Your Characters are People

by Becky Martinez

One of my worst writing habits (and I have many) is working on a number of projects at the same time. I’ve  always been so excited to start a new story and then before long I find myself with a new story idea and I want to go to work on it immediately. Since I seldom plot much in advance of the writing process, it’s not hard to do. If I come up with a character and a scene I start to write it.

Last week my sister asked if that confuses me. She wanted to know how I kept my characters from all sounding alike.
The next day, while attending the Colorado Romance Writers Tea for Readers, I mentioned that comment to the writers and readers at my table. And the answer just seemed to come to me. I see all my characters so distinctly I can’t imagine them all sounding alike. I could gather them all in a room, in a group just like we were in and I could see them all as distinctive people.

So how do you turn them into people rather than characters on the page?

Interview them. I’ve often suggested this to writers. Spend a few hours asking your characters who they are and what they remember of their past. Every character has a past, a family (or if not, a reason for not having one) Ask them about their memorable moments and their biggest successes and failures. Ask them what they want out of life beyond just their goals in your story.

Take them some place and see how they react. For instance, I could see Bonita, the young mother, from my book Home Fires Burning being very at home at an event such as the elegant tea I attended on Saturday. I could see her chatting at the table, talking about her home and her son, Teddy, with pride. On the other hand, I could see my character, Connie, from my book, Deadly Messages, constantly finding a reason to get up and move around the room. She would want to meet everyone at the table immediately and then move on to meet others as well. She likes to stay on the move. My character, Stacey, from Shadows from the Past, would be less comfortable. She would be friendly, but constantly worried she was going to spill her tea and if you told her to look to her left, she might easily look to the right. She might even be late because she got lost.

Spend a day with them. Each character would want to do something different. My character, Amber, from Love on Deck, would definitely want to go to a baseball game, while my newest character, Kimberly from my next book, Blues at 11, would insist on a spa, while Bonita might want to go for a horseback ride around her Colorado ranch.

Listen to them.  The speech patterns for your characters will be different too. My character Connie is going to talk faster than the rest while I know Stacey is just going to bubble over with enthusiasm whenever she talks, even if she says things that she wishes she hadn’t. In my next book, Dead Man's Rules, I have two cousins, Cere and Freeda, but I still worked hard to separate they way they talk so that readers can pick out each one in conversation. Cere is more serious, while Freeda is fun and flighty. I got halfway through writing that book before I knew I just had to write Freeda's story, which is almost finished.

Do all these female characters sound like they might be my friends?  I’ve often said that I always enjoy my characters. The women might be someone I could enjoy (and sometimes want to strangle)

And these are just the women. I do the same with the men too. The men are guys I might alternately love and hate. But I’d like to take everyone of them home.  I can’t expect my character friends to fall in love with them if I can’t.

All these characters are why I find it easier to write different stories at one time. As I told those at the tea, if I want to spend a day shopping and have light-hearted fun, I would chose to go shopping with Kimberly. If I want a steady pal I can tell my troubles to, I would tell them to Lisa, who helped out Connie in Deadly Messages and whose story I am now also writing. Whatever story I feel like writing, it’s just a matter of getting in touch with my character friends

If you get to know who your characters are, they will become more distinct in your head and that should make them more alive for your readers.

Re-Energizing your Writing

By Becky Martinez

Writing can be such a solitary occupation that sometimes we can forget everything else around us. Actually we may ignore our own surroundings, as we plunge ourselves into new worlds that are exciting, frightening and unique. But sometimes we have to come back to earth and when we do, it pays to visit with other authors and get a look at their worlds.

In the past month I have gone through a number of different writing experiences that involved other authors and I have to say it has been a fabulous time. All these events have made me realize how invigorating it is to just listen to other writers talk about how they create their works and to have a chance to share some of my own ideas.

So if you need some inspiration and feel your writing is growing stale, how about trying some of these things:

1.      Attend a book signing. I don’t do many and wish I had time to attend more when people I know are signing, but I usually try to get to the signings for writers I don’t get a chance to see very often. In late August I went to Diane Mott Davidson’s book signing to hear her discuss her latest mystery featuring Goldy the amateur sleuth/caterer. I always enjoy her signings because she brings a tasty treat from her latest  book, but also to hear her discuss her research. This time she talked about how she came up with people who got killed in her books. I have to admit she was the first writer I heard say that she usually kills off someone who has angered her in some way. Since then I’ve killed off an old boyfriend and a couple of ex-bosses in my books.

The second book signing I attended was just for the sheer joy of meeting one of my favorite authors for the first time -- Sue Grafton. I've enjoyed her works for nearly 30 years and she was one of the reasons I decided to try my hand at writing mysteries.

