By Margaret Tanner

The start of a new year is a great time to de-clutter, figuratively and literally speaking. A time to cast off the old and start afresh with the new.

I am a clutter collector from way back. I figure why throw anything out; you never know when you might need it. I inherited the hoarder gene.

 

“Waste not, want not” was my mother’s motto and she lived by it the whole of her life. Maybe it was because she lived through the great depression of the 1930’s and World War 2, that she would use and re-use, save and squirrel away stuff. Our house was never untidy, because most of the hoarded items were well out of sight. 

I should have learned my lesson after my dear mother died about 20 years ago and my sister and I had to clear out her house. To say it was a nightmare was an understatement. It took weeks. My mother had kept receipts from the 1940’s, even her World War 2 ration book. And speaking of books, she had hundreds of them. Then there were the ornaments, pretty little knick-knacks that reposed on every shelf or level surface in the house. Boxes of china. Well, you get the idea.

Now you would think that after all this trauma and angst, I would have dashed home and gone through my own cupboards.  I didn’t, but I did take a lot of my mother’s stuff with me.  Well, how could I let it go?  All those little treasures.

My mother-in-law passed away, same story, I kept a lot of her things too. I was a hoarder.  It came as naturally as breathing or eating.

Well friends, retribution did come. The youngest of our sons finally left home, so hubby and I decided it was time to downsize. We bought a smaller house, and put our larger house on the market. “We’ve got a lot of stuff here, we’ll have to get rid of it,” hubby says.

Over my dead body. “No, we won’t do anything rash,” I said, “there’s plenty of time to work out what we want to keep.”

A week before the auction of our house, my husband had to have heart by-pass surgery, so I had to go on with the sale alone. After the auction and hubby’s successful operation, I had to start packing, because when he came home he couldn’t do anything for eight weeks. I really hit the panic button because we had a short settlement. Forty days to clear out all our stuff, that of my mother and mother-in-law (things I had kept, and shouldn’t have). Well, it was a nightmare. I did most of it on my own.  I don’t know how many trips I made to donate all these “treasures” to the second hand thrift shop (we call them Op shops here in Australia.  They are run by charities to raise money to help the less fortunate).  And I did help the less fortunate - big time.  The Op shop manager must have thought I was Mother Teresa re-incarnated.

It was terrible. I cried because I had to give away my treasures, mum’s treasures and my mother in-law’s treasures. Worse still, was the time it took to pack them and deliver them to the Op shop. 

With the clock ticking, I had to be ruthless – and I was.

If you are even contemplating moving house, start to get rid of your surplus stuff early.  In fact, don’t collect it in the first place.  A lady once told me that if she didn’t wear a dress for a year, she was probably never going to wear it again, and she got rid of it. Smart lady. Wish I had such courage.  I still cling to my favourite dresses, hey I might lose weight and they will fit me again???

The moral of this story is - don’t hoard. De-clutter as much as possible, because one day you will have to sort it out, or your children will have to sort it out.  

The same goes for your writing.  Be ruthless. If the manuscript you have expended blood, sweat and tears over isn’t working, discard it.  Temporarily cast it into your bottom drawer is what I mean. Don’t destroy it, because you might be able to resurrect it at a later date.  Start on something fresh and new. Once you get your writing tastebuds tingling again with a new premise, a feisty heroine and a spunky hero, the words will start flowing until they become a torrent.

Never give up. It is a steep climb to the top of the publishing mountain, but oh what a view once you get there.

By Emmie Dark

It’s a strange recommendation to make, I know. Why would I urge writers – especially romance writers, whose key tool of trade is dialogue – to go see a silent movie?

If you haven’t heard about it, “The Artist” is a new release movie that’s not only filmed in black and white, it’s almost entirely silent. (It has a beautifully orchestrated score.) At its heart, it’s a love story between a fading silent-movie hero, George Valentin, and a rising talking-movie diva, Peppy Miller.

As I was watching the movie, I was struck by how the actors and all the things surrounding them (the set, lighting, costumes, music, etc) had to work so hard to tell their story in the absence of dialogue. How do we know George Valentin’s wife is unhappy in their marriage? Amongst other things, she draws fake moustaches and blacks out his teeth in the photos of him that appear in the newspaper. She doesn’t ever say, “I’m not in love with you anymore.” But we see it, clear as day, through her actions.

I loved the opportunity to observe, without the distraction of dialogue, all the elements that go into telling a story. Facial expressions, body language, habits, tics. All the vital things writers need to use to envelop a reader in their story, to immerse them in the life of their characters.

