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Writing Women’s Fiction An Easy Way to Write Master Class M Kenyon Charboneaux Edited by Rob Parnell

Writing Women’s Fiction

Creating Women's Fiction - A Masterclass from M Kenyon Charboneaux.

Introduction During these four modules, we're going to be looking at a single genre of fiction within the overall field of fiction writing. What you learn here for the writing of Women’s Fiction will be applicable to writing any kind of fiction from mainstream to genre to subgenera. Each module we'll spend part of the time refreshing ourselves on the basic tools of writing salable fiction, as well as on how these basic tools of writing apply specifically to the writing of Women’s Fiction.

Many times people take these genre specific classes because they already have a novel in progress, but it's gotten stuck somewhere. Maybe you've just lost your enthusiasm for it. Maybe you lost the story thread. Maybe you've written your characters into corners they can't escape from without tearing the entire work apart and redoing it from page one. Whatever the reason, the novel is stuck, bogged down, gone south. You have writer's lock over the poor thing and you think that this class may help to unlock it, get it moving again.

And it may.

Odds are that it won't, though. The book is stuck and stagnating and it's going to take a lot of your energy away from learning the basics of writing Women's Fiction, if you're concentrating on using the course to unblock your WIP and get it moving again. That's why when I begin a class on any genre specific aspect of writing, I always assign a NEW novel to work on - the choice of what that novel will be is yours, of course, but it has to be a new novel, not an old one you're trying to resurrect after it's gone south on you. I'm © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 2

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not telling you to give up forever on that stuck WIP. God knows I've had a few myself and not all of them were rescue-able. Some had to be trashed and after I'd written 200 or 300 pages on it to boot! WOW! That hurts, you know? It definitely leaves a bruise. But others did straighten themselves out with time and effort. So I'm not saying that your WIP is a lost cause and forget it. I'm just saying that for the duration of this class, put it away and think of it no more until the class is over.

(By the way, a good way of deciding if a novel is salvageable is to look at it as if it were a piece of corroded brass. It can be cleaned up to look like new again but is the effort worth it? If it is - pretend, it's, say, it's a brass candlestick set your grandmother gave you and you love it - then go for it. If it isn't - if it's just a candlestick set you bought at the dollar store - then trash it.)

Whether you finish the novel assigned here is your business, but I always hope that you will find yourself so enthused about the genre and the novel you're working on for the class that it will cease to be an assignment and become a true WIP for you - one that you will finish and maybe even sell. Wouldn't surprise me a bit. An awful lot of genuinely excellent writing has come out of these classes and some of it has indeed published. That's what makes Rob Parnell's Easy Way To Write classes so different from the others (this and their practical cost) - the number of authors who come out of the classes he offers with works that find publication.

So spend this first week getting a new novel planned out for the class assignment. If you absolutely can't come up with an idea, then I'll supply one for you.

Remember W. Somerset Maugham and how he said that no matter what the ultimate fate of your work, you are the only one in the world who could have written that particular novel? Well, I believe, as he did, that this is so true that if I give you all the same basic story line and tell you to write a novel, that it will result in as many novels as there are © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 3

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students in this class writing them. So if you don't have an idea for a Women's Fiction novel, I'll give you the bare bones story for the one I'll be writing during this class and we'll have the extra fun at the end of this course of seeing how each of us approached that story and what we've each done with it. If you need this idea, shoot me over an email ([email protected]) ASAP and I'll send you the bare bones, as I said, of the novel I'm going to be writing with you ,as you write yours, for this class. See? I would never ask you to do what I'm not willing to do myself, so we'll all, even DA TEACH be writing a new novel for this class. If you DO have your own idea for a WF novel, that's excellent. The only requirement is that the novel you write for this class, or begin to write, is a new one for you - not, as I've said above, an old novel that you're trying to finish.

It’s up to you if you do the assignments at all. It is in your best interest to do so and I suspect that you came here ready for assignments and discussions and with questions you can't wait to ask. But the fact is that sometimes day jobs, families, emergencies, and other things all interfere with our writing lives.

So, What is Women's Fiction? I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, another writer, and telling her that I had this class coming up. "Great!" she said (she’s taken several of the EWTW classes in the past and credits Rob’s philosophy with being the biggest reason for her rapid success in publishing her first novel and winning a short story competition with her first short story), but then she frowned a bit and added, "So, what is it? Women’s fiction. Is there such a thing as ‘men’s fiction’?"

Oh, yes, there is. One name. Two little words. Tom Clancy. That’s the quintessential in men’s fiction. One name. Two little words. Rosamunde Pilcher. She’s the quintessential © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 4

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women’s fiction writer. I highly recommend that during this course you read as many of her books as you can lay hands on and that should be quite a few as most public libraries carry her in quantity. Her first novel, The Shell Seekers, was an overnight success (and of course we all know what that means!) and it’s been all uphill for her ever since. I know that most of you have families, jobs, other commitments in your lives, that may keep you from dedicating the kind of time to reading that you'd like to have, so if you can read only one author during the next 4 weeks, let it be Ms. Pilcher. I have two reasons for saying this : 1) she writes a beautiful full transparent prose that it should be every author’s goal to learn to write and 2) she writes the finest women’s fiction available. So let’s get on to that definition my friend asked for and which you're probably not terribly clear on either.

Women’s Fiction is not Romance. There can be romance in it and often there is a romantic subplot counterpointing the main plot, but it is not romance fiction and adheres to none of the conventions of romance fiction. Your heroine can be fat, she can be over 30 (or 40 or 50, even over 80!), she can have several children ranging in age from diapers to potty trained to elementary school and on up. She can have a husband or two (but not at the same time), sometimes she can even have three. She can have no husband, but still have the children. Ah, I can see by the light in your eyes that some of you are grasping the core of what Women’s Fiction is - writing about women. All kinds of women. Women and their relationships to themselves, their families, both the ones they were born into and the ones they create when they marry or bear children with or without the marrying pa rt. Women’s Fiction deals with women in all aspects of their lives - cradle to grave. It also deals mainly with women’s relationships to other women, rather than women’s relationships with men. Sisters, mothers, daughters, friends. These are the relationships that Women’s Fiction deals in and it’s why it’s called Women’s Fiction.

Very few men care about these relationships, either to read about or to write about; they want to be the center of attention, in life, and in the fiction they read. OK, laugh. I didn't mean it as a put-down of men. I love men. But those of you who were born prior to the © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 5

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mid-1960s will recall, I'm sure, without undue difficulty, that most often given dating advice of mother to daughter : "Talk about him, dear. That’s what he wants to talk about, that’s what he’s interested in. The fastest way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach; it’s through your ears."

Here’s what the librarian at my local library told me when I asked her to define women’s fiction from the library’s point of view. "Primarily fiction written by women for women and dealing with women’s relationships, their issues and concerns at home and at work and the ways in which women face and deal with these issues and concerns and relationships." Or, as Diana Abu-Jaber, says, "Women’s Fiction tends to congregate at the middle of things."

The middle of things. Not the peripherals, not the beginnings and ends, the middle - the time in our lives as women when we are raising our children, making our careers, making our homes and our families and consolidating our relationships with our friends. The middle of life and the things of life.

How can a heroine be 80 then? you ask. Well, in a household of primarily men, you can have a teenage girl whose mother works and whose grandmother sits home all day watching game shows on TV - to the eyes of the others in the household. But in reality, in the reality of your book, this 80 year old woman is the one the girl goes to when she’s lonely, when she has questions about life and what living will be like when she’s grown, when she has a crisis with her boyfriend or a bad report card that she’s afraid to show her father. Some of the most interesting women’s fiction books deal with multi-generational families, living sometimes under the same roof, sometimes not.

The Shell Seekers for instance, is about the elderly mother, who is strong and determined (and stubborn?), OK, yes, stubborn, and her two daughters; it is also about those two daughters and their lives, their relationship to their headstrong mother and to each other. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 6

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Marilyn French’s powerful book, Our Father, is about 4 sisters who gather at the bedside of their dying father. Each is a different type of woman and each has different secrets. Ms. French's work is said to be for every woman "willing to think honestly about the place of femaleness in the world." How can any woman not think honestly, and care deeply, about the place of femaleness in the world? There is no place in the entirety of life where the place of femaleness is not important to us, as women - not the workplace, whether that place is a lawyer’s office, a child care center, a doctor’s office, a school classroom, an artist’s workroom, sports or politics - and not the domestic, the home-place - whether we're working mothers, single mothers, stay-at-home mothers, or married without children or unmarried, born into a large family or born a single child - there is no aspect of life that for a woman, is not colored by her being a woman. And that is what Women’s Fiction deals with - women and the issues that concern them.

And this brings me back to what I said above about life experience being so important in this genre. Because here, more than anywhere else, writing what you know is exactly what you do in a more real sense than in any other type of writing except the fictionalized biography.

Woolf vs. Nin About the middle of the 20th century, two very different women were engaged in writing books that dealt with the issues of being a woman - family, sexual relationships, what it means to be a mother, a sister, a wife, a lover, a friend.

These two women did share three things in common - childhood sexual abuse, differing degrees of madness and self-publishing their work.

For Virginia Woolf, a solid Englishwoman writing experimental forms of the novel, it was her half brother who abused her. For Anais Nin, daughter of a world famous (in his © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 7

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time) musician Joaquin Nin, born in France, brought up all over Europe until the age of 11 when her parents separated and her mother brought her to America along with her two brothers, it was her father who abused her. These two women were as different in their writing as they were in social class, upbringing, sexual life, and world outlook as two people can be who share only one life determining experience in life and it was how they choose to deal with that one experience as writers that took Woolf into greatness and Nin into the classification of a minor talent.

Virginia Woolf, because of her British upbringing (oh, that stiff British upper lip!), never wrote of her abuse. She believed that the writer should be androgynous, but that, nevertheless, the stuff of one’s writing should be one’s own life. Lifewriting, as she termed any type of writing about life, either one’s own in memoirs, fiction, autobiography and journal keeping or another’s life in biographies, memoirs, reminiscences and fiction, was a passion with her. Her early books were fictionalized accounts of her family life, her later works experiments in what the novel could be, but all examined the relationships of mothers and daughters, sisters, women with women as friends, as rivals, either in love or art ... but she never wrote of her abuse.

Because she was so fragile mentally, her husband set up a press, Hogarth Press, to publish his wife’s books, his own books, and eventually books by such talents as Katherine Mansfield, TS Eliot, the poet Stephen Spender and many more names we still recognize and read today. She married Leonard Woolf and except for one exception, a very short affair with the Lady Vita Sackville-West, was faithful to him to the day of her suicide. At 59, Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse and died, alone. While Woolf cannot be said to have a huge popular readership, like most of the great names of literature, she is mainly read and studied in colleges, she is considered to be one of the finest artists of the English language and a bold experimenter in the form of the novel and the treatment of what is now called Women’s Fiction. She was a feminist who took some heat in her lifetime for her nonfiction essays on being female in the early 20th century, A © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 8

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Room of One’s One and Three Guineas. Her dairies were heavily edited by Leonard Woolf while he was alive, but the newer editions of both diaries and letters are well edited and even the affair with Lady Sackville-West has not been omitted by the new editor, Lady Sackville-West’s son.

Anais Nin, on the other hand, wrote what she considered to be experimental novels which were actually just diary entries which she extracted and rewrote in a misty, poetic form that is as hard to penetrate and read today as they were then when she self-published them. She was terribly neurotic, but that wasn't why she self-published - she selfpublished because her writing appealed to no publisher and to no real audience. Unlike Woolf, Nin believed that a woman must write from her womb - a euphemism for genitals. Her writing was centered firmly in herself and the multitude of affairs she had almost to the day of her death (including an affair with Henry Miller, the most publicized of her lovers, and one with her own father, which she initiated when she was in her mid-30s). She was married to two men simultaneously (one on the East Coast and one on the West) and was faithful to neither. She wrote profusely about her sexual abuse while not admitting that it had ever happened . Anais Nin died in a hospital of cancer, alone, in her 70s.

Her novels and short stories today have an extremely limited following. While some critics claim for her minor artist status, most agree she had no talent at all for writing fiction. Her talent was for writing the journal or diary. Her diaries and her erotica, written for $1 a page along with a group of young college boys and girls when she was herself in her late 30s, is considered to be "interesting". Her expurgated diaries have been labeled "liaries" now that the facts of her life are known, and even her unexpurgated diaries are heavily edited by her West Coast husband to whom she left her literary estate.

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Put your hand down there in the back row. I know what you're going to ask. Why should we care at all about what Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin did or did not believe about women writing or writing Women’s Fiction, almost 60 years ago?

We should care because we are seeing now a renewal of the differences in their approaches in what is being termed Women’s Fiction: the school of those who believe that women’s fiction is an expression of purely personal interests (written from the genitals) and the school of those who believe that it is the expression of women’s lives in this time and place, the problems women face in our society and the ways in which women do, like Virginia Woolf, try to make the world better for themselves and their daughters and grand-daughters.

I am assuming that if you are in this class, your desire is to learn how to write Women’s Fiction of the kind Rosamund Pilcher and Marilyn French write - stories that "delve into and reflect a woman’s psyche". Stories that reflect, as Solzhenitsyn said, what it is like to be alive in this time and this place for future generations. How many of you - let me see a show of hands - how many of you want your work to still be selling, and still be read, 60 years from now? OK. And how many of you believe it will be? Ah-ha. Well, it doesn't have to be that way. All of you want your work, your novels and short stories and maybe even creative nonfiction - all areas that Woolf wrote in - to be "of lasting value" as Hemingway put it and still on the shelves bringing in money to your descendants. And none of you believe it will be? Or is that none of you is egotistical enough to believe it will be? Because it can be.

No one is going to tell you that it’s easy to write good novels, novels that last, novels that speak to the minds and hearts and spirits of women all over the world, today, next year, 10 years from now, 60 years from now. All writing is hard work. But it doesn't have to be as hard as some us of make it or as hard as some of the instructors of classes like these make it. In the following pages I'll be bringing you some tips and techniques to make © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 10

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writing easier - whether what you're writing is Women’s Fiction or Thriller/Suspense or Romance or mainstream.

I'll also be teaching you about the types of plots Women’s Fiction is mainly constructed of and how to write these in the easiest ways possible while still maintaining your integrity of purpose and product.

We'll also talk about your ideas of what direction Women’s Fiction could or should go in and how you feel the novel form can be adapted to create what you want Women’s Fiction to be - because it is you, the next to write in the field, women like you, and you yourself, who will determine what the field becomes in the next decade -- if it will sputter out into personal erotic tales of bed hopping or surge forward to the firm base of stories about women growing within themselves and as members of relationships with other women, their sisters, mothers, friends, daughters, and the men in their lives.

Once again then we come to the issue of personal experience in this type of novel, of writing what you know. Obviously, it is as true of Women’s Fiction as it is of any other genre, that you cannot write only what you have personally experienced; not many of us have lived a life that can universalized to interest other people or to allow them to see themselves in us. But we can take from our own lives hints and clues to the type of stories you will tell and expand out from there, just as you would do if you were going to write a book of any other type. You may never have been a spy, but you can do the necessary research to write knowledgeably about training and work and you have a lifetime of experience to be able to imagine what it would be like to be a spy, say, in the situation of being in love with a spy for the other side, or what it would be like to be captured by the enemy and thrown into darkness without food or water for a day before being brought out into intense lights to be interrogated.

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And if you can do that, you can write a novel from your life experience about women in crisis - women in friendships - women in marriages that are good or bad or indifferent women who love their mothers and those who do not and how that first primary relationship effects the rest of their lives and it will actually be easier for you to write these books than to write that suspense spy novel, because all the main research has already been done. You are a woman. You have a mother. You have had jobs where you were treated differently from the men around you or where you were harassed by men thinking a leer and a tone of voice isn't sexual harassment or you've had jobs where you were treated with respect and equality by male coworkers. You've had children and mothers and grandmothers and husbands and lovers and divorces and family squabbles over who inherits the Tiffany Lamp and who gets the cameo jewelry and even if you haven't had all of these experiences personally, you a re a woman and you know what it feel like to be in those situations. You may have friends who've been in them, you may have feared being in them. You certainly can imagine being in them and all the many many more that make up the stories of Women’s Fiction.

Because it is the dynamics of relationships that fuel Women’s Fiction.

In a sense, then, if you have chosen to write Women’s Fiction, if you've decided that this is your niche, your genre, or you just think it might be, you have chosen what may be the easiest of all stories to tell. The stories of yourselves. Of you, woman.

Coming Attractions ... So here’s what we have coming up.

Next module we'll talk about the difference between Romance and Women’s Fiction where the line is and how thin it is and how take either genre and flip it or slipstream it into the other. We'll look more closely at this problem of finding your niche and your © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 12

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authentic voice as a woman writer. I'll also be talking to you about journal keeping and other types of lifewriting that will aid you in writing Women’s Fiction.

We'll also begin with the first of the toolbox modules - Plotting & Characterization, plus POV, because these are the three tools you'll be working with most, not only in beginning a novel, but in writing it all the way through. We'll start by creating your characters and your plot, subplots (if you have any) and storylines and I'll be showing you some of the easiest ways there are to do these beginning tasks in creating any book of any genre. We'll talk about whether or not the characters in Women’s Fiction are more real, more complex, than those in Romance, whether they have aching backs and big butts, as my friend asked me right after she asked me what Women’s Fiction was, and if women’s fiction always implies a love interest. Is that love interest always heterosexual? Is it always monogamous? What is the content range allowable in the plot, theme and storylines? Sweet, raw, blunt, real, but how real? And we'll have some tips for you on enhancing your writing skills in general and ways to make living the writing life easier.

In the third and fourth weeks, we'll cover the rest of the writer's tools - themes, settings, research, dialog, conflict and tension and pacing, with special emphasis on crafting these for Women’s Fiction. I'll have some tips and pointers for making that writing life easier as well as the writing itself. I'll answer any questions that have come in from you and we'll finish with a list of publishers who specialize in Women’s Fiction and we'll look at the kind of book that lands an author on the Oprah show and in her book club.

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Lesson 2 - Women’s Fiction Does Not Equal Romance plus CHARACTERS, PLOT & POV I’m glad you returned to join me today. When I teach a class, I usually picture it as a real entity, a real group of people out there gathered in a classroom like the one I used to teach in at ASU. I was supposed to be the Professor’s secretary but the professor didn't bother to show up much for his lectures, so I’d end up going in and doing the best I could to give his lectures for him from his notes. Thank God his handwriting was easy to read! It was one of those big auditorium rooms with rows of seats that grow smaller the higher they go toward the back of the room. That’s what I picture. Usually. But with this class, I see us all in a nice, cozy room, a kind of Florida room with glass on three sides, low monk’s benches with green flowering plants everywhere and bright pillows to accent beige coaches and chairs. And we’ve all got either hot tea or coffee or cocoa or maybe a good stiff vodka or a double malt scotch in hand. I’m going sit here on the fireplace hearth so I can see you all and besides, these old bones like the feel of a real wood fire in winter to warm old bones ands old skin. OK ladies, find a seat and let's begin!

Tonight I’m going to talk about several things : Why Women's Fiction is not Romance, where the line is and how thin it is and then we'll look at the tools of writing - any kind of novel - and how those tools apply especially to Women's Fiction. The last time I taught this course to many women, a couple of men signed up for it thinking it was a class in writing romance. If any of you are here for that reason, I'd like to reiterate again, in large letters, because this is awfully important - the very core of the course, in fact - Women's Fiction (WF from now on) is NOT Romance.

Romance may be a part of a women's fiction novel, but only as a part of the entire life of the woman who is your main character; not the plot of the story, you see, but a subplot.

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I know I said this in the first lesson and many times since in individual emails, but from many of the summaries I've received in the past seven days this seems to be a point that is not really getting across, not sticking in your minds, so one more time for good measure - WF is not Romance. What is it then?