2.      Try a writing convention. I always enjoy writing conventions so it was no surprise that the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold turned out to be as helpful and fun as usual.  The session were top notch and spending time with other writers always gives me new ideas on stories I am working on and what I might want to write next.

3.      How about a retreat? After Colorado Gold I spent four days at the RMFW Writer’s Retreat. If you’ve never been to one, I highly encourage it. The great thing about a writing retreat is that you have to work.  With a room full of writers around you, typing on their laptops, you can’t time out to play a game or tease the cat. My first discovery was that I was too used to working in a noisy area. (too many years in noisy newsrooms) I’ve always been able to write in busy restaurants or coffee shops.  The silence in that room, except for the tapping on keyboards was deafening. I finally plugged in my earphones to listen to music.  The only problem was that most of the music on my computer is sad or very romantic. I ended up writing so many sad scenes I almost had myself crying right there in the room.

4.      Don’t ignore meetings of your writing groups.  I belong to too many groups to make all the meetings, but whenever I get to a nearby session, it is always helpful. This past weekend I attended the all-day Heart of Denver Romance Writers session on selling your books on Amazon.  The information was great, but hearing from other writers about their own publishing journeys was just as good. They’ve been down in the trenches getting their work out there for the public.

5.      Finally, try linking up with a writing buddy. One of my critique partners and I have made a pledge to meet every week to go through what we are working on and to discuss trends in the business. It’s a way to keep up on what is happening and to talk about anything that might be developing into a problem with our current books.

The bottom line here is not to get so involved with your computer that you forget to engage with others. We all spend enough time alone. And often our loved ones just don't understand when we talk about fighting with our characters or problems with a scene. Sometimes it is good just to get out and hang out with other writers to find out what their problems are and to celebrate their successes.

Okay, now it’s time to get back to work…

 

Keep Those Ideas Coming

By Becky Martinez

Story ideas can come from anywhere. I always say that to aspiring authors, and I often get that question from readers too. It still surprises me when I talk to readers and they’re surprised when I mention something simple like a walk in the park can inspire a story. Even the couple arguing in the restaurant can spark a story idea.

To me that is what writers do. A simple, overheard conversation can suddenly get the writer in us to thinking.  That restaurant argument continues in my mind with him leaving her with no way to get home and she decides she isn’t going home. She is fed up and leaving him. And suddenly she is off on a story adventure that might get her on a train or bus and get her out of town.

The walk in a park might spark an idea of a body hidden in the bushes up ahead. When I mentioned to a reader how much I love British Columbia and especially Stanley Park in Vancouver because it sparked the idea for my book, Deadly Messages, she gave me a blank look. A walk in the park sparked my idea? Because it had so many places to bury bodies, I mentioned to her. It suddenly made sense to her, though she admitted she had never thought of that when she’d visited the park.

For me, the idea of a bloody handprint in an old mining company store in southern Colorado did the same thing. Except I turned  the building into a dance hall and my imagination was off and running. The result is my next romantic suspense, Dead Man’s Rules, and it will be released soon by The Wild Rose Press.  The cover art was just released and as usual, my TWRP artist did a fabulous job, capturing that bloody hand.

I’m working on the second book in what I call the Dead Man series, and it came from another of those ordinary occurrences … the day I got stuck several miles up a mountain road in the snow and my car slid into a ditch… which I put together with the stories about my parents’ old home and the rumor of buried treasure… but that’s a story for another time.

 

Celebrating Opening Day... with Writing

By Becky Martinez

Some people look forward to each New Year as a time a new beginning. For others, the school year brings about annual changes, while others see their birth date as the start of a new year.

For me, there is something special about spring. It’s more than the end of dreary winter days filled with watching the snow forecasts. And it certainly isn’t the idea of spring cleaning that gets me excited. No, it’s the first day of the major league baseball season.

Why? Because each new baseball season is like the beginning of a new life. When teams start up the new year, they get to start fresh. Their record from the previous year is wiped clean and they get to start over.

 Opening Day 2012

Every player has a chance to make this the best year ever! Last year’s accomplishments—or lack of them—no longer matter. Stepping out on the grass for the first time each spring means a time for a new beginning-–the opportunity for players to start something with the hope that, come fall, their team will be fighting for a championship.

This week that drive toward the fall started anew for hundreds of major league players and thousands of baseball fans. The Colorado Rockies opened their new season out of town this year and so far they are 2-1. Not exactly championship caliber yet, but they show great promise with their hitting. They open their home season today, and I will be there to join the crowd.  We get to cheer wildly, drink beer, eat hot dogs and hope our guys don’t let us down and this will be the year we GO ALL THE WAY!