Without giving away any spoilers, there is an important scene, a turning point in the story, that is beautifully shot on a multi-level staircase. Apart from the obvious symbolism of George going down the stairs while Peppy is going up, there is acres of meaning in their postures and expressions that tell us what is going on for each of them at that point in their lives. There is a tiny amount of dialogue in the scene – provided through captions on the screen – from each of them, but many layers of meaning behind their otherwise superficial words.

Perhaps it was because the actors had to deliberately exaggerate their expressions and movements that I was suddenly noticing elements of movie making that I don’t usually pick up in the average Hollywood blockbuster. Perhaps today’s movies are so much more subtle than those of the silent era that we don’t notice the characters in quite the same way. Or perhaps it was simply that without the audio queues of dialogue I had to rely on my other senses to “feel” what was going on. Whatever it was that was happening, I was constantly amazed at the level of meaning the story managed to convey.

I couldn’t help thinking that it was just like a good book, when there’s more happening than what appears on the page. When an author has skilfully shown you their characters, has drawn you into their lives, you feel their pain, share their excitement, cry when they grieve. And this occurs without the author telling you what’s happening, without queues that say “feel sad now”.

“The Artist” manages to tell a fascinating story without actually “telling” you very much at all. That’s a trick most of us writers can learn from. 

By Serena Tatti

It’s likely that at some time most of us have skipped paragraphs of narrative and only read the dialogue. That’s because dialogue can move a story along more easily than loads of description. You can learn a lot about characters from their speech.  

Some suggestions that might help:

*Be true to the times: If you’re writing a book set in the past, research the language and the topics of the day. Inaccuracies can pull a reader out of the story.

*If your setting is contemporary, listen to people around you. Take notes if you have to (much easier nowadays with touchphones with inbuilt voice to text applications). Take note of the way people of different ages speak. What used to be groovy, hot, radical or mad, is now bad. Or maybe there’s another word.

*Remember to take into account the character’s upbringing and line of work.

*Dialogue gives us a sense of time and place by the words and phrases used.

*We can gain insight into the nationality of a character by using a few techniques from their native tongue. Perhaps if an Italian man is frustrated and searching for a particular item he might revert to not using contractions (because English is his second language) and using the order of words as he would say them in his native tongue. Instead of, “I’m searching for a large green box. It was unfortunately delivered here” he might say, “I am searching for a large box green. Was delivered here by misfortune.”

*A man who speaks in short, clipped sentences probably leads a busy life and needs to get on with it.

*A Regency hero who comes out with, “Cowabunga, dude!” is seriously out of his timeline – or perhaps a time traveller?

*A contemporary heroine who says things like, “Psychedelic!” or “Groovy baby” is either a child of “Flower Power” parents who grew up on a commune, or addicted to “The Brady Bunch” (or maybe “Dharma and Greg”?).

*Listening to “real dialogue” is very useful, but to make speech flow in your manuscript, it must also serve some purpose. Does it establish tone or mood? Does it help to reveal something about the character or the plot?  Does it add to the conflict?  

We often use pleasantries in everyday speech that would make your novel quite boring: “Hi, how are you?”

“I’m fine. How are you?”

“How are your parents?”

“They’re fine, too. How are yours?”

“Mum is fine but Dad has the flu.”

You can bypass this sort of thing by stating, *They exchanged pleasantries* or something similar. Get to the crux of the matter! Never pad out dialogue.

*While correct grammar is essential to good writing, people usually don’t speak in complete sentences. They speak in incomplete sentences, at times using only phrases. People interrupt each other. People tend to use *umm* and *aahh* a lot, but perhaps avoid doing this all the time because, again, it slows the pace.

If you pay attention to these little details, it can only make your manuscript stronger.

By JJ Somerville

At the start of a writing day many writers find themselves staring at a blank white page. It can offer a whole universe of possibilities or it can be a form of torture to the blocked writer.

As we sit down to that blank page sometimes we only start with an opening sentence, or we know something has to happen, and our fingers hover above the keyboard waiting for the words flow and the scene takes shape.

Other times we stare off blankly into space.

This is when our inner critic pipes up (or even sometimes our partners!) and says “I thought you were supposed to be writing.”

Now unless you are thinking about how badly your team went in the football or what you are going to cook for dinner that night, you are writing.

You’re part of a creative process called daydreaming. It’s something we often do as writers whether we are aware of it or not.