"Women's fiction is fiction written by women about women and the issues and concerns that face them in society; it is about the place of femaleness in the world."

Now, as I also stated in the last lesson, some men are now beginning to try their hand at it. How successful they’ll be is an open question since every man I’ve known has admitted that women are complete mysteries to them. But we live in a time of equality between the sexes so if men want to put their hand to writing WF, then I suppose we must give them an equal and unbiased chance at it. But I wonder how successful the average man can be in writing WF when it is primarily about being women and the place of femaleness in the world today. Certainly men have a lot to say about the place of women in the world, but it doesn't reflect how we feel about it. I can't imagine how it could - men aren't women and how can a man have any idea what it's like to be a woman in today' world? Here is a perfect example of when Write What You Know should be limited to what you know personally about a subject. No research in the world is going to give a man a real feel for what being a woman is all about. Even if you define Write What You Know (as I do) to mean writing what you know emotionally, men are still out there in the cold as far as how women feel about almost everything from sex to friendship to love to marriage and childbearing (more and more women are not taking the two to be synonymous, for instance. Many women think childbearing is an activity that requires marriage about as much as fish requires dry land.)

[An aside : By the way, one of you last week answered Freud’s enduring question, "What do women want?" by quoting my favorite character on Northern Exposure, Chris, the disk jockey, who said, "Women want the same things men do, only in better colors."] © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 15

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OK, back to the point here, though. Romance and women’s fiction are not the same thing. The line between them is very bold, nice and bold, in fact, but very thin.

Any romance in your story has to be secondary to the main plot. And any romance in your story should be confined solely to characters whose entire life histories require it. It can’t just be there because you want a romance in the story. These books are about women’s relationships to their families, their friends, their co-workers - in other words all the people in every part of their lives. If there is a spot in your story where an older sister who has never married suddenly begins to think her life is barren without a husband and children, then she can go out looking for Mr. Right, but it will have be as a consequence of her relationships with the other people in her life - what have they done, or not done, said or not said, to make her feel that her life is barren without a man and without children? - not the simple consequence of being single and the guy down the street also being single and you wanting to stick a romance in your story. That guy down the street might also be gay and her relationship to him based on the fact that he is gay, because she’s never been comfortable with men or the thought of sex.

Do you see what I’m getting at? — it’s the same principal if you’re writing a mystery : there may a love interest in the mystery, but the book is not a romance because of that. In a science fiction epic, there may be a love interest, but it’s not the story, not the plot, of the science fiction epic. Do any of you older ladies, or as old as myself, remember a book called When Worlds Collide? It was about how these two planets were headed for earth one was going to pass so close it was going to rip the earth to shreds, the other was going to pass close, but not that close, just before the destroyer came. From what the scientists could tell, this second planet looked earth-like, so a ship was to be built that would carry 125 or so survivors to the earth-like planet. If it was capable of sustaining life than the human race would go on and if it wasn’t, well, they, we, were all history - like the dinosaurs - only no one would be around to write our history the way we wrote that of the © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 16

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dinos. So that’s the plot - build the ship before the Destroyer comes and hip-hop over to the Maybe Savior planet. Meanwhile the Destroyer is causing earthquakes and tidal waves as it gets closer, and the Florida and California coast lines become part of the ocean floor. The scientists are working feverishly and the workers are doing their best because they’re all going to draw lots to see who gets on the ship and who doesn’t. Everyone wants to see the ship ready on time. There are personal rivalries and one of those is --- you got it --- the romantic interest. The scientist’s daughter is loved by two men. Now because this is the way the world works, we know the scientist and his daughter are going on the ship, lottery or no lottery. But which of the 2 men is going with her? Who will she choose? The old boyfriend or the new guy she’s drawn to? Her father urges her to make her choice on who would make a better father and protector in the new barbarous world where women will be again secondary to men’s physical strength and provider status. Pretty grim, huh? The thought that as soon as there’s no more civilization, men get to be the lawgivers and the naysayers again? Well, anyway, in the end, both men get to go. Oh, and the planet is livable, in case you’re interested. OK, now we have a love story here, a romance, the classic triangle that’s made so many romance books exciting. The point here though is, that as in women’s fiction, it is a secondary subplot. The conflict and tension are heightened by it being there, but more pages are allotted to the subplot of the rich man in the wheelchair who thinks he should get to go without being a part of the lottery, than are given to the romantic triangle. Perhaps 10 pages in all are given to the romance.

In Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, her first, and really only, conventional novel, only about 10 pages are allotted to the romantic lives of the two sisters. Virginia Woolf’s novel is women’s fiction and it devotes no more to romance than When World’s Collide, which is science fiction.

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Why it’s Not Romance Fiction OK, now let’s go into some detail on what differentiates WF from romance.

[Another Aside : Here’s another bit of an aside : there is subgenre of WF called Victim, or "women in jep" fiction. Turn on Lifetime Movie Network anytime, day or night, and you’ll catch an example of this. Some woman (and usually a cute kid) is threatened by A) her husband, B) her ex-husband, C) her boyfriend, D) her ex-boyfriend, D) a stalker or E) her boarder. Very predictable. But apparently very popular, but oh, so boring, if you're looking for something really real about being a woman in today's world that doesn't involve being in jeopardy as the central event of your lives.]

But to the line between romance and Women’s Fiction. To begin with, most publishers and bookstores do not differentiate between WF and mainstream fiction. One of you ladies asked me the other day why WF wasn’t considered simply mainstream - it was, in most cases, and until very recently when publishers began to notice that a certain type of mainstream novel - in other words, women writing books about women for women concerned with the issues and problems of women and the place of being a woman in our society - were selling better than the other types of mainstream fiction. So that’s the first of the lines between romance and WF - there has always been a definite line between romance and mainstream, publishers kept the two departments separate under different editors, bookstores placed the two kinds of books in different areas of the stores.

Of course back then, there were really only three types of romance fiction - the Bodiceripper, the Harlequin and the Gothic romance and they were all shelved separately away from the mainstream novels. Now romance is shelved separately from mainstream and this new genre of Women’s Fiction. And even if your bookstore hasn’t yet set up a WF section, the important point is that the publishers have established a demarcation between

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romance and WF and mainstream. They are separate genres, with publishers looking at separate criteria for each one.

The American Bookseller Association and the Book Industry Study Group states that 40% of the fiction sold in the United States is Women’s Fiction.

Romance Writers of America have been quick to jump on this amazing statistic and to state that they are the staple of Women’s Fiction. What they ought to be saying is that they are a staple of what women read, not the genre Women’s Fiction. By placing themselves as a staple of WF, they are regulating themselves as a subgenre of the newcomer - rather like a daughter claiming to have given birth to her mother, instead if it being the other way around.

Another difference between the two genres is that WF, according to HarperCollins is mainly commercial in nature, but also literary. It is exemplified, according to Micki Nuding, of HarperCollins/Avon, by the books of Rosamund Pilcher and often incorporates the features of other genres. Thus there can be romance included in a WF book, but it is not the plot of the book - it is at best a subplot The woman is always the protagonist, always the main character, never the secondary character, even in a multigenerational novel such as the type Pilcher is famous for writing. And while WF may incorporate suspense elements as in Marilyn French's books, or even supernatural elements, like women living in a haunted house, it has so far not incorporated into itself science fiction or police procedurals. Here is where the line is thinnest of all. Just because a woman is the main character of the story, as in David Lindsey’s great police procedural mystery, Mercy, that does not mean the book is Women’s Fiction.

Why? Because the plot elements of WF are as firmly denoted as those of, say, science fiction.

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These stories must tell the story of women in their relationships, primarily as mothers, sisters, daughters, wives and friends, their relationships with other women and the place of being woman in our society as it is today or as it was, if you're writing an historical women’s fiction novel. Some courageous woman may one day write a science fiction novel which is WF, but the essential plot and story line of women interacting with other women and the society they live in will remain the core of the genre, no matter where that society is set - on earth in 2004 or on Tau Ceti 10 in 20,005.

WF is defined, for now anyway, as fiction that taps into the "hopes, fears, dreams and even secret fantasies of women today", but who's to say that our hopes and fears and secret fantasies of today, won't still be ours in 20,005?

The next major difference between WF and romance fiction is that women’s fiction is about the empowerment of women. Romance deals with women collapsing with varying degrees of passion into some man’s arms. He retains the power in the relationship; the woman is not empowered by her relationship with him, she is returned to the role we have played throughout history - an appendage of some man. A decoration for his arm or a homemaker for his house and children. Passion, for women, is always defined in romance genre, as being a surrender of her entire being to a man. Most commonly this surrender occurs in his arms as a prelude to sex. In Women's Fiction, passion in a woman, or for a woman, can be for her work, her children, her art, even a man, but if it's for a man, that passion and the man are secondary subplots. Nora Roberts, a romance writer herself who has recently be gun writing Women's Fiction, puts the difference in this way, "Women’s Fiction is a story that centers on a woman or on primarily women’s issues... the woman’s story."

While a man may be in the wings waiting for the woman at the end of the story, his story, his internal journey are not focused upon as the journey of the woman is. Women’s fiction usually runs about 100,000 words or more and uses the extra space to develop © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 20

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deep characterization and subplots with male characters. These books are truly character driven rather than plot driven. They dwell on descriptions of the internal weather of the woman protagonist and the inner growth and change she makes in the course of the story. Being 100,000 words and more in length, these novels do not need the tight focus of shorter novels - one not only has the time to develop a deep, and deeply satisfying, main character, but the obligation to do so. These are not your mother’s romance novels. They are not even close to being the romance novels of today.

Micki Nuding again emphasizes that it is the stories about sisters and women’s friendships that are the current trend. And these books are seen to be life-affirming and empowering for women readers.

Another important difference between romance and WF is that there need not be a happy ending. In fact, the ending may be tragic. The heroine does not need to be pretty, in her 20s, naive or helpless. In fact, if she is in her 20s and pretty, she had better not be naive or helpless. She’d better be a rising corporate executive taking care of her widowed mother or raising a younger sister, and if she is dating, while this may be important to her for a variety of reasons - perhaps she wants a stable home life, something she didn’t have as a child, children with a father there for them everyday of their young lives or a loving, sharing relationship with a man who will respect her intelligence and not be jealous if she makes more money than he does or perhaps she wants an old-fashioned passionate affair, no matter what her reasons - the man is never as important - to the story or to her - as the widowed mother, the younger sister, or her own career, and the life which she has made for herself in a man’s corporate world.

The heroine of women’s fiction doesn’t have to be pretty at all. She can be 40ish with a spreading butt and graying hair as in Bread and Tulips, an amazing Italian novel recently made into a lovely art film. She can be normal looking, like you and me. She can be elegant. She can anything as far as looks go, just as in real life. Real women come in all © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 21

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shapes and sizes and colors and ages with warts and freckles and crooked toes and long noses and beautiful eyes and slim waists and lovely legs or sagging breasts and calloused knees.

Reality. Reality is the key and the most important difference between romance and Women’s Fiction. There are no limits to the kind of woman your main character is, unlike in romance where there is a set type of heroine - a distinctive box into which one must fit. Your WF heroine can even be a lesbian. The success of books The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks (a tremendous love story about an elderly couple having to cope with the terror of Alzheimer’s disease) demonstrate that romance is not taboo in WF. It is just a different kind of romance - it centers on the woman and it is firmly grounded in real life. And speaking of The Notebook - while the usual description that these are books written by women for women is still valid 97% of the time, men, as usual, not wanting to left out of anything, have begun to write Women’s Fiction. The Horse Whisperer (Nicholas Evans) was a best seller, as was Richard Paul Evans’ The Christmas Box.

Now I was originally going to use this lesson to have you make some parallels with your own writing to determine whether your niche was romance or women’s fiction. From the summaries I have received though, it is fairly obvious that, of those of you who sent in summaries, the niche you’re aiming for is romance. And guess what? That’s cool. Because in whatever class I teach, what I teach can be applied equally to any genre. What is special to WF is, of course, going to be the main emphasis of the specialty areas but other than that, what you learn here about the basics of writing will apply as handily to your romance novels as they will to the WF novels others here will be writing.

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Wounds What an odd name for a segment, you’re thinking, unless you’ve taken one of my classes before.

John Gardner said that having a wound was pretty much essential to writing - in the case of serious writers anyway - as long as the wound didn’t go too deep, so deep that it incapacitates one for living. The reason the wound is even more important in WF than it would be for most forms of fiction is that WF is based on our lives as women. Even if the story we write is in no way connected with the actual events of our lives, it is based on the emotions of our lives.

In WF, as in horror and literary fiction, the wound can be the catalyst to really open ourselves up and out, split open our very entrails and write a book of passion and beauty. We write from our wounds. I believe, from my life and my experience, that the wound isn't just a help to a writer - it is the source of our writing. It is the blood that gives it life, just as blood gives our body life. Your wound is important. Listen to what it tells you The best writing of your life will pour out of you like blood from .... well, from a wound.

The Toolbox Just for a moment, I want to talk about the Writer's Journal again. This is so important, I can't emphasize it enough. I'd gladly put something about it in every class module, but you poor guys (and gals) would go bonkers reading about it every week. However, it is that important. It's not called a seedbed and an idea catcher for no reason, after all.

The Writer's Journal is such an important tool for writing, not just because they hold the memories that we use in our work, but because they hold the seeds for short stories, poems, plays, screenplays, even articles and essays and creative nonfiction prose and, of © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 23

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course, novels. Not to mention all the characters a journal can accumulate over your lifetime of keeping it. Think of all the people you see in a day - at work, at the place where you eat lunch, at the grocery story and the library and the gas station. Even if you don't speak to them, never know them, just the way they look sometimes can turn them into a character. For instance, when we were living in New Orleans and I was working the vampire shift for Bob - all alone in the office at night I could turn out more work than any other 3 people on staff - I used to walk up to Canal Street for breakfast at the McDonald's when I got off work about 7:30 am. And every morning when I came in, there was a woman sitting at one of the horseshoe shaped booths (yeah, well, New Orleans is like nowhere else in the world, so why not horseshoe shaped booths and two stories of tables and loveseats and booths to choose your chair from, not to mention your view?).

She looked like Greta Garbo - the clothing was strictly 20s/30s Hollywood. She was still lovely, although obviously in her 80s, maybe even in her 90s. She smoked in a no smoking McDonald's using a long ivory cigarette holder and not a waiter or waitress or manager said a word to her about it. I'd sit quietly where I could watch her from behind some palm founds and listen to the conversations that were taking place over there because she didn't sit there in that garden hat with silk cherries and flowers and the flowing silk scarf that she threw over her shoulder like Isadora Duncan and the likewise flowing 20s or maybe it was 30s, dress and shoes, her face made up ready for her closeup now, Mr. DeMille. No, she sat with maybe a half dozen old men, however many could fit on the seat on either side of her. Several also stood around waiting for one of the others to leave. They catered to her, bringing her breakfast, worshiping at her feet. All the mornings I watched her - an d I watched her for months - I wondered who she had been for she had once been someone, there was no doubt about that. With Quentin Tarintino and Francis Ford Coppola living in Metairie and Interview with the Vampire being filmed at the time in the French Quarter (in other words, we had a small colony of directors and actors living in and around New Orleans), it was obvious that there was a © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 24

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good chance she really was a retired film star - perhaps from the silent era of film. She gave nothing away in conversation, though. She merely ordered her men about as if they were servants of her queenly self, allowed all to kiss her hand, and smiled enigmatically at some, giving others a more smoldering smile. I half expected her to stand up and begin singing, "Falling in love again, Never wanted to...What am I to do? I'm helpless ..." in that hoarse, Germanic accented smoky voice from some 30s cabaret film I saw as a kid.

I am a terribly shy person - I stutter when I have to speak to strangers - so I never came out from behind the palm founds to ask her who she was - never brought out my tape recorder to ask her about her life. Even if she was only faking her role as silent film star retired and living on limited means in one of New Orleans' more broken down parts of town, it made no difference. A person like that had to have had a marvelously interesting life - no matter what that life had been - in the movies, or maybe as a spy in WWI. She was marvelous. When she stopped coming to McDonald's, I stopped going, too, because I was sure she had died. None of the men came around anymore either once she failed to show up for a couple of days. That's how I came to believe that she was dead. I've always regretted missing the chance to talk to her.

I'll use her in a book someday. She was such a character, I'd not have to invent anything about her at all to stick her in another Dick Denker mystery.

This little story brings out two points I'm trying very hard to make to you throughout this course -- OBSERVATION is, as Hemingway also said again and again, the one trait that a writer must have, must have, must have!!! And the other is that there are characters all around you, ideas for stories all around you - and without a writer's journal, you may lose them. You'll forget them in the passages of time; you'll lose them to crying kids and husbands demanding attention and the way we just lose parts of our lives because we're so busy living them that we haven't time to see them in focus or in their entire gestalt.

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And it's not just in our lives that we can find ideas, characters, dialog (from overheard conversations - writer's have license to be eavesdroppers, just as we have leave to cannibalize our friend's and family's lives, per James Jones), et al, for the hungry pages of your Writer's Journal. We can also get this type of input for the journals from what we read. A shorter example this time, I promise.

This is the actual journal entry I made last night in the part of my journal that I call Diamonds - which means they are images or thoughts that hit me in my imagination "like a diamond bullet," as Marlon Brando says in Apocalypse Now. Diamonds are things I run across in my reading that strike off other thoughts that strike off others until a story comes tumbling out. This just happened to be the Diamond that hit me last night while reading Phil Rickman's new book, Chalice, and it has no other significance than to illustrate how reading can also be used in your journal as a sower of seeds.

**********************

Phil Rickman in his books (horror novels set primarily in the border country between England and Wales) deals often with ley lines and what they may or may not be - he speculates that rather than being lines of earth energy (New Age definition of such, naturally) - they may be paths of the dead - paths traveled by the ancestral dead.

This is not as out of it as it sounds, because although the ley lines connect holy places in Stone Age England and Wales, those holy places are very often also burial mounds.

The ley lines connect not just ancient sites like the standing stones and dolmens but also the churches built pre-Reformation, holy wells, mounds and earthworks, moats - most of the roads in England lie along the ley lines, as well, and accident blackspots on the roads and highways tend to be where ley lines cross.

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So we have the lines running along : a mesh of roads, paths and contour lines, churches, mounds (like the tumps and Glastonbury Tor), burial sites, standing stones (in groups like Stonehenge and dolmen circles, or megaliths standing alone like the Bottle Stone), churches (pre-Reformation) holy wells, moats, earthworks, crossroads and cairns.

ALSO NOTE : There is a circular configuration of roads leading through Anasazi country ending at Mesa Grande - they seem at first to be merely tracks that the Indians followed to gather for trade at their main city but there are ruins along the ways that seem to indicate that these were sacred places of worship ending at a central worship site Mesa Grande. This means they may have been used as processional roads to holy festivals of some kind. There is evidence of two castes of Anasazi - and of cannibalism in the higher status class practiced on the lower status class which may mean that the higher status caste came from Mexico and were Aztecs - there are artifacts that prove trade with Aztecs, why not an invasion at some time? And we know that cannibalism was a part of their holy rituals. Any of this could be true or none of it. We know almost nothing about the Anasazi anyway, except that they did not just disappear as the TV legends go, but have become the pueblo tribe s of Arizona/New Mexico, and that the name does not translate to Ancient Aliens, it translates (as closely as one may translate it) to Ancient Enemies. Ley lines are said to be all over the earth - could the spikes of the great wheel of roads that come out from Mesa Grande be a configuration of ley lines or is Mesa Grande itself on a ley line with other settlements also on the line? No one has ever thought to explore this idea.

Add to this possibly the sacred journey to get salt by the Hopis - always the same secret path or "road" taken, always as a holy journey, just as today the Native American Church will make a journey for the sacred mushrooms into Mexico to a secret site by a secret "road".

