each act has a structure in it that dictates what else must go on. Again, using Morgan Hawke’s well researched plotting pad we have the following:

Act One
1-Inciting event – Denial
Act Two
2-Crisis – Anger
3-Reversal – Despair
4-Ordeal – Sacrifice
Act Three
5-Climax – Acceptance

In that basic three act structure we’ve added stages of grief for character development. This gives us range of emotion for character development AND gives us a better climax due to a better conflict. Now we’ve added angst in the mix and made things a little deeper.

When I write a story I set out to identify the market first and foremost. Am I targeting Harlequin, or Loose ID? The difference in storytelling lies in a very simple question: How deep can I go?

I ask this question because it makes a huge difference depending on the market. Markets like Harlequin (for the most part), Liquid Silver, some of the sweeter romantic e-book publishers and some of the print lines have a basic formula they follow. It’s the SAME as what I mentioned in the last post but the human emotion level cannot go so dark and deep.

Publishers like Loose ID, Kensington, Sizzler Editions, Berkeley and Samhain allow for more depth of character emotion because that is what SELLS. It sells because the average reader for those markets expects a fucked up character they can relate to. They want to think the world is ending if not only does their relationship screw up but they can’t get over their fears or realize their greatness.

The newer generation of romance authors struggles for depth. Look around you at all the vampire novels and were-shifter novels. Those characters have flaws that you can’t possible think match the human condition—except they do.

Vampires are outcasts as manifestations of human sexuality that we often repress.
Werewolves change once a month and embrace a more primal instinct. As humans we have to justify our love of violence simply by tuning it out and growing numb. I’m not sure that’s the best example but it makes sense to me.

So now the plotting question is, who is controlling who? The author, the readers, or the characters?

Next time we’ll cover another facet of writing

Sascha Illyvich