Daydreaming is an important part of the writer’s arsenal. It’s as important as any of the other tools but we often ridicule ourselves for taking the time to imagine our scenes before we write them.

Don’t succumb to this. The time you spend thinking about your story is just as valuable as the time you spend writing it.

The single best thing about daydreaming is; we can do it anywhere. If you’re waiting in a queue, stuck in traffic (or even in a boring meeting!) You can open that mental notebook and walk your characters though their upcoming scenes.  You can daydream back-story that might never make it into the story just to see how your character reacts to life changing events.  Or you can work through the climax of the book for a glimpse of how your character needs to grow and what they have to learn before they can play their role in the story.

I often find myself daydreaming scenes near the climax of the book when I’m still writing the first act. I do this because it informs me where the story is heading and how my characters are going to develop. I probably won’t write those scenes yet; I’ll make some notes of any clever dialogue or important points, but just because I’ve thought about them doesn’t mean I need to write them yet. It also doesn’t mean I won’t change them later.

You may even find that the scene drags, that your daydream is boring you, you’ve learnt something valuable before you sat down and stared at that blank page. If it’s boring move on to the next scene and see if you can work the information you thought that scene was supposed to convey into the next scene in your sequence. Let’s face it, it’s often said; “If it’s boring to write, then it’s going to be boring to read”. The same applies to daydreaming.
 
So now we’ve talked about why we might daydream a scene Let’s try it.

The first time you try daydreaming you may want to find yourself a quiet spot. Grab a notepad and pen and make yourself comfortable.

You’ll probably want to close your eyes

Immerse yourself in the world of your story. Let the setting come to life around you. Use all your senses to see, hear, smell, taste & touch the world of your story.

Then bring in your characters. Are they waiting for the catalyst of your scene to arrive? Or are all the players in the room, each with their own agendas and foibles. Watch how your characters react to the challenges you throw at them and those they throw at each other. Listen to what they say to each other and how they say it.

Open your eyes and jot down some notes.

Now find your keyboard and start typing.

You’ll be surprised how quickly your characters fill that white page. If you feel like the scene is missing something, close your eyes again. What do your senses tell you? Can you weave those delicious details into your scene? Watch your characters interact with the space they are in, is the setting intrinsic to the scene? Bring all that back to the page.

You may need to take a few dips into your daydream to flesh things out.

Look down at your writing and realise that what once seemed like a roaring expanse of white space is now filled with the complex and beautiful world of your story.

You’ve done it! Now do it again.

By Anna Cowan

I’ve come to this conclusion: sex scenes are so difficult to write because sex is the opposite of words. It is visceral and complex and a form of vulnerability that goes beyond what we can speak, even to ourselves.

There’s a lot of fantastic advice about how to write a sex scene – how to use it to forward character and the dramatic arc of your story. But what interests me is the language we can use to come close – and somehow never close enough – to a human experience of the act.

If words can never accurately pin down what sex is, then I’m interested in what can happen between words. If you bring two contrary words together, the reading mind will try to find meaning in their pairing – and will create something wholly new in the process. In A Lady’s Lessons in Scandal, Meredith Duran strings together words to describe her hero, when he begins kissing his heroine: Hot and desperate and gluttonous and hesitant and uncertain and tentative as a boy with his first woman: this moment, this simple bedding, was turning into something strange. For me, it’s the word “gluttonous”, seemingly out of place, that evokes a real human feeling. The same feeling couldn’t be described head-on, because it isn’t concrete.

Language can also be used as touch. The sounds words make – even the shapes letters make on a page – can be used to reach out to a reader and seduce them into a certain frame of mind. Fragments of one word attached, bright and surprising, to another.

I want to be clear that I’m not talking about euphemism. I’m a big believer in calling a body part by its name.

The best example I can give of the kind of language I’m trying to describe is the poem Epithalamion by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I'm not a huge reader of poems, but this one grabbed me. It goes beyond an overabundance of words – pours words out until they sit in dense clusters of meaning and images that create something altogether new. A sensory world arrived at by the mind.

I encourage you to read the poem – out loud if you dare – and let yourself feel how, beyond language, there is a free, fierce, movement-filled world. If you take the words at face-value many of them are nonsense. Taken together they come close to something that is entirely beyond words.

Epithalamion
Hark, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe

We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured,
    where a gluegold-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and
    water-blowballs down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer's sovereign good.

By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies
    huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by
    turn and turn about.