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There may or may not be a story in this Diamond, but it'll germinate there in the journal and one day it just might turn out to be a story - or it may turn out to have some significance in a horror novel about Native American monsters I've been germinating for the past couple of years. No one has really written about the monsters of the Native Americans - no vampires or such are in their stories - but they do have shapeshifters, primarily among the Athabascan and Eskimo tribes, and some myths deal with the monstrous children of one of the Navaho gods (all of whom were destroyed but for Death who was allowed to live so that new generations could be born - if the old don't die, the world would soon fill up and there wouldn't be enough food or space for all, so Death is necessary and was allowed to live). This novel, if I ever write it, then, would be in a new subgenre of horror. That's a great reason to write it. I'd like to be the creator of a new subgenre of my favorite ge nre. Wouldn't you love to do that? And it might all come from that entry I just made last night. That entry may be the bell that finally rings Maatsua's Children into reality.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's war diaries, there isn't a lot about the war, since they were kept during the period of the "false" war, but they contain the seeds of all his future important works - philosophical treatises, fiction, and essays. As tiny as mustard seeds sometimes, these ideas, that appear in his diaries years before he would write the works that grew from them - as large as walnut seeds in other cases. The same will be true of you and your journals if you keep them consistently and if you keep them full with the things you read and see and do and observe - OBSERVE - throughout your life. And as I said in Lesson 1 - you'll never have Writer's Block again if you keep a Writer's Journal. Guaranteed.

And there's one other reason why the journal is so important - because to be a writer, a serious, professional writer, you have to write and the journal can get you into that habit quicker than any other method. I sometimes wonder if my journal is work or play - I know it's for my work, but keeping it is more like play. It's much easier to gain a habit if © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 28

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you're playing than if your working. everyday and sometimes it's not possible to work on your novel for one reason or another. The most important habit you can acquire, as a writer, after the art of observation, is the habit of writing every single day. Writing in the journal will get you into the habit of writing everyday and that's a good, good thing. And when you can't write on the novel for some reason, then you can always still write in the journal that day.

When you're stuck for a story idea or a character, chances are you'll find one in your journals. They function as both seed-bed and motivator and they can even lower your blood pressure. You'll find that writing in the journal is also relaxing. Anais Nin called her journals her opium. I know a great deal of the reason that I look forward to writing in mine each evening is because it is relaxing - Big Time Relaxing. It’s private time. It’s just me and the cat curled up on the bed with the diary. No TV roaring in my ears. No husband droning about work. Just green tea, some almond or chocolate Biscotti, the cat, my diary and me.

The Writer's Journal is a practice ground for writing. It’s a place to think out loud, in a way, about the stories you want to write and those you are writing or have written. It’s a intimate friend you can confide anything to, who doesn't condemn or scold or ask you, "WHAT were you thinking when you (did)(said) that?"

It’s your memories, fresh as the day you wrote them. It’s a measuring rod of your success in meeting your goals or how far you've fallen short of them. And do you know what else they can be?

Our lives told well, interest other folks as well. Look at Proust. Virginia Woolf, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Thomas Woolf. It used to be that writer’s mined their lives to find the stories of their fiction and in return were rewarded, sometimes, most times, with a glimpse into the meaning of their lives. Literature, Solzhenitsyn said, is a way of telling © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 29

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the future what life was like at a certain time and in a certain place. It’s a real shame that most writer’s don't still mine their own lives for their work. A large measure of authenticity has gone out of literature since the practice of writing what we know, in the sense of writing what we have experienced, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and yes, even physically, went out of fashion.

"Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open," says Natalie Goldberg. It’s not only easier to do this when you have those on-the-spot-memories safely in a journal, it’s more authentic when they're tucked away in writing, rather than merely sitting in your memory, waiting for the colors of desire to distort them.

While it is certainly true that we are our memories, it is also certainly true as Spinoza said, that memories come down to us fatally colored by desire. We tend to remember things - people, episodes in our lives, what we did and what others did within the sphere of our lives - as we wish they were, not how they really were. W. Somerset Maugham once wrote that the writer is the luckiest man alive because he can take whatever has wounded him and turn it into a song or a poem or a novel or a story and get rid of the pain by writing it out. Maugham was luckier than I am, because although I have tried to write out my wound several times, there always seems to be a layer or two missed that comes back to haunt and hurt me later. But he is right to a degree, even for me. And the idea of someday being able to completely write out the pain is one heck of a great motivator.

Of course, it’s been the contention of many writers, Stephen King, Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf and Henry Miller among them, that until we write out an event, we haven't fully lived it. They do have a point there. Writer’s do live two lives, even if they don't keep a personal journal to record that second life in - the experience itself and the later reflection on it in our fiction. Experience itself is essential, but the real value of any experience is © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 30

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the insight into ourselves, our loved ones, our lives, that we glean from it. Virginia Woolf even went so far as to say that we cannot fully live the moment - we ‘re too busy being in motion - it’s only later, in reflection, that what we felt at the time is experienced, rounding out the entire event for us. This is the second most important reason why writers should keep personal journals. The most important reason is, of course, the fickleness of memory, its propensity to color and mutate what really happened into what we wan ted to happen or needed to happen.

But let’s say you're one of those people, male and female, who just can't get into this diary thing and the discipline of it - and make no mistake about this - the discipline required to keep a record of your life for 40 or 50 years is discipline indeed! OK, so you can't go for the personal journal. Then at least keep a Writer’s Journal. Please.

And don't just use it to write your experiences and store away seeds. Use it, too, to define what you want to be as a writer and what you want your work to be and the thematic threads that you are passionate about to have them run through the entire oeuvre of your work. Think of yourself as a real novelist, not just someone who writes a book or two; think of yourself as a novelist whose life is devoted to the passion of writing and even if you're not that novelist now, you will become that writer -- if you want it. IF you need it. If it's a fire burning in the zero gravity of your heart.

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Characters & Plot : The Siamese Twins of Writing The two most important things to remember about character creation are these : Characters must be Goal-Driven and Characters must never ever Act inconsistently.

"Why characters first?" you ask. "Why not plot? Don't you have to have a story before you have characters?"

For some writers the first seed of the novel they're going to write is a plot idea rather than a character, but for most writers, characters tend to take over the plot once a certain point is reached in the writing of the book. Most importantly - no matter which comes first - the chicken or the egg, which is how an article I read on this very question a few days ago put it - there is no plot without characters, while there maybe indeed be characters without a plot.

Plot is NOT story and story is NOT plot and we'll more about that when we get to plotting a little later in the lesson.

Without characters, there is no story.

Without characters, the plot is just an idea, more or less original, more or less interesting, in itself.

Koontz's book on writing bestsellers stresses, almost from the first page, that writing in any genre, including mainstream or literary novels (his genre just happens to be horror, migrating more and more to psychological suspense), writing a great story means writing, first of all, a great story about people. That your people are battling an alien or a vampire, and sometimes they're the same thing (as in the book Vampires From Outer Space which became a great little movie called Lifeforce and my short story, An Episode From A © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 32

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War), instead of riding the range in a Western or having good, clean, erotic fun in a Romance, is what separates out stories into genres. Of course, you can slipstream to a certain extent across genres. My novel Blood Kiss is also a romance, because, after all, even vampires fall in love now and then. What a chance to prove whether or not love really is forever! So, characters must come first, just as any Siamese Twin must be firs t from the womb.

I think of my characters as people. Real people, at least as real as the people in my dreams. Why? Because, and almost every writer I've ever spoken to or corresponded with has had a similar experience -- at some point in every book or story, my characters "come alive"; they start to write their own actions, they begin to work out their own destinies. Sometimes they even have secrets I didn't know they had, rationales for behavior I didn't give them. They stop obeying me and start doing what they want. A strong enough character can take the plot I've planned and rip it to shreds, substituting his or her own. That’s why I almost never bother with outlines or with the rather standard advice to write your ending first (unless it's a mystery or a thriller). My characters are just going to come in and ruin all that work anyway, so why do it?

I believe this coup by one’s characters happens because the story has its own inner logic, its own agenda and its own truth and these come from the imagination which is largely of a piece with the unconscious mind and is where the stories come from in the first place. (I also believe that our stories choose us - that what we write is more a function of the unconscious then it is of the conscious desires of the writer.) The imagination is a bridge to that world of the unconscious. The conscious mind gives you an idea and you work it out - maybe you outline it, or maybe you just ponder it for awhile before starting to write it. You name your characters, you give them a history, you decide on their personalities and occupations. You start to write and it is then, at some point after the story has caught fire inside you, is alive inside you, that the unconscious starts pulling the strings instead of the conscious mind. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 33

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A for instance : the novel I'm writing now has a minor character I fully intended to be a real creep, but one morning I woke up, and while I'd been sleeping, he'd had an epiphany and joined forces with the protagonist. He's no longer a minor character. Now he's a secondary character and still coming up with surprises for me.

Sleep is a dangerous thing - on the one hand your entire imaginary world can turn on its axis while you dream. On the other hand, it can be the biggest help you have; when I run into a problem with the plotting, the pacing, the next scene (or my lack of it), sleeping on "it" usually brings the answer by morning. And this applies to characters, although they're more usually turning my book's world on its axis then helping me to keep it on a even keel.

Unless you're the kind of person whose first intimation of a story is a character who pops into your mind one day over breakfast or during the coffee break at work, you will, in the beginning, have to invent your characters and you have to round them out, make them realistic. Make them as real and as 3-dimensional as real people, so your readers will care about them, want them to succeed or fail, want them to live or, if they're villains, die. How do we do that? There are a couple of ways.

Some writers use their family, friends, neighbors and coworkers as templates. In a short story, this can work quite well. Writer's get to take a unique and bloodless kind of revenge on those who've hurt them by putting their enemies into their stories. For instance, in my story, Paralegal on the Vampire Shift, I had a serial killer take out a girl I worked with who was trying in every underhanded, painful way she could come up with to make me quit or be fired, because she wanted my job (actually my salary - if she'd had any idea of what my job actually entailed, she'd have run screaming from the building!). Now that story published in a national horror magazine and is still available from the magazine's archives here on the Internet so hundreds of people know what became of the © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 34

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witch (spell that with a b) in the story but only I know (and now you) that the witch was a real person, fortunately or unfortunately, too stupid to read. Anything.

There is a very interesting book out about this type of writer's revenge - writing nasty endings or nasty lives for characters based on people in our experience, but the fact is that this template usually doesn't work well in a novel. Read James Jones' The Merry Month of May to see what I mean. Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty but the book is dry and dry and dry and dull, too, to boot. If you know the real story of the people whose lives he fictionalized, then it’s an especially disappointing read, but then it had to be, didn't it? The real protagonist many years later wrote that only he and his family knew the truth about what had happened and none of them had divulged it to Jones, even though he was a friend of the family. He felt Jones had "cannibalized their friendship" (and Jones agreed that writer's do exactly that in the service of their art), which is another good reason not to use real people in your novel. Even if you can tell the whole truth in your story, you may lose the friend or family member you're writing about, since they may feel, perhaps rightly, perhaps, wrongly, that you've cannibalized the relationship for your art. But this only applies if you care what the person thinks of you or if you care less for your art than you do for your relationship.

Henry Miller always cared more for his art than for the women he wrote about with the single exception of Anais Nin. It is the only weakness in Miller’s novels, his hiding of Nin in the shells of several different women in order to protect her and the relationship. Since she ended up dumping him, I have sometimes wondered if he didn't regret having compromised his art for her sake. When he thought their love was forever, he was willing to make any sacrifice for her. She, on the other hand, was willing to make none for him and eventually was unwilling even to continue a friendship with him. It must have been a terrible blow to him when he looked back at the work he had allowed to be diminished by telling only partial and largely hidden truths about their life together, especially when he

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had only to look at her books to see their every moment written out in diaphanous, purple prose for all to read who could manage to wade though that turgid mess.

I met him in 1969 when I was 17 and he was very old. If I had known then about his history with Nin, I would have asked him how he felt about those early works and the compromises he had made for her sake. Unfortunately, I didn't know and I didn't ask. But in that long hot summer afternoon I spent with him, he taught me to play ping-pong and he largely shaped my philosophy of writing. Much of what I tell you in terms of the philosophy of writing was told me by Henry Miller one California day in 1969, colored by the over 30 years of my own experience of writing.

One of the easiest ways to make full-blooded, fully rounded characters, is to make a Backstory for your major characters. This doesn't mean that your secondary and minor characters can be ignored in this respect, but there are simple tricks to accomplish the same thing for them that the Backstory does for major characters, like giving them their own dark secret or their own agenda (but never, never, the cliched twitching lip or dropping eyelid or limp and NEVER give them names like Fat Belly or Red Nose - that kind of thing went the way of the cliche long long ago).

One of the current fads for making your characters real live people is to use Character Charts. The Backstory is a long, involved process if you use one of the Character Charts currently available in several places on the Web. They ask you to define your character in ways you can't even define your best friends or family members and the charts run to several pages. One of the charts even comes with a URL for horoscopes, so you can get your character his very own natal chart for you to use in construing his reactions and actions. Now, unless you're a Type A personality, a detail oriented anal retentive, or one of those people who will take every opportunity, make any excuse, to avoid actually sitting down to write, these charts aren't for you.

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What you need is the original idea the charts are based on, which was to simply ask a series of questions about your character. This is the questionnaire I've been using for some years now. I made it myself and made it to fit best what I do as a writer of horror, mystery and mainstream novels and short stories. For instance, the charts I've seen want you to imagine the character right down to his or her wardrobe and why or why not s/he chose the clothes s/he did. Unless it's absolutely necessary to the story, as it is in David Lindsey's Mercy (the psychiatrist is a cross dresser and always notices exactly what designer labels his patients are wearing; he lovingly describes each article of their clothing, as he does, too, the women's clothing he wears) neither you nor your audience care about the character's fashion sense.

Here's the Character Questionnaire I've used for boo-coo years and it's always worked just fine. I've never felt the need to have a horoscope done just to be sure my character is fully 3D.

* Character's name and age

* Height, weight, hair and eye color; body type

* If applicable to the story -- any tattoos, moles, birthmarks, whether he or she wears glasses or not

* Character's greatest fear and why? (Remember, we are defined by what we fear!)

* Character's belief system - religious, not religious, New Age, Conventional; open minded about the supernatural, not open minded

* Whether or not he or she cares for their own life - does s/he smoke, drink; is s/he reckless (riding a motorcycle, for instance, instead of driving a Lexus) or is s/he health © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 37

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conscious, maybe even a health nut eating Grape Nuts and drinking 8 glasses of water a day?

* Occupation or lack of one

* Dreams -- Both the kind we have awake - what he or she wants out of life - and the kind we have when we're asleep - dreams can be a great way of foreshadowing future action (by making them prophetic dreams) and by showing us how characters react to the danger in their nightmares

* Wounds - Dark secrets, embarrassing secrets; guilts; selfishness or selflessness any of which will effect his ability to win through in the end - almost all these things arise from childhood or young adulthood and are the things we find jumping up to interfere with our behavior as grown people. For instance, the woman who won't marry a man who drinks, even though he may be perfect in every other way because her father drank and beat her mother. Nowadays we're supposed to "get over it" and there is a stigma attached to those of us who can't just "get over it". If we could, the world would soon become a blase and beige place, don't you think? since it is our wounds that make us interesting and individual. And so it should be with your characters. Wounds are also what give a character his or her strengths or weaknesses; soft spots and vulnerabilities, motivations and talents and determine whether the character is able to use those talents or pursue those motivations effectively. Wounds are also the source of the greatest ability of a character to change and grow, leaving regrets and pain behind even if no one in real life (or in novel life) ever really gets over it, despite the amount of change they may undergo.

* Self-perception and perception of others - this goes to outsiders and insiders (introverts or extroverts), whether a character is a team player or always got the report card with "Doesn't work or play well with others" on it. Here's another chance for growth and change (Remember - even in a horror novel or other genre novel, it is important for your © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 38

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characters to grow and change and be solidly 3 dimensional - 2 dimensional characters only work in hard core porn).

* Give yourself a rough idea of how the character spent the week preceding the beginning of the novel. If you know what he did when times are normal, it will help you to see what he (or she) will do when the conflict begins.

* Give your character a name. Some characters come with names already attached. Some don't. How do you name those who don't? There are two easy ways to accomplish this. First and probably most prevalent is the Telephone Book method. Choose a first name from one page in the White Pages and a last name from another. OR and this is what I've been using ever since I discovered it earlier this year, there is a neat little freeware program out there called Random Names. It will automatically come up with names for every entity, personal or corporate, you could want with a click of the mouse. It's available at http://www.dramadog.com. Most of my characters name themselves - I usually only have to come up with names of minor characters. My characters are already real people by the time I start the book, so they've already told me what their names are by the time I write that first sentence.

This is actually an important part of characterization and so let's spend a little time on it. I have, in every class I teach, at least 2 or 3 students who write to ask me about naming characters. You might, if you're like me and have no trouble with naming your characters, think this is a silly question. It's not. Would Scarlett O'Hara BE Scarlett O'Hara if her name had been Norma Ann Bodkin? In history, do you think Hitler could have retained his dignity and not looked like a cartoon character with millions of people shouting out Heil Schiklegruber! - his father's name until he was in his mid-40s - instead of Heil, Hitler!? Having the correct name for your main characters and the more important of your secondary characters is important, so here are some other ways to find names. Resources for names are extensive on the Internet - baby names directories and Internet © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 39

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name directories, for instance. And Writer's Digest books has, of course, a book called, of course, The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook.

Names need to fit the character's background and personality. Lawyers and doctors should have good WASP or good Jewish names. Columbian drug dealers and criminals of other sorts may have good WASP names, but they don't use them in real life and so shouldn't in your books, unless your criminal is a good WASP like that guy who started the Billionaire Boys Club that ended in murder. The only real rule when it comes to naming is to be sure that the name you choose (if your character doesn't choose his or her own) fits the character, the time period, the occupation, the family background, the personality of that character. That's a lot, you say? Not really. In my story Grasshoppers, a mother obsessed with UFOs names all her children after UFO crash sites. They live in a normal upper middle class neighborhood. So her son, who is the narrator of the story, Rendlesham Forest Brown, goes by the name Ren Brown outside his home - at school for instance, and in this way, his name not only fits his family background, it is also consistent with his parent's occupations of housewife and NASA scientist. Names can morph, too, as Rendlesham Forest does to Ren, to fit different situations. My detective Dick Denker can be Richard to his ex-wife, Dick to his friends, Dickie to his best friend, Richard, again, to his secretary when she's angry with him and Dick or Dickie when she's not mad. I like names that morph, because they also bring out the different angles of a character's personality. Characters, like people, have different personalities in them. We all do. A name that can be morphed to those different personalities not only shows the fullness of the character to the reader, it enhances the reality of the character to you. The more real your characters are to you, the more real they'll be to the reader. So don't think that names are a trifle and not very important. They're important. In some cases, essential. Think again of Hitler and how it would have sounded if he'd been saddled with the name Schiklegruber all his life. I seriously doubt

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he'd have been able to keep those crowds under his spell much longer than Charlie Chaplin could keep an audience from laughing at his imitation of Hitler.

A very important point to remember when naming your characters and one that I haven't seen much mentioned on the Net, is to keep away from names that sound almost alike or names which start with the same letter. If you have a house party with three guys and three girls, say, in a haunted house and the guys are Dan, Don, Bill and Brian, it's going to be hard to keep them apart in the reader's mind. Same with the girls - Sally, Shelley and Sandra won't work well.

