The HEA Cafe

Does writing make you cry?

Not because you’re banging your head against the keyboard in frustration, but because what you’re writing wrenches at you.  It should.  When you’re writing an emotionally draining scene, especially the “black moment”,  you should be feel it.

Remember Joan Wilder at the beginning of “Romancing the Stone”?  She was sobbing her way through a box of tissues while typing the end of her novel, and I laughed, but I totally understood it.  If you’re not affected by your own writing, can you expect your readers to feel the emotion coming off the page?  I was writing a scene yesterday that ended with the hero crying, and by the end of the scene, I was blowing my nose too.

I suspect for some writers it is a purely mechanical process, but I’m pleased by the number of authors who confess that they too have “Joan Wilder” moments.  I always wondered if I was just odd. After all, I’m a sucker for cheap sentimentality.  Hallmark card commercials make my eyes misty.  Give me a scene in a movie with a dying dog and music in a minor key, and I’m plowing through the tissues.

On a totally different note, you might also “feel the burn” when crafting a good sensual scene.  At least, you might feel it before you’re in the 15th reading for edits.  Some writers have to set the mood for themselves with candles, soft lighting, utter isolation.  Others can hammer them out with screaming kids running in asking for snacks.  Every writer’s different, but I know that for me, I have to be feeling something if I want my reader to be feeling something.  I wrote a scene in Captain Sinister’s Lady that still gets to me, where a young man has to leave his adoptive family because racism in his antebellum town make it impossible for him to have a decent life.  It wasn’t easy to write it.  But I took the tissues and got to work, and when I was done, I blew my nose and said, “Hey!  That’s not half bad!”

So when you’re writing those key emotional scenes, ask yourself if you’re investing enough of yourself into it–are you feeling sad over your characters, or aroused, or elated, or happy?  If not, maybe you need to give it a second look.

I like reading books about pirates.  I like writing books about pirates.  But let’s face it, pirates are people who rob other people for a living.  This is a problem for me when I’m trying to write a pirate hero.  Would I write a bank robber hero?  Not very likely.  So why are we willing to accept pirate heroes?

Part of it is the romance of piracy.  Running away to sea, answering to no one but your shipmates, living life for the moment rather than the future, all good things.  Who would you rather spend an evening drinking with, Long John Silver or the guy who owns the tavern?  Plus the pirates get to dress with more flair than the shopkeeper.

As romance writers we work around this by making our pirates tragic, or funny, or on a mission, or in disguise, but unless you’re really tricky, it all comes back to him taking what isn’t his, and that’s theft.

You can avoid this issue, to a degree, by making your pirates privateers instead.  The difference between a pirate and a privateer is that a privateer has a license to steal.  Literally.  Governments would issue “letters of marque” to sea captains, authorizing them to stop-and-rob enemy ships.

The legal line between piracy and privateering could shift around, and many famous pirates were also privateers, and vice versa, Sir Henry Morgan and William Kidd both had letters of marque, but were also charged with piracy by England.   In the early 19th Century, Mexico and South American countries breaking away from Spain issued letters of marque to captains of all backgrounds who would agree to harass Spanish shipping.  Many of these sea rovers were little more than pirates, but it was in the interest of the rebelling countries to harass Spain, even if the privateer captains were neglectful about making sure the government issuing the letter of marque got its cut of the booty.

In the United States, the US Merchant Marine proudly includes privateers among its founders, pointing out, rightly, that in its earliest days the US only had merchant ships that could be put into action, not a standing navy. In the War of 1812 there were 23 USN ships in service, and 517 privateers.  Becoming a privateer was a favorite “get rich quick” plan for merchant captains, though naturally it carried a high risk.  The ships you attacked were likely to fight back, and if you were captured, the enemy nation might not wish to honor the letter of marque. John Paul Jones was a hero to the US, a pirate to the British.

All European and US governments engaged in privateering (they got a cut of the take) well into the 19th century, however, the US did not sign the 1856 Declaration of Paris that ended European use of privateers.  The Confederate States of America issued letters of marque to allow Southern privateers to harass US shipping during the Civil War and while we don’t issue letters of marque in the US today, it’s still possible.  Section 8 of the United States constitution says that Congress has the power “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water”.

It would make for an interesting contemporary romance–a bold, swashbuckling adventurer, perhaps a former Special Forces operative, is issued a letter of marque and reprisal to go hunt down terrorists.

I’m not going to write that one, but it’s an interesting idea.  In the meantime, I’ll go back to working on my pirate and privateer historicals, ‘cause who doesn’t like to read about pirates?  I know I do.

Autumn comes late to Florida, indeed, in some parts of the state it doesn’t arrive at all. But in North Florida we’re now in our autumn/winter season, or as we like to say, “The season when you can open the windows again”.

I find this switch from the heat and humidity of the summer to the more temperate days of a Florida winter stirs my creative juices. I’m once again able to sit out on my screen porch beyond 9:00 in the morning, enjoying the butterflies hovering over my butterfly-friendly container garden. The days are energizing, and this is felt throughout the community. This is the time of year when we have outdoor art shows and music festivals. The summer is simply too hot and too wet. This is also the time when the farmers’ market begins to bloom with winter flowers, like mums and pansies, and winter greens. It’s salad time at the market, ’cause once again, the summer is too hot and wet to grow much besides corn and tomatoes.

Those of you preparing for a northern winter (or a southern summer down in Australia) have my sympathy. As I told someone on my annual winter trek to the frozen north, “The only good thing about traveling up here in February is having a return ticket that says ‘Florida’.” This is our payoff for the 100F temps and 98% humidity, the hurricanes and mosquitoes, the droughts and wildfires.  I like to take my notebook computer out with me these days, finding that being away from my desk and enjoying the sunshine can get me through some rough writing patches. I enjoy feeling the change of seasons, and as a writer I like how it makes me feel different, more creative, more willing to try something a bit different. I hope that whatever season you’re experiencing now, you enjoy it to its fullest.