This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast
Into such a sudden zest
Of summertime joys
That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild
    wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood
By. Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on
    the air,
Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels
    there,
Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots
Rose. Here he feasts: lovely all is! No more: offwith - down he
    dings
His bleached both and woolwoven wear:
Careless these in coloured wisp
All lie tumbled-to; then with loop-locks
Forward falling, forehead frowning, lips crisp
Over finger-teasing task, his twiny boots
Fast he opens, last he offwrings
Till walk the world he can with bare his feet
And come where lies a coffer, burly of all blocks
Build of chancequarried, selfquained rocks
And the water warbles over into, filleted with glassy grassy
    quicksilvery shives and shoots
And with heavenfallen freshness down from moorland still
    brims,
Dark or daylight on and on. Here he will then, here he will the
    fleet
Flinty kindcold element let break across his limbs
Long. Where we leave him, froliclavish, while he looks about him, laughs,
    swims.
Enough now; since the sacred matter that I mean
I should be wronging longer leaving it to float
Upon this only gambolling and echoing-of-earth note -
What is...the delightful dene?
Wedlock. What is water? Spousal love...
Father, mother, brothers sisters, friends
Into fairy trees, wild flowers, wood ferns
Ranked around the bower...

By Dora Braden  

There’s an abundance of enthusiasm and energy at the beginning . On the 1st of January at one minute past midnight there were fireworks festooning gold over the city of Melbourne, lighting up the city from end to end. I for one was watching with wonder and excitement, clutching a mug of thermos tea, from Studley Park Road.

This is also how I like to feel when beginning a book. Having purchased a book either from the shop or by mail I can’t wait to curl up in my favourite chair and clutching a mug of tea begin to read with a sense of wonder and excitement for the journey I’m embarking on. But Oh, if the pages aren’t scintillating and the characters are dull the excitement I’ve brought to this bargain is quickly expended. Then there is a feeling of having been let down. Just as if I had stood on Studley Park Road on New Year’s Eve with nothing but expectation to keep my excitement nerves on high alert but when the time arrived and the fireworks were a meagre little fizz I would have felt very deflated.

As part of the bargain the author makes with the reader, it is important to show the reader you intend keep that bargain by writing a beginning that will grab their attention and ensure their enthusiasm for continuing to read your story, which of course will not fail them.

Does it help to have a sense of excitement when you are penning those initial pages? I think it does. You have been working on your GMC (Goal, Motivation, Conflict). Your characters are feeling like real people with some major life changing event happening in their lives and there is the thrill of finding out what they have to say about it and what they intend to do. However you don’t want to give too much away. Beginnings are exiting because we don’t know what is going to happen next.  The beginning of a novel needs to raise more questions than answer them. Minimum back story and maximum focus on the difficulties and immediate problems. Yes immediate problems. Nothing gets attention like a sense of urgency. Why is this person I’m reading about interesting at this point in their life, so interesting there is a book about them?

Once again I draw a parallel with the New Years Eve excitement. The fireworks should go off with a bang, lots of colour and noise and should evoke a reaction in the viewer. Oooohs and ahhhs is really what you are after in the first few pages of the book. It may help your first publisher think of your book as one that will move off the shelf. People in bookshops are often seen browsing through the first pages of a novel. I love to read the sample first chapter of online books. Remember beginnings are wonderful and scary, in order to be exiting. We don’t know what will happen. It’s the possibilities that are intriguing.  Give your Heroine and Hero some possibilities that are going to be a really big, scary for them, challenge in the opening pages and you are on your way.

By Margaret Midwood

Margaret’s How to recipe for writing a Category Romance!

I thought I’d share with you my formula, or maybe I’ll call it a recipe for a page turning romance that leaves you feeling satisfied just like a delicious choc chip muffin.

We start with a pivotal incident, our mixing bowl, where our hero and heroine will be tossed in together for the battle of their lives.

To the mix we need to add a bucket of conflict. External conflict drives the hero and heroine together, while internal conflict (their life experiences and beliefs, even if faulty) pushes them apart.

The stronger these conflicts/differences the stronger your story and the more personal challenges they have to overcome to be together, the more your reader will come back for more.

Stir in a generous scoop of emotion, and keep it on every page. Every scene must have a purpose and move the story along or you have to cut it. Don’t tell us about the furnishings unless it reveals something of the character or the situation.

Spoon in lashings of feelings and reactions. Show us how the hero and heroine are feeling. Don’t get angry. Sweep the desk of the pens! How would you react in a particular situation? We want to breathe your story, feel it, live it!