As far as using names of people you know in your books, or famous people, still living, that is generally a no-no. Sometimes people want you to use their names if you're basing a character on them - like my friend, Fred. He not only wanted me to use his name, he wanted the character to be an exact replica of him and since he was a very colorful character in real life, I did it. In Blood Kiss Fred Zephyrs appears exactly as he was in 1990, the year I wrote the book. In Cri du Coeur I mention the real life son of the Mafia leader of New Orleans in the 1960s. I cite some of his short comings. I doubt if he's ever read the book or ever will, but if he does, he can't sue me for slander because nothing I said in the book is untrue. Of course he might take out a contract on my life for some of the insulting things I had a character say about him, but he really is as ineffectual as a mobster as the character says he is and I doubt he'd even know how to farm out a con tract. That's why I could dare to say the things I did - they were all things that I had heard said about him by other "family" members and his personality is drawn completely from my own impressions of him (he dated the witch I killed off in Paralegal On the Vampire Shift).

Ordinarily, though, it's a bad idea to use the names of people you know or famous people. Keep to the random name generators or baby name books or the telephone books or ask your characters what their names are - they just might tell you. In a dream, in a sudden © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 41

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flash of inspiration or while you're taking a shower. You never can tell when a character is going to pop up and speak to you. Or what they might say if you've chosen what they consider to be the wrong names for them.

And that's for the easy way to write it character chart. No multiple page character charts with "favorite shirt why; least favorite shirt why?" type entries. Just the basics. Just the things you need to know to start the main characters on their journey. Just a portion of one, not even a whole, page. Because in the beginning that is all you are going to do start them on their journey. Before too long, they'll take over their own destinies and then you'll only be observing (and writing down) their journeys to their bitter or sweet ends.

This phenomena which is so common with so many writers of the characters coming to life and writing the story for you almost, is the reason I say that the stories are alive in us, that they choose us, that they have their own agendas and their own truths, that they live in us, an organic thing, which germinates until it's ready to break through the earth and be born. It grows until it blooms.

We have far less control, I believe, on our novels especially, than we think we do.

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A FEW DOs & DON'Ts OK. Now you've back-storied your characters. You know them as well as if they were people who'd been living in your basement for a few years (which, in a sense, they have the basement of your unconscious, as Jung would say). How do you convey these folks to the reader? Let's start with the DON'Ts.

* DON'T use the old character looks in the mirror and describes his own face to himself gambit, not unless you can do it in an entirely new way. This method has been so overdone that it ranks as a physical cliche and can be just as deadly to your writing as a word cliche. Mediocre and lazy writers still do it, but you don't want to be mediocre or lazy and if you do, then a real writer is not what you want to be nor will ever be. Aside from being a cliche in action, it's boring to the reader. It's telling, not showing, one of the first and most cardinal rules of writing broken, right there in the first few pages of your book. That said, there are ways to do it creatively so it's no longer a cliche, but those ways are so few as to be unique. Stick with this one as a DON'T of the First Order.

So how do you do it then? How do you describe your character’s physical appearance? Who says you have to? Stephen King, Rosamunde Pilchur, Donna Tartt, Peter Straub, Jeff Strand and Jeff Long do it, but they do it sparingly and with a delicate touch. Stephen King rarely describes a character's looks other than to throw in a few details noticed and commented on by other characters during the story and that’s the best way to do it. Having another character notice your protagonist’s physical characteristics is a form of showing, not telling. Stu Redman noticing that fine "I Want" line between Frannie's eyes; Frannie wondering if anyone has ever told Harold a little soap and hot water might help his acne; your male character describing the length of the female antagonist’s legs ... showing, not telling. Besides, as King and other authors point out in their own books on effective writing, it is often best to let the reader fill in the features of a character. That makes the cha racter much more real, because more personal, to each individual reader. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 43

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* DON'T say the character looks like a movie star as in "She was Marilyn Monroe right down to the breathy voice." Ira Levin used the tactic, and used it to advantage, but he did it with the delicacy of a surgeon, when he has Rosemary meet the Terri down in the laundry room. Rosemary stares and then apologizes because she's taken the woman to be a movie star. This opens a dialog with this very minor character who is very soon dead (thus opening the door for Rosemary to be the next choice as the Devil's bride) in which Rosemary can describe her husband's character and his career - important details which we must know, because it is this flawed career and Guy Woodhouse's ego and selfishness when it comes to his career, that leads him to agree to let the Satanists use his wife to bear the child of the Devil.

* DON'T use vague adjectives as in "She was the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen" or "He was the most delicious man she'd ever seen." The problem with this is that beautiful means something entirely different to each of us, as does delicious. To an Arab, a woman with four chin rolls of fat and a body so hefty she can no longer stand on her own feet is beautiful. To an American male, blond, big breasted women lead the pack when it comes to beauty.

* Conversely, DON'T describe a person as handsome or beautiful, made more so by a flaw like a slightly bucked tooth or a mole on at the corner of the mouth. If a character is beautiful to the beholder, there don't need to be any flaws to make her more beautiful and besides, all of these techniques are cliches in action - something you want very very much to avoid. So, what’s the easiest way to describe a character if you going to do it? The easiest way is to let your other characters do it over a period of time by showing the effect of the character on the others. Two men talking about a beautiful woman can describe her by talking about a third man lucky enough to be going out with her. A woman can throw in descriptive details about a man her friend is dating by saying how jealous she is she never gets guys with shoulders like that or hair that black and glossy or © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 44

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eyes with long lashes like his. Remember every word you write should advance the story and m ere physical descriptions of a character's looks rarely do that. What rounds out characters in any genre of fiction is their backstory, not the way their back ends look in jeans.

It used to be the conventional wisdom that secondary characters don't really need much in the way of characterization. But people these days, while being more in a hurry as life becomes a faster and faster thing, conversely are looking for more reality in their books; they always have and still do, want characters who evoke emotions - hatred for the villains, concern and liking for the heroes. So don't skimp on characterization just because it’s a secondary character.

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Lesson 3 – Women’s Fiction This module we’re going to be talking about several things and it’s going to be one the largest of the lessons just because we have so much to cover in the next two weeks. As before I’m going to start off with some words on living the writing life which includes finding or making the time to write, a subject that comes up in a lot of your email and two Q&A sections, to answer questions you've sent in the past two weeks. Also, as usual, I'll be looking at the more theoretical side of writing in modules like The Art if Fiction, and then we’ll have our Toolbox Sections - two this week : one on Conflict and one on Dialog.

Bur first, I’ll be talking about Character Creation in a it more detail and how WF characters differ from those in other genres. I'm also going to recommend some of what are sometimes considered "books for women" for you to read. It may be that WF is not exactly your genre. You may like it, you may feel an affinity for it, but there just is something about it that doesn't grab you. It may be that WF is not your niche, but rather those books called more loosely "books for women" and which are genred as everything from Big Romance to mystery to mainstream. These are generally any book where the hero is a heroine, as in the romance subgenres, specifically the Big Romance subgenre, the chic-lit genre, the newer genre of detective fiction where the cop or private eye or bounty hunter or forensic pathologist (psychic or not) is a woman instead of a man and the suspense genres where women are still secondary characters, but their inner lives ar e more important than that of the men involved in the story. I’ll also be adding some more detail to plot creation and we'll be looking at Conflict (Suspense and Tension), Pacing Anxiety and Dialog. Like I said, a long lesson, with a lot of meat.

Since I’m going to be using several books to give you examples from, and since many of you seem to be very interested in reading novels of this type now that you’ve been introduced to the genre, I thought it would easiest if I listed them here, first. All of these I © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 46

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got at my little local library and if they have them, it’s almost certain your library will, too. Of course you can also buy them, I’m sure, but library books are free (unless you’re like me and rack up huge fines at least 2 or 3 times a year!). It’s not that I can’t buy books, it’s just that I read them so fast that they’re not worth - to me - the prices being charged these days. And besides, ahem. Getting money out of my husband for anything as frivolous as a book is a little like performing dental work on a tiger. So here goes.

WF : 1) Mary McGarry Morris - Songs in Ordinary Time (an Oprah Club selection)

2) Minette Walters - The Breaker

3) Frances Donnelly - Shake Down the Stars

4) Rosamunde Pulcher, any, but especially The Shell Seekers and Coming Home

5) Marilyn French, any, but Her Mother's Daughter in particular

The "books for women" category mentioned above :

1) Robert W. Walker’s Jessica Coran mysteries and his Kim Desinor mysteries (Kim is psychic FBI agent who solves crimes using her esp gifts, while Jessica is an FBI medical examiner.)

2) Wally Lamb - She's Come Undone

and, hold on now, this one is going to come as surprise!

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3) Fabio - that’s right Fabio, male model for the paintings on those romance genre novels, sub-genre bodice-rippers, sometime actor with a guest spot on Roseanne and several I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter commercials, as well as a sit-on partin Exorcist III as an angel in the dream sequence of Lt. Kindermann. . Can you believe it? Well, he’s written a book in the books for women genre, but it's trying hard to be WF genre, subgenre mystery, called Mysterious and here’s the real shocker - his writing isn’t half bad. It’s only half good, but hey! That’s not half bad, right? And I have to admit I did buy this one - for a buck at The Dollar Tree. I couldn’t help it. The mere curiosity quotient alone (like going to see the Freaks at the Carnival when I was a child) was worth a dollar. Mysterious is a try at a romance novel/suspense novel/WF novel. It’s fun to see what a man usually perceived as being about as smart as the bowls of marg arine he sells on TV can do with a novel he’s writing in his second language.

Hey, can someone help that lady there? She’s fainted. Hmmm, I wonder if it was this beefcake picture of Fabio on the cover of his book or the shock of hearing he’d actually published a book? Well, it proves one thing, anyway. If Fabio can get published, anyone with the determination to write a book, good, bad or half-bad, has a shot at publication. It would be a good idea though to be sure that that book is really, really good, if you want to have a real shot at publishing it, because how much ya wanna bet that who he is was more important to his finding a publisher than how well he writes? I wouldn't bet against that assertion if I was you - remember several years back Jackie Collins sister, the actress was given a multi-million dollar, three (I think) book contract with a NY publisher who also gave her a million or so dollars as an advance, based solely on who she was (an actress and Jackie Collins sister)? What happened had to be a first in modern publishing when they got her first manuscript, they tried their damnest to get back the advance money and cancel the rest of the contract. I cant tell you what happened next because I'm afraid I didn't bother to follow up on it. My disgust quotient at the stupidity of publishers giving multi-million deals to a woman they didn't know could ever write or not at the time of the deal, infuriated me so much I didn't want to know what happened in the court © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 48

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case. This was definitely a case of who you are being far more important than whether you can write or not.

Who you are can't help you if the book you turn out is pure dreck, it seems, a thought that makes me quite optimistic in the dead of night when I go through the "I'll never make a kazillion bucks on my books" Blues. The thought helps restore me to some sort of semireasonable hope. As it should you.

Regarding Thee ..... Many of tips, pointers and techniques I’ll be talking about will be of varying use to each of you. You all have lives different from each other - some have husbands and children, some just husbands (which is the same thing as having a child), some no husbands, but children, some neither one, but they have parakeets, cats, dogs, fish or ferrets. Some have full time day jobs or part time jobs to go along with those families -- or not, as the singular case may be; some are disabled, some are hale, healthy and hearty; some are taking care of disabled family members, some are in school, unusually universities but I've had a high school student a few times in a class or two of mine. Some in this class are in their 60s to 80s and some in their 30s. I think there may eve n be one or two in their 20s. Some are novice writers, some are more experienced, some are actually already published and here looking for a new genre to stretch their talents in or just hoping that there will be something in this class that will help them to be better writers, a hope I share with them and something I work at there being present in every class I teach.

In every case, the time you all have for writing will differ, the space you have to write in will differ, and the amount of support from significant others will also differ. Your life is your life and though it may resemble that of others in this class, it is, in the end, unique. That’s why nothing I tell you here is writ in stone. It’s more like it’s writ in jello. Take

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the tips, techniques, pointers and advice and adapt them to your own needs or delete them completely when they’re of no use to you.

You’re probably saying to yourself that you already know this. Why is she wasting my eyesight telling me something that’s so incredibly self-evident?

Because it’s not self-evident to everyone.

I have had students in other classes and even one or two or three in this class, who have written to tell me that something I said was all well and good for someone else but it didn’t work for them and they weren’t going to do it (forceful exclamation point) .... as if I had said Do It!! or an old Santera will come to your house and curse your entire family down to the 10th generation. (WOW! What a WF novel that would make! Imagine if she cursed the family so that all the men died before they were 30! You’d have a house full of women with the men as transient as flies. Hmmmm...) Oops, ‘scuse me.

Anyway the point is, teachers, as you used to know in high school, but may have forgotten since, don’t have any power to make you do anything. I am not the boss of you, as I heard on a commercial the other day. Take the tips and pointers and other such things as suggestions as ways to improve your writing by improving your writing life, then adapt them to your own situation or discard them, but don’t think that I expect you to take them as gospel and that bad things will happen to your writing if you don’t do exactly what I say. As Henry Miller said, although in a different context : Writing is a different thing with each person who does it.

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The Writing Life People talk about the writing life. They say it’s a lonely one, and it can be. They say it’s a difficult one if you have a family, and it can be, but there are some things you can do that will ease both of these aspects of the writing life and make writing your Women’s Fiction novel, comparatively speaking, easy.

One of the most frequent requests I get in email from students is about time - how to get more time to write, how to organize their work so they don’t waste time when they sit down to write with irritations like "where did that dang set of notes on arsenic go?" or "I know I had that whole scene plotted out - where the heck did it get to? and how to get their significant others, friends and family others, to leave them alone when they do manage to find some time to write. You’ll have noticed immediately that the operative phrases here are "writing time" and "organize. And that’s what I’m going to start with in this section which deals with making the writing life easier.

A Sacred Space That’s what I once heard another writer call the little niche she had in the family living room for writing in - she could have used the bedroom where it was quieter or even set up in the basement where it would have been even more quiet, but she loved the sound of her family’s life going on all around her while she wrote, so that little corner was where she always worked.

Whether or not you have a family, this concept of a space sacred to your writing is an important one in making your life easier. There are two reasons for this: Habit and Rhythm.

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Virginia Woolf said that writing needs habit and without a space that is entirely your own, devoted only to your writing, habit is a hard thing to come by.

Every writer has his own version of the writing habit and some of these come close to a superstition, like the baseball player and his lucky socks. Hemingway sharpened 12 new pencils every morning before he began work; Truman Capote used three different colors of paper, one color for each of 3 drafts; another writer used to write only on the left hand page of his notebook for his 1st draft, then for the second draft, he’d go back and use the facing page. My thing is graph paper and blue pens. Like my idol, Virginia Woolf, I write my first draft in longhand. She used steel nibbed fountain pens and I use those $1.99 a bag Papermate stickpens with blue ink.

I’ve been to Hemingway’s house in Key West and seen his writing room - it was full of sunlight and 6 toed cats sleeping in warm patches wherever they could find them - his table, his chair, his bookcase, one was even draped over his typewriter. (All of these cats, by the way, and they run all over the estate, are lineal descendants of his own 6 toes cats and there’s a waiting list 3 years long to get one of the 6 toed kittens when they litter.) Virginia Woolf had an actual room of her own in their London house but on the country property they owned, she had a kind of shed built that lay across the garden from Monk’s House where she could go every morning to write. It was her version of "Pepys’ "Up betimes and to the office." She would write in longhand during the morning and, back at the house, type up her morning’s work in the afternoon. I’ve seen the room where Faulkner wrote in a building now abandoned with the roof falling in just behind St. Louis Cathedral in New Orle ans. It’s not a tourist attraction and I had to get special permission to see it, because the building is dangerously decayed but not slated for destruction even so. It’s just being left to rot in genteel New Orleans fashion. The piano was never removed from the room - they said it was too big to get down the stairs. I was too shy to ask how he managed, in that case, to get it up there then.

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Besides having a sacred space in which to write, all of these authors, all of the great authors, had a schedule. Even Henry Miller, that most undisciplined of writers, had a schedule. Very loose, but it was a schedule. I’m not a great one for discipline myself, so making myself sit down and write is probably more of a problem for me than it is for most of you. The schedules I made for myself were always very rigid and very detailed, but it’s true what my granny used to say, the devil really is in the details and that ol’ devil, he’d have me up and doing anything but writing at every chance. Even housework. And I loath housework! Now I use a variant of Henry Miller’s schedule because without a schedule of some sort I am too undisciplined to work as hard as I know I must. But when I make my own schedules, I make them too rigid and inflexible to take account of times when family obligations or my disability break into my writing time. So I took a cue from Henry and his type of schedule, I guarantee all of you procrastinators and undisciplined writers out there, does work. Your first assignment for this week is make yourself, unless you already have one, a schedule that works for you, a schedule based on this easy, flexible one of Miller’s as adapted by yours truly. Make it is as loose or as strict as you need it to be to make your writing life easier.

Work Schedule, 1932-1933 - Henry Miller (with corrections and additions for my situation - you make your own for your situation)

Commandments

1) Write first and always! Everything else comes afterward.

2) Work on one thing at a time until finished.

3) Start no more new books. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 53

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4) Don‘t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.

5) Work according to a Program and not according to mood. Discard the program when you feel like it - but go back to it the next day. Concentrate, Narrow down..

6) When you can’t create you can work.

Daily Program

Mornings

1) If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus. If in fine fettle, write.

2) Work on the section in hand. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time.

Afternoons

Generally : 1 hour to each task, more if available

1) Work on putting reading & research notes into the computer

2) Work on same with the Project Planners

3) Work on putting together submissions - make at least one submission a month!!!! (to contest or magazine or publisher)

4) Work on a short story. Finish one per week. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 54

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I don’t have a room of my own that is specifically set aside to write in. Probably not many of you do, either. I do have a space. It’s a desk in a corner of my bedroom. Every morning, I make what I call "white coffee" - it’s just French Vanilla coffee with so much French Vanilla CoffeeMate in it that it’s white instead of black - (it’s my equivalent of Hemingway’s pencils) and I sit at that desk and I write. The schedule hangs on the wall above the desk, just a pushpin holding it there, nothing fancy, no frame, no cork board, just hanging there where I can see it and remind myself to do my work. So wherever your special space is, hang your new schedule where you can see it when you sit down. And sit down every morning. Writing needs habit.

By the way, keep that space as neat as you possibly can and never use it for anything else if you can possibly help it. Some of you, those of you who write on a computer, will have a hard time doing this. I write in longhand and my computer sits on the kitchen table well out of my sacred space. The only thing in my writing space other than the desk with its writing materials, is a thigh high bookcase in which I keep my 3 ring binders which used to hold my Project Planners, but now hold only research for the novels I am planning on writing. Each novel has its own Planner. Project Planners, as a I said, used to go in those binders, but in my last class one of my students, introduced me to an easier way to keep things organized than the 3 ring binders I’d been using for years. I’ll tell you about that in the sub-section on Organization.

Enforcing Boundaries - The Need for Rhythm Arnold Bennett once wrote a letter to his wife telling her that the reason he had moved into his club in London was because she insisted on interrupting him while he was writing. Every time you do, he said, Every time you stick your head in the room to say

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even What do you want for lunch?, you throw my rhythm off and it is often not possible for me to recover it again for the rest of the day.

Oops. Sound familiar? You bet it does. I’ve gotten several emails from you asking how to make the other people in your life respect your need for privacy, for solitude.

Solitude has kind of a bad rap in our time. I think Nietzsche started that with his "Show me a man alone and I will show you either a beast or a saint." Walter Kaufmann said he should have added "Or a philosopher." I say he should have added, "Or an artist, especially those called writers." People who don’t write have no idea how hard it is to write. How very much most writers need to be undisturbed, even by their favorite people, while they’re writing. So besides a space that is special to your work, you’re going to need privacy - a rather nice word for the lonely solitude of a writer, don’t you think? - in order to keep the second most important thing in making the writing life easier intact rhythm.

