I'm over at the Ruby Slippered Sisterhood blog with my fellow '09 Regency finalists - we're discussing what it takes to final in the Regency category of the Golden Heart. If you're entering, considering entering, or even just thinking about how to polish your Regency manuscript, please stop by!
Wedding bells are tolling for Malcolm and Amelia -- for about the fourth time. After rereading AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE on Saturday, I identified a couple of areas that I want to change, and their wedding and subsequent wedding breakfast are at the top of the list. While the rest of the book is snappy and dialogue-driven, the wedding and breakfast are throwbacks to my first draft; I loved the concept and so kept the scenes virtually intact, but now they don't fit in with the rest of the book, and the heavy usage of narrative instead of dialogue makes the pace come to a screeching (albeit brief -- but not brief enough to maintain agent interest) halt.
So the concept is staying the same, but I'm rewriting that section from scratch. I wrote four or five pages tonight while sitting in a cafe after work, and was intrigued to discover that, while I changed everything and kept only a couple of original lines, I told the same exact story, with totally different details, without deviating from the original word count by more than 100 words. This surprised me; clearly I have a strong sense of how long the scene should last, even if my version of the scene has changed.
Overall, I'm happy with the progress I made tonight and am feeling much better about the rest of the edits on my plate. It was really hard to jump in at first; I "finished" AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE in December, and all of my creative focus has been on Ferguson and Madeleine instead. But once I started writing, Malcolm and Amelia came back to me -- and I think they're happy that their wedding is going to reflect the rest of their ridiculous romance.
Now, though, it's bedtime; I need to carve out some writing time tomorrow, which will be difficult due to an early-morning dentist appointment and a dinner engagement with some friends. Wish me (and Malcolm and Amelia) luck!
Several months ago, I picked up a copy of Christopher Vogler's THE WRITER'S JOURNEY: MYTHIC STRUCTURE FOR WRITERS. While the fact that he managed to use 'writer' twice in the title was indicative of his generally weak writing style, I thought it was an interesting look at how stories are formed using common archetypes and story arcs. He draws heavily on his experience as a screenwriter to demonstrate how most stories -- particularly blockbusters like action, fantasy, and romantic comedy -- follow a familiar cycle in which the hero/heroine goes off on a quest and must find their own holy grail before returning to their known world.
This all seems quite obvious and not worth the $17.79 that the book currently runs on Amazon (full retail is $26.95, which is steep for a paperback). However, I recently reread it, and as I've watched movies and read books over the last few days, I have been struck by how accurate his analysis was. Between yesterday and today, I watched BRUCE ALMIGHTY and FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL and read THE GRAVEYARD BOOK by Neil Gaiman (which I shall review sometime soon). While the stories were quite different -- man at a crossroads dealing with faith issues in a comedic manner, man on a mission to forget his ex and find love with the new girl, and small boy raised in a graveyard until he can take revenge on his family's killer -- all three of them had structures that adhered closely to Vogler's analysis of the ideal story framework.
What I find interesting about writing romance is that there is such a clearly defined set of rules for the genre -- particularly for historicals, the hero and heroine can't be involved with other people while involved with each other, the story must explore two people falling in love, and the story must end with the hero and heroine either married or engaged (almost always married). The challenge is to take a set of rules and write a story that adheres to the strictures while still feeling fresh and original. The rules provide a form that sets the reader up to be pleased and prepares them for a happy ending -- but the writer must get to that happy ending through several hundred pages that create doubt about the ending and provide the reader with a satisfying emotional journey as the hero/heroine grow through the power of love.
This is all a lovely challenge for me; when I started writing AN INCONVENIENT MARRIAGE, I only had the first section and the last mapped out. The rest all came to me while I worked through the manuscript, resulting in extensive rewriting during the second draft to fit all the pieces together. But as I begin to plot out book number two, I think THE WRITER'S JOURNEY could at least help me to set things up in a slightly more unified way, even if the process of writing itself will still lead to a massive overhaul after I finish the first draft.
I'll keep discussing craft and storytelling as I begin work on book number two. Meanwhile, what's your favorite story? What do you love about it?