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Quote by Anton Chekhov.

Mix in plenty of angst. Make things bad for your hero and heroine, and then make things a zillion times worse. Torture your characters. Put them out of their comfort zone and see if they sink or swim.

Now you’re happy with the mix you have reached turning point one, your hero and heroine are ready to commit to the plot.

Everything is going well. This is turning point two, your hero and heroine are enjoying being together while their love is deepening. It’s a tranquil time where they commit to each other, the honeymoon in their relationship. You see a future.

A discovery is made and everything is over and the relationship fails. This is the black moment when all is lost, and there seems no way for the hero and heroine to be together.

Suddenly realization hits and we sort through our options and come to an understanding, this is the epiphany. The hero and heroine will sort through their conflicts solve their differences and change.

Ending with a satisfying Happily Ever After where we see the hero and heroine together and we believe in their future happiness. And together they can face life’s challenges.

Copyright: This article is © 2011 by Margaret Midwood – All Rights Reserved

By Cara Gabriel

Each month at MRWG, we set aside part of our meeting time to talk about our writing goals for the coming four weeks, and reflect on what we’ve achieved so far. 

Why do we do this? Why do we submit ourselves to the scrutiny of fellow Guild members and the potential embarrassment of admitting we’ve not achieved what we wanted to? While the chocolate rewards we get for meeting goals do help, there’s more to this process than expanding our waistlines. Setting goals and holding yourself accountable to those goals is a powerful motivational exercise. Don’t believe me? Here’s five benefits of goal setting that can positively impact your writing.

1.     Work out your long term vision and save energy

Setting goals helps you to work out where you want to go in life. Whether your goal is to become the next Nora Roberts, or simply to finish your next novel, the important thing is that you know what the end picture looks like.

This has two interlinked benefits. Firstly, you’ll know where you need to concentrate your efforts and secondly you’ll be able to easily spot the distractions that are keeping you from working toward your goal (next series of Downtown Abbey, anyone?).

2.     Keep yourself on track

Goals are great for keeping yourself on track. By setting a clear big-picture goal for say the next five years, you can then set smaller, more manageable goals to help you work towards it.  Setting and achieving these mini goals means you’ll see progress on something that may otherwise have seemed like a long, endless grind. What’s more, meeting your goals will improve your self-confidence as you recognise and celebrate your successes.

3.     Get ready for the big time

You’ve done it. You’ve secured your contract and your book is going to be published.

Once the celebrations are over and the chocolate eaten, a certain uncomfortable truth may come home to you.

Your contract has dates in it.

And what’s more, you’ve signed it, which means you now have to meet those commitments or risk being in breach of contract.

In reality, contractual dates are no more than externally imposed goals (i.e., someone else is telling you what you need to do by when). If you’ve developed the self-discipline to set, work towards and complete internally imposed goals during your pre-published years, then meeting your contractual requirements will be easier.

4.     Learn when you don’t make it…

Sometimes we just don’t make it. Maybe the goals were overly optimistic, or maybe life has just thrown you one too many curve balls.  We all have those weeks (months… years…). Not reaching your goals every now and then isn’t an issue as long as you learn from it. Try to work out what went wrong and come up with some ideas to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

But what if you’re regularly not meeting your goals? Then it’s time for some soul-searching – letting goals slip time and time again can indicate that you’re really not that passionate about them. So in this case, it’s time to be honest with yourself and work out whether your goals need a major rethink.

5.     Celebrate the wins

The best bit by far – celebrating when you reach a goal. At MRWG, the celebrating usually involves chocolate, and December’s meeting was no exception. Only this time we were reviewing our goals and achievements from the entire year.

All thanks to our goal setting, as a group we managed to:  

·      write over 1.5 million words;

·      start 28 books;

·      finish 19 books; and, more exciting of all…

·      sell 5 books!

Setting goals works – the MRWG’s results prove that. And while making the commitment of working towards a goal can seem daunting, it is precisely that commitment that will drive you towards where you want to be.

What are your goals for the coming year? 

Our last meeting for 2011 will be held on Sunday 11th December! 

Following a brief meeting and some goal setting we will celebrate Christmas together!

Remember to bring your Kris Kringle present and a plate to share!

Note: It will be an early finish!

Fiona Lowe, multi-published Mills & Boon and Carina Press author presented a wonderful workshop, Emotion Charged Love Scenes at our November meeting. 
Thank you Fiona for another of your entertaining and informative workshops!!