Not surprisingly, Virginia Woolf (who once had a very public spat with Bennett over what constituted a novel), also had a great deal to say about this and like Bennett, she called it "rhythm". Being a movie nut, I call it continuity. When my husband or the phone or the door interrupt the movie I’m running in my head as I write, it’s like putting the VCR on ‘pause‘. I’m really lucky if I can get the continuity of flow back once I hit the ‘play’ button again.

You’re a writer, even if you’ve never published a thing. You have a right to your writing time. This is often called ‘enforcing boundaries’. You make your significant others aware that this is your time, your writing time, and unless they are incredibly selfish, like Bennett’s wife, they’ll give you the space you need to write and learn to respect you for your determination as well.

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Nope, you say, I tried that. Didn’t work. Well, then, here a few non-lethal ways to get that certain someone to leave you alone.

1) Chances are, if you’re living with someone and you’ve been together for any length of time, she or he also has a boundary of their own that they don’t want you crossing. Point out to them that giving each other space is a two way deal. If my husband wants to go out to the tittie bars with his friends and not be bitched at about it, he’d better leave me alone when the door to my bedroom is closed and the Scriptorium sign is on the doorknob. Point out, too, that giving each other the space you each want not only makes your writing life easier, it makes all of your life together easier.

2) Make a trade. If you leave me alone when I’m writing, I’ll take you to the movies/dinner/the museum/the ballet/whatever this weekend.

3) Get them involved in your writing by having them do research for you while you write. It gets them out of the house and to the library. But this only works if you have a mate who is also a book lover. I don’t, so what I did was I got him interested in bonsai trees. He needs a lot of time alone to concentrate when he’s working on the bonsai trees. We’re now a perfect match!

[An aside - If you have a day job, if you have children, if you live in a college dorm, if you are in any situation where your time to write is very limited by outside factors over which you have little control, the easiest way to get that alone time is - yes, I’m afraid so, but I’ve also been there, so I know what it’s like - to get up after midnight and write. I used to get up at 2 AM and write till 4 AM, when my husband would get up for work and I would have to start getting ready for work myself. It was easier than trying to snatch 20 minutes here or 10 there throughout the day. Good writing does require rhythm and it does require habit and all those writer’s magazines that tell you 10 minutes here and 5 minutes there will do the trick aren’t being completely fair with you. Yes, it will do the © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 57

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trick if all you want to do is pile up pages. If you want to write well, however, if what you want to write has what Hemingway called "lasting value", then stolen moments< I> isn’t going to do the trick.]

Habit and rhythm. Without these two things, writing your book can turn into a marathon torture session. Believe me. I’ve done it both ways and as contradictory as it sounds since all these things - having and using a schedule, having a sacred space to write in and the privacy to write by enforcing boundaries - at first glance seem like they would only make things more difficult, having them in place really is the easiest way to write that novel.

Organization You’ve all probably seen the Organized Writer website. It’s a dandy one - if you’re a freelance writer.

A lot of people have started using ‘freelance’ as a catch-all that’s catching fiction writers in it as well, but we're not freelance writers, we are fiction writers. Our organizational needs are relatively simple compared to someone who’s scrounging for an assignment from an editor every waking moment of their lives while they also try to raise families, balance checkbooks and file tax returns. The kind of organization you need as a writer of any of the fiction genre, sub-genre or slipstream, is easy compared to that needed by the freelance, nonfiction article writer.

Again, what we’re talking about here is making your writing life easy so that writing that Women’s Fiction novel will be as easy as writing can ever hope to be. All that is really required is to keep your material straight and your desk organized.

Writing will be easier, your entire life will be easier, if you keep everything segmented and ordered. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 58

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Planners I spoke a little bit about Planners above. My philosophy is that everything associated with writing should be as easy to use or to do as possible so that the real work and the real thought go into the writing, not into the preparations for writing or the organizing of materials for writing. So I always recommend project planners to anyone who asks me about organizing their work space and I always include a portion of at least one lesson in the classes I teach to project planners. The chances are that if you’re taking this course, this isn’t the first book you’ve written or the first you’ve thought of writing. Like Henry Miller, I’ve always got 5 or 6 ideas brewing and it’s hard for me to stick to just one when I’m writing. It was impossible before I started making project planners.

I used to use 3 ring binders - one for each novel. Now I use what I call the 4x6 Planner and it was recommended to me by a student in the first class I ever taught for EWTW. It consists of 4x6 cards and a recipe box to keep them in. Small, portable, space saving. You can get everything you need to make one from a drugstore like Walgreen’s or Eckerd’s. Here’s all you need and all you need to do:

1 recipe box that will hold 4x6 cards

4 packages (at least) of 4x6 index cards - lined (get them in colors if you like since this will make it easier to identify the correct cards you need at a glance)

1 package of Papermate or Bic pens - fine or very fine point (so you can get more writing onto each of the cards)

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Since you will not be using a box for each project, the 4x6 Planner is much less expensive then the 3 ring binder planners. The recipe box will come with tabbed divider cards in it that are labeled fish, fruit, eggs and other types of food groups, but if you turn them over, the other side is blank. So - turn those suckers over and write one of these basics on each card - l - Characters; 2 - Plot; 3 -Theme; 4 - Story; 5 - Dialog; 6 -Setting; and 7 - Conflict & Pacing.

According to your own preferred way to work, you may also want to add a section labeled Outline and/or Research - whatever divisions that will make writing your novel or short story collection or any other large project more organized and easier to manage. (if you need more cards for dividers than the recipe box comes with, you can either buy them separately or you can buy a second recipe box and use its cards - at $2.00 a box you can afford to buy an extra one and since they are cardboard, that means you'll have a backup when the first one starts to fall apart as all cardboard eventually does,eh?).

The rest is as simple as filling in the blanks - when inspiration hits, grab the recipe box, whip out a card from the appropriate Basics section (Scene, Characters, et al) and write down that great piece of dialog you just thought of or describe the beautiful house you’ve just dreamed about and which would be perfect for your main character to live in or jot down an interesting name you just heard on the TV that would fit that secondary character really well and make her stand out from the other, less important secondaries. If you're not at home and something springs out of the unconscious at you, or you see something you want to describe and use later in a novel or short story or you overhear an interesting bit of conversation, then write it quick, quick on the nearest piece of paper (it's a good idea to always carry a little notebook in pocket or purse) and put it on the planner cards the minute you get home. Eh, Voila!

But if you prefer to make the larger project planners in the binders for whatever reason impaired eyesight, for one thing - it’s difficult to see that tiny writing on the 4x6 cards, or © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 60

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maybe you want your research in the same place as your working notes and projected scenes, dialog and whatnot that the cards and dividers are for - then here is the "recipe" for making a full size Project Planner. Again, everything you need can be gotten at a drugstore or, for less expensive binders since they do run quite high in drugstores, Office Depot, Office Max or Staples.

1 3 ring binder for each large project (novels, books of essays, short story collections, whatever) Package of colored paper to use as dividers

Package of white lined paper (or graph if you prefer - I do), 8/12 x11

Mark each of 7 (or more) of the colored papers with the names of the 7 basics just like you did the 4x6 cards, stock each section with paper and you’re all set to do the same things with this planner as with the 4x6 planner, except this planner can also hold typed research notes and cut out pages from magazines with pictures of the furniture you plan to furnish your heroine’s house with and/or anything else larger than the recipe box would hold - maps, photographs, anything, everything.

Ah, you say. But I hate all that writing stuff. It’s slow. I’m a child of the 20th century. Give me a computer and a piece of software!

OK.

There is some great software out there for writers and more keeps popping up on the software sites every year. Some of the programs are small and easy to use, utilizing tree structures in which you can do the same thing as I do with the Planners. TreeDB, for

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instance, is small, fun (it has a lot of colors and fonts you can play with) and allows you to keep things ordered down to the level of one detail to one file on the tree.

There are also some writer oriented word processors, two or three quite good freeware ones, that have the same capacity, while also allowing you to write your book within the same program. The Writer’s Deskbook is the very best one I’ve ever run across - it even has tabbed dividers that are labeled just like the ones in your planners and, while not freeware, it is inexpensive. It’s put out by Grimsoft and costs a mere $15USD. The point is to make it as easy as possible to keep your planning for your novel ordered and easy to access. Planners can do this for you with minimal effort, whether you’re a Luddite like me and prefer paper, or a child of the computer age who needs to have everything on a R/W disc.

MAKING TIME "Do make time for your writing. Do make time to complete all the paper-work involved in putting your work out into "the rounds". And do keep your sense of humor. Make your writing a priority and stick to a schedule of working. You have to accept that these words that come to you are a gift and should be considered precious." Janet Thompson

This is another question, or rather statement, that I see in a lot of the email from you. "I take care of my mother (or children or a disabled spouse)", "I attend college and take real classes", "I work and have a family", "I don't have time ...".

Just as the Ancient Mariner had his albatross, a lot of you folks have a lack of time to write. Or the perception that you haven't the time to write everyday even though you know that the only way to write everyday is to write everyday. That sounds like circular © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 62

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reasoning, but it’s not. It’s a reality of being a writer. The only way to be a writer is to write and the only way to do that is to do it every day. Every single day. Shine or rain, inspiration or perspiration, party mood or hangover.

Since this course is about the easy to write and the easier way to live the writing life, here’s some tips for making sure you DO have the time to write everyday.

* First, let’s dispel the myth that writing everyday means working on your novel. It doesn't. Keeping your writing muscles in trim doesn't demand that you write only on your "work". You can just as well write a short story, or work on one. You can rewrite a passage in the novel that’s been bothering you or you can write a poem. You can write a diary entry or do a writing exercise - 10 minutes of freefall writing. I have 70-some pages of prompts and exercises in PDF format that I use as a handout in my journaling class and I would be glad to send it to any of you who would like it to use for writing exercises. Or you can sit down and write out an internal dialog with yourself. It doesn't have to be about writing, but the ones I've found to be the most helpful to me are those on writing that consist of a little question and answer period between myself and me. Myself asks me if I'm adhering to the progra m I laid out for myself, my goals for writing this month or this year or this week, even. Me then answers. Answers usually lead to more questions - like how I can do better if I'm faltering; how I can do even better if I'm succeeding.

So don't think that writing everyday means that you have to pump out so many pages or a whole chapter everyday. It means using the writing muscles, keeping them sharp.

In the old days, you could even write a letter - the weekly one to Mom, for instance, or one to your best friend who moved to Chicago last year. Nowadays, unless that email is stretching the character limit of your email provider, email doesn't count as a letter. Letter writing was an art, one that was already dying out when I was a kid and one that is totally

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gone now. So don't cheat and say, "Well, I wrote 4 emails this morning. That’s my writing for the day!" Doesn't work like that. Sorry, folks.

There is the letter to yourself, though, and it should be written at least once a year. In it you tell yourself where you are in your writing career and where you want to be in a year’s time. Set goals, assess possibilities. Pat yourself on the back, don't kick yourself in the butt.

If you're a serious writer, the first priority, after the human beings in your life (and Faulkner would disagree with me on that) is your writing. You've got time. You just have to recognize it when it comes around.

Remember that the gift of being able to write is not one that is flung about like raindrops or maybe it is - like raindrops in the Mohave Desert. In other words, it’s rare and it’s precious, as Janet Thompson says in the quote above. Remember Maugham, too --- no one else will ever be able to write what you write. So even if every person in the entire world had talent, desire and discipline (the 3 must haves if you're going to be a serious writer), and everyone in the world actually sat down and wrote books, none of those books would be exactly alike. Some would be great and some good and some terrible and some indifferent, but no matter what they were, they would all be unique. Because only you can write the books you have written or are writing or plan to write. Only you.

* Second, here are a few easy ways you can make time for your writing :

1) I've suggested this one many times before because it works so well for me and for other writers I know who have tried it - get up an hour or two earlier. Most people can handle an hour earlier, some can handle two or even three hours earlier. I've found that like the REM dream cycle in sleep, 90 minutes is the best for productivity, so try to get up 90 minutes before you have to be up ordinarily. If you just can't handle getting up any © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 64

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earlier on work days or school days, then do it at least on off or weekend days. After all, 90 minutes on Saturday and Sunday adds up to 3 hours. That’s a good amount of time, considering some writers, very famous ones, who only wrote for two hours a morning or writers like Virginia Woolf, who, in the last years of her life, only wrote for one hour a morning. Look at how much she produced in her writing life - novels, memoirs, plays , short stories, essays, book reviews, even parts of an autobiography and a full biography of her good friend and artist Roger Fry!) Not to mention the volumes and volumes of journals and letters, which were usually written in the afternoon before or after tea. So three hours of fiction writing over a weekend are nearly the entire output of her week, since weekends were generally down days with her.

2) I read this on another website and I wish I could remember where so I could make the attribution - but this lady said to pretend you have - um - an upset tummy (the runs) - and lock yourself and your notepad in the bathroom for an hour. She said "this really works!" Can't hurt to try, right?

3) If you work outside the home and are fortunate enough to get a lunch hour break (I've had jobs where you were lucky to get some food stuffed in your mouth while typing up the dictation 10 hours a day), then take your writing with you and write while you eat. You'll get maybe 40-45 minutes a day that way.

4) If you take a bus or train to work and the ride is longer than 30 minutes, use the time to write. I once had a bus ride to work that took 45 minutes each way. I got a lot done in that 90 minutes. Once I had a mile walk to work. I took a tape recorder with me and talked the whole way there and the whole way back.

5) Turn off the TV or go into another room if your family would rather kill you than let you turn the dang thing off. If you can't live without seeing Nip/Tuck every week, join the club. I don't mean you have to give up ALL TV ... but think about it. How often do © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 65

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you sit there and watch something just to be watching something? Or how often do you watch TV, but the show isn't really all that great - you just don't think about the possibility that you could be doing something else because we're pretty much programmed that way these days. You can do something else - like write. An hour, two, while your husband watches American Chopper and the kids watch Werewolf on Campus reruns and there you go! Lost time becomes writing time.

Remember what I also said above in this lesson - 5 minutes here and 10 minutes there don't cut it. But those 5 here and 10 there minutes don't have to be wasted either - what you can do with those odd minutes, is jot notes for the scene you’re planning in the next writing session or dialog for use during that climax scene you’re thinking about.

If you’re serious about your writing, you’ll be able to find the time, because if you’re serious about writing, it means you love to write and we can always find time for what we love, can’t we? If you can’t find time, then the chances are you’re not serious about writing and you certainly won’t ever be a serious writer. As a hobby, writing can be fun, but it’ll never bring you the satisfaction that writing as a vocation does. Or the acknowledgement of your peers or the reading public’s hunger for your next book. Ask yourself why you write and if your answer is "Because I have to!" (which is the answer 98% of the folks who I've interviewed or who’ve filled out the questionnaire I told you about, gave, or the authors whose biographies and autobiographies I've read or those I've seen interviewed on television gave) then writing for you is a vocation and somehow, you'll find the time to write.

If you do find some ways other than the the next lessons and I'll incorporate them in all the classes to come. Your suggestions will have a temporary immortality in every class I teach as long as I'm teaching! Pretty cool, huh?

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The Art of Fiction I’ve noticed lately a lot of courses springing up on the Internet with variants of the title The Art of Fiction. (They also vary in price from $125 to over $1000!) Having investigated what they’re offering as well as I can without actually paying for the course materials, I’ve found they’re really just teaching 1) Basic writing skills and 2) Living the Writing Life.

There is no single Art of Fiction, there is only, as Thomas Mann said of Art itself, the arrangement you have made between yourself and your work. There are however philosophies of writing.

As quoted above, Henry Miller said that writing is a different thing with each person who does it. He said that was the only thing he had learned about writing in the years that he had been a writer. He was being disingenuous. He learned something else, and wrote about it, in language both beautiful, and in my experience, true.

The writer, Miller said, doesn’t want to write, so much as he wants to make a world in which he can live. The first word put to paper, he said, is a word of pain, the word of a wounded angel. Writing feels, he wrote, as if one were taking a shot of some narcotic. He’s right. It does feel like something incredibly, uniquely, good, to write, to have your writing flowing, to have it going right, when it goes right. There isn’t another feeling like it in the world. This is true whether what you write is fictionalized memoirs, as he did, science fiction screenplays or Women’s Fiction .

You may not think of yourself as an artist. You may not be an artist at this point in your career. I know I’m not there yet. But as writers of fiction, writers who create from nothing but the imagination, we are all artists in the making as much as we are writers in fact. We write because we must, or we wouldn’t do it at all, this thing which exposes us © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 67

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to so much rejection and humiliation, not only at the hands of editors and publishers but even sometimes at the hands of our own families, and if we are going to do this thing, we should make it as easy as possible to do, and yet do it well, not just so that we’ll publish, but so that we can be proud of what we’ve written, so that as artists, we can say that our work is honest and the integrity of our art is on every page.

I firmly believe that art is integrity and nothing else. The root and trunk and branch of everything we write is, or should be, grounded in personal honesty - honesty with ourselves and with our work. THIS is why writing is a hard job and it’s also why Rob Parnell’s courses are so important to your development as writers, because it’s essential that what can be made easy in this process, be made easy.

The philosophy of the Easy Way to Write Series is to teach you the easiest way to write a book, without compromising the integrity of your work or yourself as a writer. You’ve probably all seen those ads on the Internet : Write any Book in 14 Days Even if You Can’t Write, Even If You Flunked High School English! Or Write A Book in 28 Days! Any authentic writer will tell you that to write quickly is to write badly. Rob Parnell, the author who brings these courses to you, will never tell you that you can write a book in 14 days even if you can’t write, nor will he tell you that writing is an easy job. He, and I, and any real writer you speak with, will tell you that writing is a hard job but there are ways to make it easier and that’s what this series of courses is about - teaching you the easy way to write, utilizing some new twists on some old techniques.

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HOW TO WRITE A PRIZE WINNING NOVEL Remember those 5 rules to writing a book that would for sure, without doubt, absolutely, win you the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize and the Booker Prize that we had in our lesson last week? The first rule was: Take three or more characters.

So let’s begin writing your women’s fiction novel with rule no. 1 - those 3 or more characters. CHARACTER CREATION - A mite more on Characters, especially as they apply to Women's Fiction

Although we spent a good deal of time with characters and went into a great deal of detail about them in last week's lesson, I thought we should talk a little more about them - how they differ in Women's Fiction from the character's in other genres of fiction, for instance.

The two most important things to remember about character creation are these 2 rules from last week's lesson: Characters must be Goal driven

and

Characters must never ever Act inconsistently

The third most important thing about your characters - and again, I repeat myself - is always Show, never tell. How is that easier? Because it's easier to describe an action than it is a static portrait. Use gossip, use envy, use another character's insecurity, or pity as Rosamunde Pilcher does in The Shell Seekers when she has the competent, chic, financially stable businesswoman sister noting how fat and discontented her housewife © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 69

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sister with the debts and the boring life, looks compared to the last time she saw her. Just for a moment she pities her, but then the sister opens her mouth and, as usual, what comes out of her mouth kills any pity her sister has been inclined to feel, momentarily, toward her.

So far we've been talking about major characters, the main character, but what about those pesky secondary characters, like the heroine's favorite hairdresser or her boyfriend? You'll need to have some of these, of course, but there shouldn't be more than 2 to 3 of these; 4 if you really must. You want the emphasis on the main character in a WF novel on her feelings, her actions and reactions and the events of her life with the emphasis on the other women and her parents in her life - sisters, best friends, women relatives like grandmothers, mothers, a favorite aunt, etc. With WF, the events and emotions of your own life will make the most authentic characters you will ever write in any genre. But that takes a special kind of courage that not all of us have .... to be able to split oneself open, groin to gullet, so to speak, and let those emotions and events out to play in a fictional playground, can be as painful as letting them out to play in a nonfictional playground, like your analyst's office. But without our own emotions and life to propel our characters in WF, there will be a lack of authenticity, a lack of "realness", that will be all too noticeable to the reader.