I’ve often applied that “spring” principle to my writing too. Think of how much you can get done by October if you start in the spring. Whether it’s writing a new romance, a new adventure, or a new mystery, spring offers the perfect time to begin a new story. I love beginning new writing projects when the weather warms up. New story ideas seem to “spring” to life under the warmer days that carry a hint of brighter days to come.

Like those baseball players taking their first pitches in the spring, this new story holds just as much promise. It could be the best story I’ve ever written. It holds all the exciting prospect of wonderful things to come. Of course there will be the doldrums of August and perhaps a few losing periods when I throw out and re-edit what I’ve written, but right now, there’s hope, there’s the thrill of that new idea, that new season.

So, it’s time to shed those winter pounds, time to get a new hair style and bright, fun clothes. Time to take those steps onto the fresh grass and start that new story and hope that come fall, I'll be fighting for a championship in the form of a new contract!

 

 

Let's Plot

As the year draws to a close I have started thinking about what I want to do next year and one thing is to blog more. And always anxious to get started, I decided to start now. In the past couple of months I have been teaching a variety of writing courses at Savvy Authors and I have two more that will in two weeks. One of them is a six-month long class that deals with writing an entire book. It's not as intense as NaNoWriMo, but it can be challenging.

It got me started thinking about how I start to write a book. Well, it all starts with ideas, of course. How often do you get those great ideas and then you don’t know what to do with them? A couple of weeks ago one of my classes was a Help Desk coaching class and I tried to give everyone ideas for their writing. This is one of the lessons I took away from that class.

Where do your ideas come from and what do you do when you know you need to start a new book? Let’s look at a couple of ways you might get started formulating ideas and then putting them into motion to get the plot moving.

 1.       Have a Plotting Party.  This can be a lot of fun and get others involved as well. If two heads are better than one, then how about three or four?

 When I am struggling with an idea and I don’t know what to do, I call together the Gang. I have three very good friends from college who still regularly get together, even after 40 years. We’ll get a couple of bottles of wine (or champagne) or make margaritas, order take out food or make up some snacks and then just sit around and talk.

I toss out my opening premise and we go to work.  I’ll take notes and we’ll start throwing out ideas. We might take the plot in one direction for a while and then someone comes up with something so wild we go in an entirely different direction. More ideas, more directions for the plot to go.

They also toss out ideas for the hero or heroine. Or sometimes they can make the villains really weird or spooky.  I have one friend who always seems to make him sympathetic. It helps me to keep things in perspective as I write the story too.

This idea can also work with critique partners. Several years ago when I was meeting with a regular group in a restaurant every week, we decided to meet at someone’s house instead and do a plotting party. We also did it in a library meeting room once. We bring sticky notes and write down the ideas and work for several hours on plots for all of us. We would then put the sticky notes up on a dry erase board so we could watch the plots develop.

2.      A more solitary idea I try for developing a story idea is to simply start writing scenes with my characters. It allows me to bring out their emotions and to see who they are and how they might react.  I might start at the beginning of the book, but sometimes I do the meeting scene or the first love scene between the hero and heroine. 

Since I don’t have any preconceived notions of how they might react the characters often come through better and on their own terms.  I’ll do that same sort of thing with a scene, describing the setting or the feel. I may not use all of what I’ve written, but both of these exercises get me into the mood for writing and before long I find myself working on an actual scene itself.

3.      Another idea I stole for mystery writer John Sandford. At a booksigning someone asked him what he did when he was stuck in writing a scene. He said he took a notebook and went to dinner and didn’t come home until the scene was written.

I’ve often done that, though not necessarily when I was stuck on a scene. I’ll do it as a part of my regular writing progress. Whenever I find myself rebelling against writing my pages, I take myself out to dinner.

There is something fun about just sitting in a different location and writing. Of course it requires that you don’t mind sitting in a restaurant, eating alone with your pen and notebook in hand. But I’ve done it in everything from Starbucks to diner to very fancy restaurants.  My current favorite is a local PF Chang’s that has an amazing view of the front range of the Rocky Mountains.

So as the year comes to an end... if you need to come up with some ideas for what to do with your ideas, you might try these suggestions! 

Basking in the Glow

Yes, I am still basking in the glow of my latest release, Shadows from the Past, a new romantic suspense novella from The Wild Rose Press...