Last month I blogged about “writing what you know”.  This month I’m blogging about “writing what you don’t know”.

My newest novel takes place mostly aboard a British frigate during the Napoleonic Wars.  My desk is now piled high with research books, some from the library and some I’ve purchased for myself.  I am full of Royal Navy trivia, and yet I know going into this that there’s no group of reading fans more rabid than Royal Navy buffs (with the possible exception of US Civil War buffs).  They will catch your mistakes–or what they think are your mistakes–so fast it’ll make your pixels spin.

For example, I have to figure out the date of my book.  If I have it set before 1805, the person who assisted the surgeon was called the surgeon’s mate.  After 1805, he’s technically the surgeon’s assistant, but no doubt most old timers still referred to him as the surgeon’s mate.  So if I set my novel in 1811, do I have to have a snippet of explanation saying, “Well, yes, Mr. Expendable is the surgeon’s assistant, but of course we all still refer to him as the surgeon’s mate”?

Decisions, decisions….

This also shows one of the pitfalls of deep research.  What a friend calls the “I did this research and you’re going to pay for it!” syndrome, where the author believes because she finds these tidbits fascinating, you must also find them fascinating or face her wrath!

I had to take pages and pages out of my last manuscript because I realized that while I found the story of Anna Jai Kingsley fascinating (Read Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley–African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner by Daniel L. Schafer for more), writing about her wasn’t advancing my own story and I had to stay focused on my H&H, not wander off into the delights of sharing research.

And while I’m ruminating on research, I must put in a plug for one of the most underutilized yet valuable tools a writer has, Inter-Library Loan.  If there’s a book you need for research, and your local public library doesn’t have it, ILL will get it for you.  From anywhere in the US where that book is in circulation.  You might not get it this week, but eventually it will turn up.  I wanted a copy of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett, an 18th C. Novel.  Our library didn’t have it, but within two weeks it was within my hands, shipped from a library in North Carolina.  ILL has given me access to many books published by the Naval Institute Press, books that if I had to buy them, even used, would quickly exhaust my budget.  Plus, these are often books I don’t need to keep, or just need to see a chapter or two.

Which leads me into my next thought, The Evils of the Interweb!  I’m often asked by budding young writers which websites to go to for research.  The answer is, “None of them should be a primary source.”  Oh, sure, it’s nice to be able to see pictures of the uniform of the U.S. Revenue Marine in 1845 at a website, but it’s much more valuable to read a comprehensive history of the Revenue Marine.  Here’s the thing a lot of new writers don’t realize–when you use books for research, you learn stuff you didn’t know you needed to know.  Also, books have editors.  Websites do not.  With a website it’s very much “Researcher beware!”  Sure, books can have mistakes too, but at least someone other than the author took a look at it before it got to the presses!

So when writing what you don’t know, consider your sources: visits to historical sites, if possible, are always worthwhile.  Read books.  Read some more books.  Then go to websites to see if there’s any tidbit or update you might have overlooked.  And finally, don’t make your reader pay for your pleasure.  Save your wonkiness for the next time you’re hanging with the period re-inactors.

“Write what you know” is one of the most fossilized commandments of How To Write. Sometimes writers take it too literally.  They think they have to be “method actors”, immersing themselves in roles before they can sit down at the keyboard and make their characters come alive. It doesn’t have to be that intense. I didn’t have to be a soapmaker to write about a character who’s a soapmaker (Amanda in Captain Sinister’s Lady), but I did have to do research on how soap was manufactured in the early 19th century.

Yet there is something to be said for “write what you know”, and we should always keep this in mind.  For one thing, you know more than you think and you should use it.  I may not have known at the outset how to make soap, but I knew what it smelled like to unwrap a fresh bar.  I also knew the gliding feeling of working up a lovely lather and what happens when you have soap that smells like almonds, or sandalwood, or roses, spreading its fragrance through a room.  That too is writing what you know–incorporating all the sensual details of your life into your writing.

And this is leading me back to my original thought behind this blog entry.  When I started writing my first novel, Pirate’s Price, it was set in England because, well, gosh, every historical is set in England unless it’s a US civil war story, right?

So I’d be sitting out there on my back porch, thinking about writing Regency London, when what I really wanted to do was describe how a clear February day in Florida gives you a sky so blue it makes your eyes hurt, how the red hawk in the tree bordering our yard was calling out its kee-yar cry, and how my neighbor’s orange trees were perfuming the entire block.

I wanted to write about what I knew–the North Florida landscape I’d lived in for over 30 years.  So I did.  I took trips to St. Augustine and walked the streets of the Ancient City, toured the Castillo de San Marcos, went to Fernandina to research its pirate history, and visited the various springs, rivers and geological sites that figure in my work.

It was fun, and it helped me give my writing an air of authenticity that I believe does spring from writing what you know–how something smells, how it feels, how it grows, how it sounds, what’s in bloom at certain times of the year, and when you would have a character attend a cane grinding.

When I had my heroine make a persimmon cake in Smuggler’s Bride, it was because I’d purchased some ripe persimmons at the farmers’ market and ended up using them in a spice cake (recipe upon request [g]), so I was “writing what I knew”.

Even if your story is set in a solar system far, far away, you can write with this kind of authenticity.  You can describe the foods your characters are eating, the fabric of their clothing, the sights they encounter based on your own experiences.  Each writer must in her own way incorporate her life experiences into her writing, because when it comes down to it, we’re all “writing what we know.”