This is not to say that you have to write about your own life in a ficionalized way as Miller did and Proust and Woolf. Many of you are doing that and sent me summaries of your lives as the summaries of your books, and it's a good thing to do, a healthy thing to do - especially if you have unresolved wounds to deal with and unresolved problems in your relationships within your family and friendship circles that you want to try and correct by fictionalizing the situations.

But if writing about yourself is not your cup of tea for WF, it's not a requirement and you are free to make up your characters and their lives to the last minor point, if you wish © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 70

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the only thing that must come from you and your life, is the authenticity of the emotions of these women, especially those of your main character.

And while this is true of any main character in any genre, it is most important, most essential, in WF.

Let’s look a little more closely at the main characters of Women’ Fiction. Unlike the romance heroine, the women in WF are just like you and me. They've got good butts and fat butts, gray hair and blond hair, laugh lines and crow's feet. They’re ages span from children to grandmothers. They can be single like Louie in Shake Down The Stars and Maggie Jenner in The Breaker. Louie is single because she thinks marriage is a trap. One minute you’re a princess, the next he’s shouting because dinner isn’t on the table and there are crying babies everywhere. Maggie is single because her husband, a man she loved deeply and therefore trusted deeply (always remember that there is no real love, no deep love, in life or in fiction, without trust - there can be passion and there can be marriage, but there can’t true love with true trust) swindled her family and friends out of thousands of dollars, in some cases, including Maggie’s mother, bankrupting them. Louie likes men and she dates and she puts them off when they start talking marriage. Maggie won’t go near a man for the purpose of dating and hardly speaks to men at all for any reason. She lives with her mother in the house they can no longer afford to keep and breeds, trains and boards horses, a business she is on the brink of losing because her mother won’t allow their friends to be dunned for the fees they owe. Marie in Songs in Ordinary Time is divorced with children and hasn’t any better taste in men than poor Maggie.

The Women in Women’s Fiction are, in some sense, you and me. Their’s are lives we have ourselves lived, or we know women who have lived lives like theirs. Some are still passionate about life at 80 and others have lost all hope by 30. It’s easy to create characters for Women’s Fiction - just look inside yourself, look at your best friend, look © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 71

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at your grandmother or the old woman living in the apartment next to yours. Each of us was a daughter, some of us were sisters, wives and mistresses. Some of us have loved only once and our hearts torn out of our bodies when we lost that love. Some of us have taken love all our lives as if it were a carnival ride in the Tunnel of Kisses. We are women and the women in Women’s Fiction are us.

PLOT & STORY I’d like to add a little more about plotting and plots here. There are two important rules to remember about plots, both of which I also gave you last week, but they can't be repeated often enough :

1) Plots are NOT story!

2) Plots are ALWAYS character driven

In life it is an axiom, almost a cliche, that character is destiny. In the art of writing, we say that character is plot. If as Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage and all of us only the players on it, then these two definitions are analogous. Character is destiny because character is plot.

Now to be absolutely precise, plot is not the same as story. Remember this! Plot is not story and story is not plot. Plot is the framework you drape your story around, but in practice, the two are easily meshed and usually become one and the same at some point during the writing.

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ASSIGNMENT Aha! Thought you were getting out here without your main assignment, didn’t you? Not likely - I’m a slave driver!

This week your assignment is to actually start writing either a novel or a short story in the WF genre. You can slipstream if you want to, but the core of the story must be WF. You will write at least one chapter of the novel or half of a short story. No more plotting. no more character charts, no more planning - that can go on and on and on becoming an excuse not to write, an excuse to tell folks you are a writer, but never actually settling the butt in the chair and writing.

First Q&A One of those imaginative and jumping-ahead emails came this week and actually had two questions in it that were so pertinent to the plotting and characterization lesson, that I decided it had to be the one for the Q&A section for this module. I'm sure others of you have wondered about these same things and I really want to thank the person who sent them in for doing so. These are questions I've rarely seen covered in the advanced classes where they actually belong, much less in a basic class, and I've never seen them covered adequately in any lesson. I hope I've done better at it than the answers I've seen elsewhere. Fingers crossed out there, guys and gals!

The questions were :

1. Are you suggesting we plot and then outline the novel before we jump in and actually start writing, or are you saying there's a back-and-forth between writing and plotting that takes place? © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 73

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2. Where in the process do you recommend tapping into the archetypes of our main characters? You suggest beginning with a brief understanding of our characters, and then using that awareness to plot as far as we can. Is it at this point that we go back and explore archetypes? Or do we wait until we've explored our characters further through actually writing?

I understand that in practice there are no bright lines, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on these things within the context of the ideas you're discussing.

And the answers (such as they are - there, indeed, being no bright lines here ...) are :

You're absolutely right - there are no bright lines. Things shade into each other, the way rainbow colors shade where they touch. But most people have trouble with that conception - people like things black and white for the most part - and so I end up writing lessons that seem to imply that there are heavy, very noticeable lines, steps that one can take, a working formula for writing a bestseller or even just a book.

Regarding question 1 - I am an intuitive writer. I don't use outlines or plot summaries unless the work is a very large one with more than a few subplots and a cast of millions to keep track of - I just sit down and write whatever the character who's sitting beside me tells me that particular day. I've always done it that way - and always is since I was 7 years old. But for those who do need outlines and plotting aids, and most of my email when I started teaching were pleas for this kind of thing, I include them in the lessons.

The truth is, as you yourself see, that these things should be done and are most effectively done, during the actual writing of your book. Until you start writing, you don't have a complete sense of what you're going to need, one chapter or 15 chapters down the road.

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Most of my students, though, want to do these things prior to writing. I'm not sure, but it may a comfort thing - they think they know where they're going everyday just by looking at the outline or plot arc.

The fact that at some point your characters will come alive and start deviating from your carefully plotted out scenario, doesn't sink in no matter how often I say it, or perhaps they don't believe that this will happen or perhaps they do believe it, but figure that the outline or plot arc or both can be adjusted when that happens, and it can be, no question. It can be.

So I suppose the answer is just --- what is most comfortable for you? What will get you writing, instead of planning? Some people use outlines and project planners (and, to a lesser degree, researching) as excuses to keep from having to actually begin writing their magnum opus.

I am very fortunate in that always, every time, my story or novel begins itself, usually with a first sentence. And when I have that sentence, I have a character. Everything flows from there. In my author interviews for Eros & Rust, I asked this very question - Does the character come to you first or the story? Most of the writers I've interviewed, or who answered the questionnaire I sent out earlier in the year to the forums I belong to (some 70+), answered it was the story. Characters came after the idea for the story was already pretty fully rounded out.

Story is not plot, however, so if you are a writer who doesn't just go with the flow, it has to be plotted to a lesser or greater degree before the writing begins. But not totally plotted out. If you wait until then, you may wait a long time to begin writing.

So it's always best, I think, to start writing and see where the story is taking you and plot the arc as you write. That is NOT the advice in most writing books, though. Most of those © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 75

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that I've read say that all the preliminaries are necessary before you begin to write. Your characters fully fleshed, your plot completely charted, your outlines (plot and subplots) totally finished down to the last sub-sub item. I can't do it that way and the students I've taught and the other writers I know, rarely do it that way either. It must be a kind of ideal advice that no one in real life can really attain to - like moving that mountain with faith. Then, too, most of the writing books in the library here where I live in Palm Beach, Florida, are not written by actual writers. They're written by teachers and retired editors and literary agents. If the books you're reading aren't written by writers and they claim to be teaching you how to write, then you have to question the veracity of those instructions -- or at least I do.

I firmly believe that each story, whether it's a short story, a novel or a screenplay, play or poem, has its own agenda and how you write it will be according to its agenda and your own personality. As Henry Miller said, writing is a different thing for each person who does it. How you do it is your expression of your world view - your experiences, your talent, your needs. Always remember that no matter how you do it, it's your art, your work and as W. Somerset Maugham said, no matter what the eventual fate of your work, it will remain, and cannot be other, than your work alone - no one else could ever have put together those words in precisely that way to make precisely that story.

So the answer to the question? As I said above — Whatever makes you most comfortable and whatever actually gets you writing the soonest.

Now for question 2 - Because I am an intuitive writer, I rarely even use the character questionnaire except for those huge novels I spoke of above. The characters tell me who and what they are. As for the archetypes, sometimes I'll be halfway through a novel before it hits me that this protagonist is a Quester or this one a Great Mother and this one her antithesis, the Evil Mother.

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Again, it's the nature of the email I receive in my beginner classes and the writing articles and books I've read that argue these things need to be articulated before you write. But I don't think any writer, any writer who has experienced his or her characters coming alive, can agree with that instruction.

No matter how much I want my John Doe to love Hawaiian shirts, if he comes alive and throws them all out in the trash in disgust, there's nothing I can do to change that. If Jonathan Doe, a secondary character in a book I'm working on and mentioned in the lessons, decides he's not a dickhead, and is, in fact, an ally of the hero, there's not a lot I can do to change his mind about that. It seems I'm the one who's at fault here, not him. I saw him wrongly at first or perhaps I judged him unfairly.

Let me give you an example from a prize winning short story of mine - Grasshoppers. The first thing - and the only thing - I started with was a picture I saw on the cover of the National something (Star, Examiner, whatever - you know the type of magazine I mean ), predictably, while standing in line at the grocery checkout. The picture was a black and white of President Clinton shaking hands with an alien (one of the gray ones with the big slanty eyes) in the Rose Garden of the White House. Before I got home, the opening line hit me like a ton of bricks - it usually does - "My mom had a thing about UFOs." (It's a good thing I didn't drive even before I became disabled - I would have caused an awful lot of accidents when those first lines come zooming into my conscious mind from the place where the stories live.) So I had a character now and the voice of the character in my head was that of a teenaged boy. So when I got home and the groceries were put away and my husband kissed bye-bye to his room to play on his computer, I sat down and wrote Grasshoppers.

A small aside - The title didn't come until the final few pages when the aliens appeared on stage for the first time and I saw their heads looked like grasshoppers - a minor point but one people ask all the time - how do I title my novel or story (in other words, how © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 77

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should they pick a title)? Pick a working title if you must (and I'm one of those who must because how else can I refer to it when I'm working on it and recording the work in my journal?), but the final title will probably hit you somewhere during the writing. Then, to make matters even more frustrating, that perfect title of yours may be thrown out by the publisher of the story, who has other ides about what the perfect title should be .... this doesn't happen as often with short stories as it does with novels. Publishers often change titles on novels because they think a different one than the perfect one you got while showering one morning, will sell more copies faster. As in things with publishers, the bottom line is the only line.

But back to Grasshoppers. Everything grew organically from that first sentence and the character who spoke it. The story was already alive where the stories live and pushing to get out. Grasshoppers opened out like a night blooming flower in slow motion photography, the boy had a sister, then a brother and then a brother and sister who were twins. Mom was UFO freak (she named all the kids after crash sites) and Dad was a NASA employee and things just kept unfolding until the story was done.

Novels and short stories grow organically, because there is a place inside you where the stories live. The story is there, you just have to be able to relax enough to let it come through, to let it tell itself to you. And who tells it to you but your characters? Even in third person, it is the characters who tell the story - simply and only because the story is theirs, and no one else's to tell. The story is what they've experienced and when it's ripe, when it's ready, that story will come pushing out at you so that you feel like you just have to write here and now, no delays, no slowdowns - it's that fire at zero gravity, washing over everything like waves of water and burning everything to the ash that is finally the story in it's finished form.

From seed to shoot, it grows and ends and re-hibernates until the next time. The entire process, from the first inkling of an idea, the first glimpse of a character, the first moment © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 78

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when you think, "Hey! that's cool. What if ..." is an organic one, equating to the Phoenix burning to death and the new Phoenix then arising from it's own, old and cold ashes.

In this sense, all writers are living out the phoenix myth. It is the prime archetype for writers as a group.

So the answer to your question is (again) -- Whatever makes you comfortable. Whatever is the easiest way for you to tell your character's story. Whatever gets you writing soonest.

Mix and match - play with the character questionnaire and the archetypes, if you have no clear cut idea of what your character will be and want to know now, instead of waiting for the eventual unveiling. But remember, too, that characterization is a novel long process, just as it is a life-long process for our own characters to grow and complete themselves.. Only in short stories do you need to know pretty much everything about your character before you can write the story.

In a novel, characterization should begin on the first page and not end until the last. Characters have to grow or they're not alive - growth is a criteria for life, remember? Biology 101? Movement is a criteria for life - that's why scenes have to show the reader the character growing, changing, evolving, becoming, living, dying, not told in narrative prose no matter how beautifully constructed. Scenes must be scenes of movement. Only if the novel is alive can you keep the reader's interest, keep him or her reading. Once you've done a few chapters, if you know the archetypes fairly well, you'll know which one fits your character best and you'll have an easier time making sure you don't impose your own ideas on him or her. When a writer does that, the character almost always ends up acting inconsistently and that's a good way to lose the reader.

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Also a reader can almost always tell when the writer is interfering in the natural unfolding of the book - the prose becomes forced instead of transparent. Transparent prose is that which a reader is not even aware of reading. He or she is in the story. The prose doesn't exist anymore. Dialog tags don't catch the eye, making the reader stumble, passages don't catch the inner ear and make a stutter that disrupts the reading and brings the reader back to being a person sitting in a chair with a book in his hands.

The answer to both questions is, really, to consult the story. According to your own comfort levels and your own skill levels, whether you're just beginning or this is your 4th or 5th novel, you'll know whether you need outlines and character charts and plot arcs to proceed and how detailed they'll need to be, once you've consulted the story.

Now I realize that it seems a tautology - throwing you back on yourself for the answer to your questions, but, after all, you are all that you have when you're writing. Any book, any teacher, even the book I'm writing on writing, even me as teacher, can only point you in the right direction to becoming a better writer. It's you who has to do the work and it's damn hard work. Don't ever let anyone convince you that it isn't. The first step each day is always the hardest step of all and it may or may not get easier for you depending on how self-disciplined you are (I'm not. At all.) - the first step is putting the butt in the chair (or on the bed or on the floor or wherever it is you write) and writing. Period. That's all. Sitting down, everyday, and writing. I have seen some people who had a great deal of talent, and no self-discipline, react with cries of joy to the Internet and the writing magazines and guru s who tell them writing is fun and easy and here are the 10 rules to making writing your successful and certain money making business. And they throw away any career they might have had as writers when they do this.

One of the most harmful things to a serious writer's career at the moment are the critique groups. Too many of them (well, let's be honest and say all of them that I've ever belonged to and that's been a whole bunch) do nothing but sing hosannas to each other, © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 80

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stroke each other, tell each other they're all great undiscovered writers who will just have to go to the author mills to be published, since no one else appreciates them - not apparently realizing that author mills don't bother to read their material. All they read is the check signature and amount; all they care about is that the check not bounce. The hosannas feel so good to them that when someone comes along and tells them

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Lesson 4 - Conclusion - Setting, Context and Background plus Narrative and Descriptive Writing

The Writing Life

Some of the things I wanted to discuss and didn't, were several of the Writing Life modules that I try to include in every class. Tonight, I’m going to include some of those modules for you. We're going to talk about finding your niche, just in case Women's Fiction isn't it after all, some esoterics like Voice and Style, an old favorite (or rather no one's favorite), Writer's Block/Writer's Lock and a special module on rewrites and revisions.

HOW DO I FIND MY GENRE? WHAT’S MY NICHE? When you signed up for this class, you may have already decided that Women's Fiction was your genre, your niche. Or, like several of the students in other incarnations of this class, you may have discovered this genre when you heard about the class and discovered, during the class, that this was THE ONE for you. I had a student the last time I held this course who sent me an ecstatic email around the 3rd week of class saying that she felt she had discovered her mission in life – to write stories about strong women as inspiration for women like herself - an abused and, to her own mind, weak woman, as a result of that abuse. The very fact that she could write about strong women, survivors, for the inspiration of other abused women, just proved to me, and I told her this in my return email, that she was a strong woman herself, a survivor, herself. No weak woman who had been beaten by her abuse, could possibly have found the strength to help others find strength.

Perhaps, going into this course, you didn't have any preconceived notions that this was the genre for you - you came to the course just out of curiosity - and you didn't find here © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 82

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your passion or your mission or just your genre of choice in Women's Fiction. Or perhaps, coming in, you thought this was the one for you, but after taking the course, you've decided that this isn't really your niche, after all. Since we all write from our wounds (our unconscious needs and desires), the stories choosing us, rather than we choosing the stories we tell, and you're still looking for your place, your genre, now that this course is over, like those writers who write from deep wounds and choose fantasy or horror to write as their specific genre, you, too, need to take a look at the writing fields open to you and find the one that fits your strengths, your needs and your abilities. How do you do this?

1) Start first with what you like to read. What you read is an indicator not only of what you enjoy reading about, it’s an indication of how you deal with your wound and therefore of the genre that may be best, or right, for you.

Perhaps you love to read mysteries. Cozies, hard boiled, noir, the genre niches for mysteries are like candy - there are so many flavors, it’s hard to get out of the candy shop without a bag of each clutched in both hands. Do you like puzzles? All mysteries are good for these. Do you like the feel of being transported back to more innocent times? Cozy mysteries fit the bill perfectly. They're usually set in a country estate of some English countryside (or French) and maybe the butler did do it in the dining room with a candlestick, but I always put my money on the ingenu in the boathouse with an oar. This type of mystery is most commonly associated with Agatha Christie who has to be the queen of the cozies, but the success of Clue as a movie and a game and a book, has to tell you that the cozy hasn’t gone out of style even yet. American authors presently seem to do them b est. Hard boiled detective mysteries are a small genre, not much going on there of late, but it’s still being written and some of the smaller presses do specialize in it.

Mysteries, don’t forget, too, segue into police procedural and other types of detective novels - both police detective and private eye detective books which usually take place in © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 83

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large cities - as well as suspense thrillers which often bounce from one big city to another, one country to another. I'll have a bit to say about cities in just a moment.

Noir, although originally confined to film, has found its way to books and I like to think that Cri du Coeur was one of the first to make the transition from film to paper. There are other types of mysteries besides murder mysteries, but caper mysteries and the other subgenres don’t sell as well as a dead body or two on the lawn or in the pantry or in the grit-filled streets of Chicago, New York, Los Angeles or any megalopolis you like, although you should stick to the one you live in or one you know well.

Researching a city is difficult, at best - things change in large cities in the wink of a few weeks. When I wrote Cri, I lived in New Orleans, a city I love with a terrible passion, and you could see from the back of St. Louis Cathedral to the old Yellow Fever cemetery. Just a few months later, the Harrah's casino was built and blocked that long view and incidentally, path. Burials would leave from the back of the church and, old fashioned Dixie band funerals marching along, the coffin would be carried to the cemetery for the internment. I left Cri as it was since the funeral of Martinique was an old-fashioned Dixieland burial from St. Louis Cathedral to the Yellow Fever cemetery, but I've received some emails that berate me for not knowing that Harrah's was now blocking the old funeral way. I've replied that I do know, I lived there when it was built, but the city I love is the one without Harrah's and I refused to include it in Cri. For one thing, it didn't belong in a Noir and for another, like many another New Orleans lover, I hate that damn casino. It doesn't fit in with the rest of the city - architecturally or any other way. In a city where they build Macdonald's to match the architecture of the area, you'd think they could have induced Harrah's not to build that abomination where they did and with the architecture they used.

Researching a city you don't live in will inevitably leave you with mistakes like this and you'll hear from the readers about it. That's why you should only write, in any genre, © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 84

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about the cities you know, the cities you live in or know well from having lived there or living near it for most of your life. If you do decide to write about a city you don't know, like Paris or Berlin or New York, be sure that one of the first research aids you get is a current map of the city. These days you can get them on the Internet, so there's no reason for getting street names wrong (they change more often then you'd think) or putting buildings in the wrong place.

