Romance Novels | Write Sex

New Contributor – Stella Price on World Building

Stella Price 1 Response »

Aug 252011

This month we introduce our newest contributor to WriteSEX – Ste lla Price. Stella is half the duo of Stella and Audra Price, award winning romance authors who construct characters, worlds and more that draw the reader in. She’ll be joining us at DragonCON 2011 on Friday Night as we host the WriteSEX Pane l. Her first article on world building follows.

World Building. Most think it’s just for epic fantasy, or even dark fantasy. As a paranormal romance author, world building is, as they say, 9/10 of the law. Without it, characters are not believable, nor is the story in general. In my coming posts we will talk about suspension of disbelief, character development, and building a world from the ground up, but for now I want to talk about the necessity of world building, in any story setting.

Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror, Historical, contemporary, BDSM… Name a genre and it’s quite possibly the most important element because this is what sets your stage, and what hooks your reader. Without a believable situation and background, it really isn’t a story.

In work, even if you’re working from a contemporary setting, it’s the details that matter in making your book believable and unique. You cannot write a story without details right? Well details are a major element of world building.

World building, when done correctly, and not half assed, makes your story richer, full of depth and allows the reader to be immersed in the story you created. As an author, you strive to engage your reader on a level deeper than a letter to penthouse, right? Without the connection you can be damn sure that next story you put out won’t be on the reader’s auto buy list.

There are levels to world building. Light world building, where the author uses already accepted places, subjects and morae’s to make the reader feel at ease, and just adds details to enrich the experience. Then there are those that do it with a more heavy hand, where they take ideas already in play and twist them into other things, be it alternate history or alternate universes, and then there is the extreme of building the world from roots to the sky. None of these are wrong, and all have their pros and cons.

Light world building is what you see a lot of in Para romance. They use the contemporary setting, and then focus on the characters and their societies to build up the mythology. Kresley Cole with her Immortals After Dark series and Gena Showalter with her Lords of the Underworld series are prime examples.

A more heavy hand twists to alternate history, or alternate universes, and focuses on the characters and Society like the lighter hand does, but puts emphasis on the background and events that brought about the current status quo. Allison Pang’s Brush of Darkness is a great example of this as well as Lia Habel’s forthcoming Ya Dearly Departed and Meljean Brook’s Iron Seas books. These books rocked alternate histories and timelines, to give the books depth and dimension.

Extreme world building, Like Gail Martin’s Summoner Series or Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series is the very top of the world building ladder. You see this most in High fantasy and Scifi, but it is slowly making its way into the mainstream of romantic fiction with series like Michele Armstrong’s Settler’s Mine series. I look forward to seeing others.

It’s your duty as the author to know what kind of world building you are capable of, so that you don’t short change your readers or your story. Getting into a groove with your writing is paramount and the sooner you realize where you sit in the world building arena the faster you will realize just how important it is to your work.

Stella Price
Award winning best selling author
www.stellaandaudra.com

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Using the Character Arc in Plotting

Sascha Illyvich 4 Responses »

Jun 022011

If we take the plot advice from Morgan Hawke and continue with our writers education, we’re at the part now where we describe the character arc. This is the particular point of any story at holds interest because it keeps your attention. But what is the crux of the story?

According to Morgan’s post here we know that stories are about change. The hero and heroine must face inner demons and come out stronger after they’ve fought their obstacles. Think about it. In erotica this is a little less downplayed because the plot is focused on the characters getting together but in longer pieces, novella length and up, there is some sort of change going on. How exciting would the story be if the plot looked like this:

Hero and Heroine spotted each other.
They fucked in every possible way, position, with all sorts of toys.
The end.

Might be fun for a few minutes and it might be worth a good laugh but how about this plot instead:

Hero and Heroine meet
They fuck only to realize that each has their hangups about certain sexual positions and toys. (Oh noes!)
ENTER CONFLICT
Hero and Heroine separate despite the great sex and connection
Something puts them back together
They fuck more and realize that in the end they cannot stop fucking but they HAVE to get past their hangups.

Morgan talks about the seven stages of Grief and she uses that arc a LOT. Why? Because working off the emotion of angst we have something that gives us CONFLICT. Since our stories, be they erotica or erotic romance in my case, are about emotional connections, we need conflict. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that all fiction stories are truly about emotional conflict. Think about some of the classic non erotic stories like Huckleberry Fin or anything Shakespeare ever wrote. The stories are about people. And people are NOT emotionless robots (mostly) but we have to have a vested interest in them, otherwise why bother with them?

I will disagree with one point Morgan makes ONLY in the sense of character development. I believe our stories are about growth, not change.

Think about change like this: One moment I’m wearing my blonde hair down to the floor, the next it’s chopped back to an inch in length, spiked and dyed blue. And I’ve stopped listening to metal in favor of elevator music. That is change.

Growth is a teenager with angst over his father’s “unfair” treatment only to realize as a man that his father was trying to teach him lessons. The idea is simple: The underlying resentment caused pain that must be dealt with and in a teenagers mind, but in the mature person’s mind that resentment is analyzed and understood.

Going through the seven stages of grief started from Angst at a situation, person or incident gives us a backbone to our stories. Using that same bit of angst in our sex scenes helps add depth and flavor to draw our readers in more. It gives them something to connect with and a reason to keep reading.

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