Seeing a new book out there for sale is always an exciting time and every time one of my books comes out I get questions about what it takes to write a book and get it published. Often I hear those comments many writers get -- “I always wanted to write a book, but..” and then the excuses come. They could never find the time to work on their writing, they could never figure out how to develop characters, they could never figure out how to go about trying to get published, or some other excuse.

 I have a simple answer -- if writing a book is what you want to do, go for it

Dreams don’t come true if you don’t take steps to make them happen.

This simple statement should be pasted on every writer's wall. Writing dreams will not come true without taking action to turn them into reality. What does it take to stay on track and find a way to make those dreams come true? It takes work, planning and finally, action. Your writing will never get published sitting in a drawer. You can turn out some marvelous stories, but if your mother and sister are the only ones reading them, you are never going to be published. You need to figure out what you want to do with your writing and then do what any business person does. Make a plan and stick to it. Here are a few thoughts on how to make your writing dreams come true:

1. Plan: Make a writing plan and stick to it. At one of the recent conferences I attended, I asked a multi-published author where she got her ideas. Her response surprised me.

“It’s not finding ideas that slows me down. It’s finding the time to write.” She followed up with the advice to make time to write every day, no matter how busy things get. Another multi-published author said she gave up television for two years and forced herself to write a few words every day. My goal is to make writing a daily habit. Not long ago I read a blog that quoted a famous basketball player who said he had to “touch the ball every day.” I wrote that down and printed it out in big type and now it is taped to my computer monitor.

2. Plot: Know where you want to go in your career, and plot a course in that direction. Decide what you want to write, and then research publishers and agents. It makes no sense to waste time submitting to houses that don’t handle your brand of writing. Getting a response takes long enough as it is. Not long ago I heard several agents say they look for writers who aren’t experimenting with different genres. They want to build a writer’s career, and they want to work with a writer who has already figured out her/his strong points. 

3. Promote: Don’t be afraid to promote yourself and your work. Writing is a lonely endeavor, and most writers are notoriously bad at promoting themselves. But how else will you get your name out there to fans, to booksellers, to editors and agents? Find groups or people with similar interests that you can talk to. For years I coached young writers and taught on a one-to-one basis. Now I find that there are insights I have that I can use to teach to others, and I have been teaching classes.

4. Pitch: Don’t underestimate the power of a good pitch. Be ready to query and submit. I’ve known writers, who have finished several works, and they are good writers, but they are afraid to put their book out in front of everyone. At the same time, I met a young woman recently who had finished one book, and she was ready to tell the world about it. Something tells me she will probably be more successful than the writer who keeps her work hidden away.

5. Persevere. Hang in there and don’t give up. This last point really hits home for me. Yes, I have been writing for 20+ years. I’ve told this story over and over, but the one thing that always gets me is that 20 years ago I gave up. I stopped trying to get published and went in a different direction. I never stopped writing, though, and I always kept that little dream in the back of my head. Twelve years ago I decided to try again and it took a few years, but now I do have books and short stories out there.

These days with the growth of self-publishing and e-publishing there are more opportunities than ever. So I say again, if writing a book and getting it published is your dream, go for it.

The Joy of Release Day

There is nothing quite like the day that your book finally comes out. Days and nights of writing, weeks of editing, months of waiting! And then, there it is, with a great cover, up on a webpage ready for sale. My new suspense novella SHADOWS FROM THE PAST came out today, so naturally I was up early, hesitating as I opened The Wild Rose Press publishing website, half afraid it wouldn’t be there, although I knew it would be. Should be.

And there it was!

The fabulous cover, the tempting blurb, and a sale price! Yes, it is on sale at the moment.

As I’ve written previously, SHADOWS FROM THE PAST was a joy to write because for me it is my homage to the gothic tales that made me love reading and writing romance. When I started reading suspense many years ago, I loved the stories where the young woman came to the strange house that held so many secrets. I absolutely loved  JANE EYRE and then came WUTHERING HEIGHTS  with its mysterious landlord Heathcliff and his lost love. Naturally I fell in love with Manderely in REBECCA and then came Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney. I read every Whitney book I could get my hands on.  She always had a wonderful gothic setting that was true to whatever far flung location she used.   

I was also a big fan of DARK SHADOWS with its dark mansion and all the secrets inside. The thing I’ve always loved about gothic romances besides the spooky setting is the presence of similarly spooky and mysterious characters. Barnabus Collins, anyone? Or how about that strange Mrs. Danvers?

And then there were those gray days that seemed to fill the gothic stories--lots of fog and low hanging clouds. Lots of mist. Actually today was supposed to be snowy in Colorado, but as though the weatherman knew it was my release day, we have been given a cold, drizzly day, just the sort that I wrote about in SHADOWS.