Serial killers still sell well, but you really need to have : a) a truly original killer or b) enough power in your writing itself to carry a no longer original theme. With serial killers these days, the best selling books in the genre are those that get inside the head of the killer, rather than that of the cop chasing him. If you’re into lighter writing, check out Robert W. Walker’s series of books featuring the psychic FBI investigator Kim Desinor and his Jessica Coran series. What a great way to get inside the mind of a killer, right? if you’re a psychic cop!

If you love standout good writing and a deeper examination of the evil that men do and why they do it, check out John Katzenbach’s State of Mind. Katzenbach is said to have a special understanding of the criminal mind and State of Mind is said to be "Relentlessly chilling..." (I'm only about a 3rd of the way through it, but so far I agree with the reviews). Now that’s something you want your reviews to say if you’re writing in the field of police procedural slipstreams into serial killers or Jackal-like assassins. One area these books have only barely touched on until now is also the most interesting (at least to me) idea of symbiosis and the relationship the killer often thinks he has with the cop hunting him. The Watcher tried to deal with that aspect, but deteriorated into the usual you knew what w as coming story by the mid-way point. (Plus in the movie, Keanu Reeves wasn’t a believable serial killer, but that’s just my opinion.) I'd love to be the one to write a really really really great novel on that symbiotic relationship in the mind of the serial killer, but maybe it'll be you or you or you. Maybe this will be the niche for you. An old theme made new by slipstreaming it into the genre of psychological thriller. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 85

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Romance, of course, is the largest selling genre of all, and up until recently it was also the genre with the most terrible writers making bundles of money at it. I don’t know, because I can’t read the stuff, but I think that the writing has improved in the past couple of years since that legendary housewife who threw that legendary romance against the wall, crying, "I can do better!" has entered the ring.

Romance is the Great Escapism of reading, especially the Big Romances which are, by the way, slipstreaming over into Women’s Fiction. The subgenres here are almost uncountable - but can be broken down into about 4 major categories: Innocent Love, Erotic, Spicy, Hot – Hot almost to the point of soft porn. But the rules of romance are still quite rigid.

There is also Erotic writing that is not a part of the romance genre and it borders on hard porn. Well, actually, that which I've read when I was researching possibly writing a course on it was hard porn and since I can't write it, I decided I'd better not try teaching it.

Another point that's important to remember - the shelf life of most books is about 3 weeks. You can go in any bookstore and find shelf upon shelf of the bestselling authors King, Steele, Shelton, Pilchur - but books like the ones you and I write, have a shelf life, if we’re lucky, of about 3 weeks, according to Harlan Ellison; and more like 3 days on the racks in airports, drugstores and grocery stores. The sheer volume of books being published by the traditional houses in NY is so large, that a book has to make it in the first week of its sales or it won’t be around a month from now for you to buy except by special ordering it from the publisher. And once it goes out of print, you may never find it again.

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But we were talking about Romance as being your possible niche. If you love to read it and you love to watch the Lifetime for Women Movie Channel, then this is the genre for you. You can meet that perfect man here - it’s pure escapism and pure fun. Pure light, too. If you don’t mind the restrictive rules of romance writing, then this is a likely niche for anyone who likes to keep their literature light and enjoyable and a source of escape for a few hours in a bathtub of Calgon bubbles with scented candles burning on the toilet tank.

And it’s fairly easy to break into if you don’t mind being told not only what to write but how to write it - Harlequin will send you a packet with the characters already prepared, a plot and story line already worked out and even some dialog for insertion in the correct places. Or at least that’s how they did it when I inquired about it a few years back. Writing for them is a bit like putting together a child’s puzzle - the pieces are large and fit nicely together and you get published. With their introduction of hotter sex into some of their lines, you might find yourself actually slipstreaming out into erotica, which is a very good paying market. One rather famous horror author I know said he doesn't make a living on his horror yet, but he was able to quit his day job because of his earnings in the type of erotica mentioned above (under a pen name).

And speaking of horror, this is another biggie. The polls and stats show that horror has been declining again, but that really doesn’t matter. The fact is, it cycles. And it always comes round to being a big sell again at some point. Like Foucault’s Pendulum, it swings back and forth, and the even realer truth is that people who read horror are lifelong fans of the stuff and will buy it whenever and wherever it appears. Other than noir and serial killer mysteries, horror is perhaps the genre in which the wounds we write from provide the most bloody ink for our use. People read it for the same reason, I believe, that we write it - to deal somehow with the things in the world and in our lives that we can’t deal with on an open level.

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As with all niches and genres, the thing to do is find out which one you can change with your own original ideas, which ones you can reinvent because that’s what will make your books last more than three weeks. Originality. And of course, writing well.

There are other genres - Westerns, scifi (always a big seller), men’s fiction (primarily the techno-thrillers of writers like Clancy and the new rising star, I. Pineiro), regional writing (James Burke writes Louisiana so that you can actually taste the air and have to wipe the humidity off your face while you’re reading him), and all the slipstreams of each to each to create subgenres of subgenres in some genres (and try to say that 5 times fast!). So how do you figure out where you belong?

Like I said, the first way is to write what you read.

2) The second way is to experiment. Short stories are good for this because you don’t have to spend as much time on planning and writing them as you do a novel (obviously, Kenyon!) - write short stories in all the genres, see where you flow and where you stumble; where your interest works for you and where it works against you. I love reading horror, and for many years horror and mystery thrillers with supernatural overtones (or undertones) have been my niche. Not too many months ago, I found myself unhappy with my writing; it seemed empty and not "me" at all anymore. I looked at what I was reading and found I was reading literary fiction (in the sense of literary as a genre, not literary as a MFA grad defines it) : James Burke, I. Pineiro, John Irving, Carol Shields, Charles McCarry, John Gregory Dunne, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Dominick Dunne, Donna Tartt, and to go back a ways, Lawrence Durrell, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf. What it came down to was, I didn’t feel I was giving my best to what I wrote anymore. That I wasn’t doing the best I could do, or wasn’t capable of giving my best anymore, unless I made a change.

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You, too, may find that you’re in a genre for a period of time and it’s working for you and you’re even selling, but suddenly, one day, it’s just not "you" anymore. You’ll have to either plod on in the rut you’ve worn over the years where you’re comfortable in the sense that you know you can write that book and you know the chances are high that you can sell it, too, or you’ll have to make a change to another niche.

Jump fearlessly out of that old one! Don’t let yourself slog down. Write outside your genre even while you’re still in love with it. Look into other genres and niches and keep your eyes open so that the day, if it ever does come for you, that you feel dissatisfied with the body of your work as it is and want to change, you’ll know what other options there are for you and the kind of writer you are -- or the kind of writer you want to be.

3) The third way to find your genre, your niche is to write about what moves you. Write about the things you’re passionate about. If you do that, you’ll not only find that writing is easier - that it will flow more readily for you - you’ll also find that you write in an authentic voice, a voice that the readers will hear and respond to, as they will to no other kind of writing.

Which brings us to voice.

VOICE & STYLE Every writer has his or her own voice. You know it when you see it – I could hand you a book with duct tape over the title and the author and after a few pages you’d say, "Stephen King, who else?" King has a distinctive voice So does Donna Tartt and Peter Straub and James Burke. Every writer has a voice, but not all writers have a distinctive voice and, believe it or not, that distinctive voice is what helps you to make it as a big time writer, instead of a struggling, half-starved writer.

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So how do you find your voice? How do you make it distinctive? Well, this is one of those areas where it actually comes almost entirely from the unconscious. You can try out all the voices you want – you can even write a book using someone else’s voice. There are two writer's contests I can think of right now that are based on this ability of writers to mimic the distinctive voices of the famous – one is a Hemingway competition and one is a Faulkner competition. I’m sure there must be others. Jack London, perhaps, or Joseph Conrad.

Well, that’s all cool, you say, but how do I find MY voice?

Write.

Sorry, that’s the only way to do it. I’ve been writing since I was 7. Most of you know that. But I didn’t get serious about it - I didn’t start writing with the idea that now I was ready to write for publication - until I was 38 years old in 1988. It was 5 years before I finally got something besides a rejection slip in the mail. And it was while writing Cri du Coeur in the mid-90s that I finally found my voice. I knew it was my voice because suddenly I didn’t have any problems anymore with finding words - words poured out. It was like a big engine starting in my head (that’s King’s metaphor for it in IT) or as if a door in a submarine had opened on a flooded compartment (that’s how I experienced it and now describe it) - in both cases, you’ll note that it is something huge, powerful, which, as King says, you want to get out of the way of, you want to let it have it’s way with you, because it’s strong and it’ll knock anything down in its way, including you.

People often conflate voice with style. While they may sometimes appear to be the same thing, they aren’t.

Style can change from book to book - if you’re imaginative enough. One book may be written through the POV of a young boy's first experience of the world outside his © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 90

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family’s bosom and the style of that book will be very different from the one you write about the invasion of the boobysnatchers or the one about the invalid man who doesn’t know his caring and devoted wife is caring for another man these days and devoted to killing her husband as soon as she’s sure she can do it without getting caught.

Style is a function of two things, I believe - first of the POV character and secondly, of your facility with the English language. Voice is something inborn, it’s the way you "sound" on the page and it’s unique to you. People sometimes like an author for his voice rather than the actual books he or she writes. I’d probably read anything Donna Tartt writes, even if the actual subject matter didn’t interest me all that much, because I love her voice. The first page of The Secret History hooked me on Tartt’s voice. By the second page I was hooked on her style - her stylish and beautiful use of the language. I’ve even read The Secret History in French and I have to tell you, the story is just as bang up good, the voice is still there, but the style is not. The style is that of the translator and he or she (I forget which now) didn’t allow Tartt’s facility with English to come through in the French translation. This is true of almost any book in translation, though. It makes you want to learn to read German so you can see just how Thomas Mann really came to be called the greatest writer of German or French, so you can appreciate how Voltaire came to be called the greatest author at using the French language correctly and beautifully.

If you happen to write a book like The Secret History and it gets translated around the world, be sure you try to keep some hand in the choice of translators in your contract. A good translator can make the difference between being a world-wide best seller and an American bestseller that Europeans read and think, "I just don’t get it. This book isn’t that great." True, we’re looking ahead quite always here discussing translators for your world-wide bestseller, but it’s something to keep in mind if you’re serious about your work. You have to think ahead when you sign those contracts for your novels. Too many

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authors give up foreign rights or artistic rights when they sign "standard" contracts without consulting a lawyer first. Every one of those sales, to movie options and European houses, mean money in your pocket AND the publisher's pocket --- or just money in the publisher's pocket. Rule 1, 2 and 3 of any contract you sign with any agent or publisher, is KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE BOUNCING BALL AND MAKE SURE IT NEVER GETS OUT OF YOUR COURT "IN PERPETUITY", as far as any rights go.

Style can be learned, and usually is, during your apprenticeship as a writer and it can be unique to you just as your voice is, but voice is not something that can be learned. It’s like talent. It’s just there and it’s yours alone.

So how do you find it?

Again the only answer is write. Write and write and write. One day that machine will start up in your head or that submarine hatch will open and the flooded room will flow out over and through you, or the well where you dip your buckets (Straub’s metaphor) will start to overflow.

Remember, too, that style can change, whereas your voice will not.

Some of you, a very few of you, know that I had a near death experience after my surgery in 1999. Something happened to my voice and style after that experience. It became different, deeper, more complex. You can see the actual difference when you read something like my book of short stories, 8 City Tales, where all but 3 of the stories were pre-NDE. The post-NDE are readily recognizable. The style is different. It’s different enough that you can feel its difference.

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D.H. Lawrence also had a change of style and voice after his near death bout with pneumonia. It may be a function of a simple maturing of style and/or voice in a wink of time, rather than having the maturing take place over several years of normal growth time. If that's not the answer, then I don't know what the answer or the mechanism is. All I know is that it happened to me and when I looked, did some research, I found it had also happened to other writers like D.H. Lawrence.

Perhaps being so close to death and knowing this is your second chance, and maybe your last chance as well, initiates change in a lot of different ways in your life and one of those ways is in your writing. It would almost have to, wouldn't it, if writing is the passion and the vocation of your life? Ah, well, it's all conjecture, and, Please! Don't try this NDE thing at home!

I want to emphasize again that voice and style in the end are unique to you. They are what will set you apart from other writers as writers. Not as storytellers - because sometimes the best storytellers have no style at all - look at Tom Clancy. Usually the people with the strong voice and the inimitable style are the ones who end up being called artists. It’s something to aim for, because even in those of you who think you’re in it for the fame of writing and to make money, who never think of yourselves as artists or your work as art, do have, deep inside, a desire to be an artist and to be seen as one and esteemed as one.

That desire is both a blessing and a curse. What we fail to achieve is the curse part of it. What we achieve of it - what our work becomes through, and after, the years of apprenticeship, is the blessing part.

Now before we pass on to the Toolbox, I’d like to talk a little bit about a problem we all share at one time or another. It’s generally called Writer’s Block, but that’s about as descriptive as calling melanoma cancer. Sure melanoma is a cancer - read that again © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 93

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melanoma is A cancer, a kind of disease that is only one of many, all of the same family that go by the same generic label, cancer; Writer’s Block is A difficulty which is only one of many writer’s difficulties, all of the same family, and labeled by the one generic label -

Writer’s Block. Writer’s Block is traditionally the condition of having no ideas or no idea what to write about at some point in your writing life. That’s it. That’s all it really consists of and there are plenty of ways to get around that block - taking long walks is one of the most commonly given cures - here are a few others : keeping a writer’s journal as a seedbed of ideas; keeping a shoebox with scraps of paper in it on which you’ve written those ideas that come to you at odd times of the day or night; looking around you at the familiar things in your life and putting an extraordinary light on them - F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that writing was the process of taking the ordinary and making it the extraordinary; seeing something while you’re out shopping or picking up the kids from soccer practice or reading something in the day’s newspaper or hearing a bit of gossip and asking yourself, Now What-If? And if all else fails, invest in one of those Story Wheels you see advertised in the writing magazines.

There are several other difficulties with writing that are being labeled Writer’s Block these days but they're actually entirely different problems and I've labeled these Writer’s Lock. One type of Writer's Lock is when you working on a novel and it stalls. I've received several emails on this - at least once per class a student will write asking what to do because they've suddenly stalled out on a novel they're 200 or 300 pages into and they don't want to trash it after so much work has gone into it. Well, who would? I have, but believe me it hurts to have to drawer a book you're 200 pages into because suddenly it stalls and you can't get it going again or you do get it going again but it's a terrible hassle to write - you manage to squeeze out the sentences but they aren't anywhere near the caliber of the rest of the book before the stall. © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 94

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Stalling can happen for several reasons, two of the most common being boredom with your work and losing the thread of what you were doing, and why you were doing it. Here are a couple of cures for this type of Writer’s Lock :

* Consider your subject from a different angle, a more unique perspective - for instance, you can look at it from the viewpoint of another character, rather than through the eyes of your main characters. Sometimes a secondary character or even a minor character can tell you where the stall happened and why and how to get out of it.

* Consider your plot and story line and ask yourself what about it are the most unique and the most interesting points. Why should a reader want to read your romance novel instead of someone else’s or why did you originally choose to write this story instead of some other story using the same setting, the same characters and the same bare bones plot?

* Invert your original idea for this novel - try turning it upside down or going at the story from the opposite direction. This is a radical way of assessing why your novel has stalled, but I’ve found it the best help for me when a stall happens. If I can’t get the sucker going again after trying all three of these suggestions and particularly the last one, then I label the manuscript Fatal Error and put it in a drawer. This is my Trash Drawer because I’ve found that books that end in the Trash Drawer are usually just there for a shorter or longer stay before they hit the kitchen trash compactor. A Fatal Error for me is usually just that. Fatal. More often, though, for you, as for me, these ways of re-seeing your novel will get it moving again.

Boredom sets in whenever we’re doing the same thing day after day - whether it’s at our jobs or just having the same thing for dinner every night. I don’t know how many of you remember the 50s, but it was pretty common among lower middle class families like ours © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 95

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to have a menu for dinner that was invariable each week - meatloaf on Sunday - so there could be meatloaf sandwiches on Monday for school lunches - Baked Chicken on Tuesday, Pot Roast on Wednesday - you get the idea. Nowadays, we don’t plan and execute our food intake in that boring way anymore. We’ve reassessed how we eat and when we eat and what we eat when we eat - reassessment is the key, too, for this type of Writer’s Lock.

Another fairly common Writer’s Lock is writing your character into a corner and not knowing how to get him out again. This is kind of like making your move in Chess only to find you’ve moved right into checkmate. Unless you’re playing on the professional circuit there are a couple of things you can do to get that checkmate to disappear - claim your fingers never left the piece and your opponent cried "Checkmate!" prematurely cheat, in other words. Or you can beg for take-backs. Sometimes this works — if you’re playing with your mother.

Or if your opponent is the quintessential nerd and you look like Angelina Jolie (if you’re female) or Brad Pitt (if you’re male). In the same way, when you’ve pinned your character up against a problem you can’t get him out of, you can cheat. Look at Dallas Pam woke up and oh, boy! What a dream! I’m NEVER having shrimp before bed again! Or, to bring it closer in time, anyone remember the series WitchBlade a couple of years ago? Same season ending - the Witchblade can turn back time and make everything the way it was before - plus our heroine remembers what happened and so does things differently this time around and her partner isn’t killed, but hey, guess what? The program was. Because cheating, on TV, or in a book, is going to turn your audience so off, they may never trust you again.

Another form of cheating is the Deus d’machina - in the ancient Greek drama this was where you had the gods save the day by descending in a chariot (god’s machine, get it?) from the sky at the last possible moment. For those of you who don’t read Greek drama, © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 96

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the movie Congo, which you can catch on the USA channel every few months, does the same thing - but it uses a helicopter instead of a chariot. Now in the original book which was by Michael Crichton the helicopter did come to pick up the survivors, but they survived on their own because the author, whoever he turns out to be, knew better than to cheat with the deus d’machina. He wanted his next novel to be read and optioned for the movies, too.

This type of cheating is also asking the reader for a takeback. Oops. Let me take that back - what really happened was - it was all a dream Pam had! the witchblade really could turn back time and restore everything to the way it had been! a helicopter came and rescued everyone at the last second! Whew, that was sure exciting wasn’t it, boys and girls?

Crichton did another kind of takeback with his second Jurassic Park novel by bringing the chaos mathematics doctor back to life. Here he committed the cardinal sin of thinking his readers are too stupid to remember what happened in the first book. I don’t know how many people are like me, but I resented being called stupid and haven’t bought a book of his since.

So, what do you do when you’ve put your characters into an impossible situation? How do you legitimately get them out of it? Well, the only real answer is - the book isn’t published yet. Reassess what you did and why you did it and how it resulted and then go back and rewrite it differently. Add the necessary tools for the characters to use when they get in that situation so that they do have an out. Or drop that particular part of the story line altogether. This is, after all, your novel and you can do what you want with it (until it's frozen between the covers of a book), just so long as you don’t cheat the reader, because cheating the reader means losing him or her and every one of the people s/he complains to about your book. Word of mouth is just as important as formal marketing in the sale of books. Or movies, for that matter. How many times have you decided not to go to a movie, to wait for it to come out on video or on TV because friends, people you © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 97

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trusted, said, the movie sucked -- it’s not worth 25 bucks to go to the theater and see it? How many times have you decided not to buy a book, but maybe to get it from the library first, because someone whose taste is like yours told you the book sucked? If you never have, then you’re a rare bird, indeed. Most of us don’t have the money to waste on books (which are now $7.95, $8.95, sometimes even $9.95 in paperback!) and movies (which run at least $25 for two with popcorn and jujubes) we know from the advice of friends or family members we trust or whose opinions we respect are no good, IE, not something we’d enjoy or want to waste the money on without checking it out in a less expensive form first.

It’s important to remember, too, that Writer’s Block and Writer’s Lock don’t descend from a clear blue sky to use a cliche (I’m the teach, I can do that sometimes - you should attempt to avoid them at all costs - they tell the editor who reads your work that you’re lazy - too lazy to find your own words for the description). They both arise rather from several things going on in your life. Here are a few of the worst offenders :

* Stress

* Physical or mental disabilities

* Setting yourself unrealistic writing goals AND/OR not writing on a regular basis

* The unrealistic desire for perfection

1) Stress comes in from all sides and usually all at the same time. You have to get the house ready to sell the same month you have a new baby and your mother-in-law is staying with you to help out when all she’s really doing is criticizing every little damn thing you do from washing the dishes to washing the baby’s bottom. This is also the month when you’re up for promotion at work, but because of all the stress at home, you © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 98

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start to slip at work and maybe your boss is understanding and you get the promotion (which adds stress because now you have more work to do and you’re expected to do it better than you did your old work) or the bitch doesn’t have an understanding bone in her body and you don’t get the promotion.

How do you beat stress? Long walks are that perennial favorite. But there's also meditating 10 minutes a day either when you first get up or just before going to bed; physical exercise of any kind; psychotherapy; and of course, Prozac or one of its cousins, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, et al. And, if you have an understanding spouse, a weekly round at the pub (in America we call them Sport’s Bars) with the boys (if you’re a male) or at a male strip club (if you’re a female) with a few friends is also a great relaxer. You’ve got someone to talk to (and your friends will always support your interpretation of the situation, even if they think you’re wrong because that’s what friends are for during crisis times - later is time enough to tell you that maybe you handled that a little bit badly - now is the time for complete and total support!) and you’re out of the house, which, for most of us, is where the biggest of source of stress for our writing resides (the job being the second largest source of stress that disrupts your writing).

The most important thing to do is not to add more stress at this time - don’t force yourself to write. Don’t start a diet. Don’t stop (or start) smoking. Don’t stop (or start) drinking.

2) Most writers are as healthy as their age and environment allow but many writers are disabled - of just students of mine from the last 3 classes there was one lady recovering from a brain tumor, one in chronic pain from fibromayalgia, one with adult ADD, several with chronic pain from age related disorders (my oldest student so far was 80 and she was a kick!) and then, of course, there’s your teacher in a wheelchair and chronic pain from a broken back and a botched surgery.

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Chronic pain is perhaps one of the most difficult problems with your writing to overcome because the cure can be as bad as the disease, as they say. Taking narcotic pain medications, as many of us do with chronic pain, can affect your writing adversely because, until you’re used to them, at least, they produce a fuzziness of mind that is hard to work around. Yet not taking the medication so you can think straight, can also keep you from writing because the pain itself may be too unbearable to think of anything but the pain. Or you may be caught in a middle ground, as I sometimes am, where the medication is not sufficient to handle the pain on certain days and you spend those days in bed, writing by hand if you can do it lying down (because you can’t sit up at the computer or on the bed for any length of time to write). I don’t know of any cure for this form of Writer’s Lock. All I can tell you is that I bull my way through it. When I simply cannot get out of bed and over to the computer, I write anyway, lying in bed, with a board propped up against my knees. That’s the only cure I know - to bull through it. Self-pity parties are OK once in awhile, but try not to invite anyone else to them. You can lose friends that way, especially friends who are new and don’t understand what you’re going through yet. Keep self-pity parties down to just you and your pet, if you’re lucky enough to have a dog or cat or bird. They love you unconditionally, listen when you whine and they don’t judge you.

Lawrence Durrell once wrote that writing can uncover "the meaning of the pattern" of our daily lives; "Only there in the silence of the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side." The consolation of art is that "joyous compromise with all that [has] wounded or defeated us, in this way not to evade destiny, as ordinary people do, but to fulfill it in its true potential." - which is one of the reasons I feel it is such a pity that people’s own lives are no longer the subject matter of their work. It is not impossible that some of us, here in this class, may become great enough writers to transmute our pain into art.

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3) Oh, those unrealistic writing goals! Probably every writer has been through this, at least at the beginning of their career. Stephen King writes X amount of words per day and advises you to do the same. Or some other writer who writes a book on writing gives this advice. Henry Miller thought at the beginning of his writing career that a "real" writer was required to sit in a chair and write for 11 hours straight every single day. As a result, he thought about being a writer, and he wanted to be a writer, but for years, he never sat down and wrote a word outside of his head. That 11 hours was just too intimidating to face. The cure for this is simple - if you’ve set yourself a goal of 5000 words a day and it’s just too much with the kids racing around your ankles and the dog barking and the husband wanting his dinner or the wife wanting to go out dancing every Saturday night or the bowling buddies making fun of you for not bowling 500 anymore, then cut down the expectation you've made for yourself. Try 3000 words. Or don’t go by words at all. Go by time.

Virginia Woolf wrote for an hour each morning. My own goal is one page per day. That’s one page, single spaced, in my handwriting which is as small as 10 point Arrus, on that tiny square graph paper they sell in pads at Office Depot, both sides of the paper. Typed, it comes out to between 4 and 5 pages, so that one page a day is really not as small as it sounds.

Make your goal for your daily writing - and ignore those who tell you all over the Internet that everyday is not necessary because it is - the only way to learn to write is to write and the only way to be a serious novelist or a career novelist is to write everyday. There is just no other way to do it. Writing seriously is a hard job, as hard as any other job you’ll ever do - harder, because you may not see a paycheck for some time - years, if novels are your game. The average apprenticeship for novelists who "make it" is 10 years. 10 years. For a "distinguished novelist, the apprenticeship is - on average - 15 years. So unless you're a hobby writer, this work, this writing, is the most difficult thing you will ever do and it is the most rewarding, also. Don't forget that. It's the cure for the © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 101

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discouragement and frustration that are also an unavoidable and unchangeable fact of serious writing.

But do think about that. A decade of your life spent in learning your craft well enough to "make it". Determination and will power can’t do that decade. Only desire can. You have to desire it, otherwise you’ll never get it. It has to be a desire, not just something you want the way you want a new car or a blond, big breasted American woman to marry. Writing is an art - fiction writing is anyway. If you’re a novelist and not a freelance creative non-fiction writer, then the rules of obtaining the state of "making it" are different.

And one of those differences is that you must work on your art, your craft, your writing, every single day. So set yourself realistic goals and write everyday.

I’ve already gone over the ways in which you can find the time and rob the time from your schedule to get the time you need to write everyday. The rest is up to you. There is no deus d’machina to come and rescue you. There’s only your daily goal and it has to be realistic if it’s going to take you where you want to be. Experiment with it. You may not be able to come up with the daily goal that’s really right for you for a few weeks or even months. But once you’ve got that baby down, don’t let it, or yourself, or your future readers, down by ignoring it. Because it works kind of like a diet in that way - sure if I have sugar cookies today, it doesn’t mean I won’t go back on my diet tomorrow. But if I have sugar cookies a week in a row, the chances I’m going to go back on that diet and make it work are negligible.

Think of your writing as a diet, if it helps to keep you writing your daily goal. Think about going on talk shows, book signings, the look in your loved one’s eyes when he or she sees that first big royalty check, think about whatever it takes to make you get in that chair and write on those days when you would rather be doing anything else (even © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 102

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housework) but making that goal. If you want to be a serious writer, if you want to "make it", you have to be willing to make the compromises and the sacrifices that art always demands as its tribute.

4) The unrealistic desire for perfection - oh, this one can be used as an excuse for not doing your best and I’ve seen that happen over and over. Doing your best, making your writing the best it can be, is not the pursuit of perfection, not the hubris of believing your words are sacred, it is the basic tool of any craftsman in any art, any craft. If you don’t do your best, then why bother at all? But the expectation that your best will be perfect is unrealistic and will stop your writing dead in its little ink tracks across the page.

Unfortunately, the perfectionist is often a perfectionist in every area of his life and little short of psychotherapy is going to be of help to him or her. But if you are not a life perfectionist - expecting perfection of ourselves in everything we do and trying to force it on the people we live with as well - if writing is the only area of your life where you seek perfectionism - then you can be helped. A simple mantra, repeated over and over during 2-3 minutes of meditation before you write each day works for at least one person I know. She shuts her eyes and says out loud, "Only God is perfect. I am human. My writing is as perfect as I can make it, but it will never be perfect. Only God is perfect. I am human ..." etc.

You can also set a limit on your quest for perfection. That’s what I ended up doing. I allow myself a first draft, then 2 rewrites, all by hand (I write everything in longhand first), then a typed computer revision. Then I make myself stop. Because if left to my own desire for perfection, I would never get that short story, that novel, off to submissions land. I’d never even get these lessons out of my computer and onto yours. I can nitpick with Monk. I can nitpick better than Monk!! But only when it comes to my writing and my writing space. The rest of my house looks like nuclear weapon’s testing went on here. My clothes are full of holes. The only reason I cleaned my closet out a few © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 103

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weeks ago was because my crazy cat decided that she wanted to live in there and in consequence, I had to get everything off the floor so there’d be room for her and her food and her box and her body to play or sleep, as the desire hits her to do, whenever it hits her to do it.

I don’t mean to make a joke of this. I actually know two ladies who have never submitted a thing, although they’ve written novels and short stories enough to found an entire oeuvre over the years, because they believe the work is not yet perfect. It never will be, folks. We can only do our best and that’s what we should be doing, each and every time we write something. But perfect? Nope. Will never happen.

Even the greatest of writers have said that in looking at their past published work, they can see places where a sentence here could have been better or a phrase there crisper or a paragraph here deleted or added. The fact is that no artist is ever completely satisfied with his or her own work. As long as you know you’ve done your best, though, the fact that it’s not, and never will be, perfect, is not something that should worry you and it definitely should not be allowed to make you quit writing and/or submitting.

I’m going to end this Writing Life section by answering an email I got this week. Although the tone of the email was rude, it sounded like the rudeness was born of being frightened, so I decided not to answer it in the tone it was addressed to me. Instead, this is what I wrote and I think it’s valid for all of you - that’s why I’m including it here. This person asked why I spend so much time on the writing life aspect of writing. Why don’t I just do my job and teach writing?

The writing life is essential to writing is the short answer.

If you don’t make your writing a job and a part of your life just like any other job or any other thing which consumes time and energy in your life - like raising your children, for © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 104

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instance - you’ll have a much harder time of it - this becoming a writer vocation or avocation. People read books on how to raise children; they even read books on how to raise and care for their pets. They read cookbooks and exercise books and self-help books (especially those - by the zillions! What a market that is, if you’re interested in writing creative non-fiction!). What makes writing any different? It’s a part of your life and it’s a big part of your life if you’re serious about it. It’s so essential a part of your life that it can ruin relationships - sometimes a spouse or a life partner doesn’t understand about your need for solitude when you’re writing - especially if you got bit by the bug late in life. If you’ve been married 10 years to a man or a woman and suddenly get bit by the writing bug, they’re going to have a hard time adjusting to it, to the new you, so to speak. And knowing some ways and tips and techniques to make your writing life easier can mean the difference between a merely exasperated spouse and an ex-spouse because if that bug has got you good, and it usually does, when the partner gives you an ultimatum, many times I’ve seen the ultimatum end up in divorce court. That’s no joke.

And these writing life advice and discussions like the one we’re having today on writer’s lock and writer’s block - do you really want to go through your writing life without someone giving you some options for dealing with problems of writing like these? Most people don’t. They join forums and chat rooms for that very reason - to have someone to talk to about the difficulties of writing, the problems they’re facing and conversely, the triumphs they have when their families and friends are uninterested in their writing and so the forum is the only place they can go to celebrate.

I think whoever wrote the email was frightened at the thought that there might be an actual life change involved in writing as a profession. I think he or she wanted reassurance that it is not the same as, say, waking up one morning to find you’d been in an accident a week before and now you only have one arm and will have to learn how to make a life without two arms. Who wants to have to adjust their life to that kind of change? Yet it could happen - it’s happened to a lot of people - and then you do go out © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 105

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and read books and talk to counselors and to others in support groups about how to make your life easier with just one arm.

Well, cheer up, my frightened friend - while beginning the writing life late in life can be as difficult as starting out a new life with only one arm, it usually isn’t anywhere near that tough. It is, however, hard, harder for some than others, and it needs addressing in classes about writing. I place the Writing Life section first in these modules for a very prosaic reason. If I put it last, most students might decide to skip it altogether. Some probably do anyway, but at least when it’s first out of the box, statistically, there is more of a chance that it will be read, than if it’s last out of the box.

Of course we all remember what Mark Twain (or was it Disraeli? Could have been Spock, come to think of it ...) said about statistics, right?

"There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics."

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THE TOOLBOX

Descriptive Prose and Narrative Writing : Setting, Background & Context This lesson will be on the most difficult of the tools we use to create compelling fiction. Whether the lesson’s short or long, these will be tough ones because using these tools effectively is tough – at least for the majority of writers, whether they're newbies or long established. If you’re one of those who finds conflict simple to write, then you really do need to count your blessings. Same for this week’s subject - descriptive prose and narrative writing & setting/background/context. Here is where you really prove yourself a writer and not just a sketch artist with words.

So far in this course we’ve focused on the beginnings of things – the things that need to be in place before you actually start writing that novel : your characters, the point of view the story will be told from, the importance of dialog and some tips and techniques for writing this "other kind of action" as Graham Greene called it. In many How-To writing books we’ve seen that the instruction is that we devote 30% of the novel to dialog. That's good advice, because studies and polls show that people love dialog, that they actually look into books in the bookstores before buying them to see how much dialog there is in them there pages.

But that’s still only 30% of the book. Where’s that other 70% coming from? What makes up that other 70%?

Descriptive prose and narrative writing. That's where. That's what.

OK, no fainting, now. No hyperventilation, please! Show, don’t tell, remember? That’s an aspect of prose writing that we’ve covered, I just wanted to remind you that

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descriptive prose and narrative writing are not as scary as they sound. What they mean, in simple, unscary terms, are, the words you use to tell your story in - Narrative is the series of events told from your own unique perspective. Descriptive prose is the exact same thing by definition, but in reality it is not the same thing at all and it is fast becoming a lost art in writing.

Here's a semi-assignment: I am going to recommend some contemporary books that are not even considered literary writing - both in fact are spy thrillers - for you to find in your library or on Amazon.com and ask that you read them. You don’t have to read the entire content of either book, but I think that you will want to once you’ve begun them. I'd just like you to read enough of them, a few chapters, to see what I mean by descriptive prose. Both are great spy thrillers set in exotic locales with bright dialog, plenty of plot twists and turns, surprising storylines and some of the finest descriptive prose I’ve seen in years. They were published by big houses, the public liked them well enough for them to go to paperback - even the critics love them, by the way - so good writing has not yet gone out of style, no matter what those forum buddies of yours want you to think! The two books are : The Prodigal Spy by Joseph Kanon and Second Sight by Charles McCarry. If horror is more your thing, try Julian’s House by Judith Hawkes or any of Peter Straub’s horror delights, Julia, Ghost Story or even his mystery trilogy, KoKo, Mystery and The Throat. If you’d prefer something more mainstream, there’s always Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. In Women's Fiction, probably the best at descriptive writing is Marilyn French, although it's a hard call to place her first and Rosemary Pulcher second. They're probably both No. 1 in reality.

Descriptive prose takes the reader and pulls him into or sets her down in your world, whether that world is Algiers, Louisiana or Algiers, Africa; whether it’s the Mexican desert or Dune, the desert spice planet, whether it’s the streets of New York or the streets © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 108

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of San Francisco. It doesn’t just evoke emotion, it makes your skin gritty with the desert dust or oily with sweat from the Louisiana bayou. The reader ceases to feel that he’s reading something and instead feels like he’s there, a fly on the wall, just as dusty as your protagonist in the Mexican town, just as uneasy, lost in the Louisiana swamp and scratching the same mosquito bites with those little fly legs.

Why do I say it’s a dying art? Because too many newer writers these days associate the ability to write descriptive prose with literary prose - that gunk coming out of the MFA writing programs - "the stuttering tulips" kind of thing. Also we’re being conditioned to think that people are in too much of a hurry to want to read that kind of writing, that Hemingwayesque sentences are the only acceptable prose in this time of ours when a New York minute now defines the length of a minute wherever you happen to live. To put it as my granny would have, "T’aint true." People will still pick good writing over competent writing every chance they get, whether it’s in a mainstream novel, a literary novel, a horror novel, a spy thriller or a romance novel. They just don’t have much of a chance to pick it anymore.

Stephen King outsells Peter Straub, even though they occasionally collaborate on a book, because most people who read horror have never heard of Straub. The same goes for choosing, say, Robert Ludlum, over Joseph Kanon or Frederick Forsyth over Charles McCarry. It’s who you’ve heard of that largely determines who you read. Not a lot of folks have the time I do to wander up and down the aisles of a library or bookstore looking for that gem hidden between the bestsellers on the fiction shelves. And literary writing has become an anathema because of the MFA programs that turn out prose that sounds like something you’d use for tinder in the fireplace rather than something you take into the hot bubble bath with you to relax away the stress of your day.

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of all. It’s not something that can be taught, per se. It’s something that you either have the gift for or you don’t, just like you either have blue eyes or you don’t. But ... and this is a big but ... you can have the talent for it and never know it because you fall for the preaching you hear every day on the Internet that no one wants to read it. No one cares how the story is written as long as it’s a good story.

On the surface that last sentence sounds like a true statement. But I’ve asked a few of the editors I know, and the very few publishers I know, why it is that so many books are turned down in comparison to the number of books submitted each year to the traditional publishing houses, both large and small press, and the answer I got was very short and very simple :

1) The incredibly unprofessional state of the manuscripts they receive - no spell checking, no grammar checking, no editing on the part of the author; most of these look like first drafts and probably are, since there seems to be a rumor gong around lately that to revise or rewrite is to strive for perfection. No, rewriting and revision are attempts to do your best before your submit something, to write your best. It always has been that way and it always will be that way.

Another reason these same manuscripts can go unread is because they’re sent to the wrong departments - a horror novel is sent to the editor of romance novels at Random House, for instance - or because they’re sent to the wrong house, period - a horror novel is sent to a publishing house that only does romance, for example. So, the first reason is, quite simply, unprofessionalism.

2) Writing that is so incredibly bad that not even the most original, most interesting story in the universe can make it palatable. The kind of writing that has given rise to the urban legend about the housewife who throws the romance she’s reading against the wall crying, "I can do better than that!", drags out an old typewriter © M Kenyon Charboneaux & www.easywaytowrite.com Page 110

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and does do better than that. One editor at St. Martin’s Press told me he’s always tempted to send a personal scribble at the bottom of the rejection letter for these books saying, "Grow up! Writing is a profession, not a hobby!" but, he added, he didn’t have time for that. So form rejection is all that goes out and the writer who gets it comforts himself or herself with the thought that the book is good and someone will someday take it and if they don’t, there’s always the subsidy houses. Of these there are two types, those who screen their submissions with a rigorous eye, just like the big houses do, and the kind that don’t care if my cat wrote it as long as I have the money to pay to have it published. That’s the eventual end of the line for book no. 2.

Conclusion The truth is that if you’re going to be one of those who "makes it" (and that can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different writers) your work has to be well written. It doesn’t have to be the most beautiful prose ever written (and let’s face, it, the most beautiful prose ever written isn’t going to sell a bad story!) but it does have to be the best work you can do and it has to be the most professional work you can do.

Enough said?

Yours,

Kenyon.

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