News from New York City

I'm writing this post on the plane back from New York City and the 2015 RWA National Convention. I'm on airplane wifi, somewhere over West Virginia, and the plane is quite certain that if I connect to our Word-Whores programming calendar, dire and terrible things will occur.

Alas.

But I have plenty that's off-topic to say. The convention was wonderful.Here's at the Black & White Harlequin Ball at the Waldorf Astoria with my agent Connor Goldsmith and good friend, agent Jennifer Udden, of Donald Maass Literary Agency. There may have been a lot of free champagne involved, but there are thankfully no photos of that phase of the evening.

I hope.

Despite the many parties, time spent catching up with friends and business meetings, I managed to attend a few workshops, and live-tweeted nuggets I gleaned. I thought I'd share those here.

Julia Quinn gave a terrific keynote speech. She spoke to the universal truth that you're more likely to see the President of the United States than your own book in your local grocery store - and how that relates to a writer's sense of self worth. It's tempting to think about the market, what your readers might demand down the line and how to hook them into the next story, but pointed out that our primary concern when writing a book in a series has to be THAT novel, not the overall series arc.We can't escape being liked - after all, there's a reason they call it popular fiction - if we couldn't be popular in high school, then by God we'll do it now. However, she very wisely pointed out that when we accept that we can't please everyone all the time, it frees us to write the book we need to write.

I might have that cross-stitched.

I learned a number of new ways of looking at conflict. Virginia Kantra gave great insights on it in a workshop on emotional content, saying that without suffering, there is no growth. Without conflict, your hero & heroine are merely dating. Michael Hauge lived up to his reputation, giving a great workshop on storytelling. He said that the hero or heroine of your story doesn't need to be heroic, but must have the potential to become heroic and that a storyteller's goal is evoking emotion in the reader - and emotion arises from conflict. Outer conflicts should occur more frequently and become more intense as the story progresses, to accelerate pace. Inner conflicts arise from emotional wounds and the beliefs the hero or heroine holds that grow out of emotional wounds are never true, but are always logical. Inner conflict is the conflict between being safe & unfulfilled vs. fulfilled & scared shitless.

That's the shorthand version. I recommend Hauge's workshops, which can be obtained online here. I know I'm going home with some increased clarity about what I want to write and how.

How Writing 1st Person POV Gave Me Boy Cooties

Yesterday, at #LERANM, my local RWA chapter, I gave a tutorial on using Twitter. We had a great time and the lovely and viviacious Katie Lane snapped this pic as I was talking. And gesticulating. LOL!

This week's topic in the bordello concerns perspective - as in first, second or third person point of view (POV) - which works best for us and why.

I started out writing in first person, because my natural form from the beginning was personal essays. Very much like my blog posts. I sometimes segue into second person, I notice. Particularly in blog posts where I start saying things like you don't really notice how essays and blog posts tend to be in first person because you expect non-fiction to be more so than fiction. <-See what I did there?

So, when I went to write my first novel - which eventually and after many revisions and iterations became Rogue's Pawn - I wrote that in first person. In fact, and I admit this with chagrin, I originally wrote that book in a memoir style. As if I, myself, had fallen through a gate to Faerie and wrote a memoir about my adventures. I thought I was SO BRILLIANT doing that, subverting the genre tropes and all. Thing is, I didn't write genre well enough to subvert the tropes - something I had to learn through painful trial, error and ego-bruising. Thinking about it now, it IS kind of a cool idea. Something I might have the craft to pull off at this point.

Hmm...

Anyhoo. I wrote in first person because it was what I knew and I had some skill at it. Readers tell me they like my first person perspectives when they don't like others. It's not easy to do because it's so restrictive. The reader can only know what the first person POV characters now. You can mix in more than one first person POV character (I don't like it) or mix in a third-person POV in with the first (like that even less), but the purest form - and really my very favorite - is one person, telling the story through their eyes. It works well for me because I feel like I can really delve into the person's character, along with their emotional and spiritual arc.

I started writing third person with erotic romance. Most fiction is really in third person. With my full length erotic romance novels, the Falling Under trilogy, I added in the hero's third-person POV too. I alternate POVs in those and that's fun, too, to build the story from two perspectives like that. I keep a very close POV, so that it's barely a step removed from first person. So close, in fact, that in writing the third book in the trilogy, I inadvertently slipped into first person - writing from the hero's POV! I couldn't figure out why I felt so... odd. Then I realized, a page or two later, that I was inside a man's head. A very strange place to be.

This may have marked a step up in writing craft for me however. I might try it again, if I can make sure to wash off the boy cooties afterward. ;-)

For the fantasy series I'm working on now - brand new, top sekrit stuff! - I'm writing in third person alternating POV, because my agent, fabulous Connor, asked me to. He  and Iwanted to target a particular market and I like the idea of selling books as well as the next Word Whore. At first I struggled, however. I *really* wanted to write in first person, particularly the heroine. But I applied discipline (GASP) and found my way through to her voice. Now I'm into it.

So, that doesn't really answer the question, I know. I like having all the tools. Each story is different and so are the various markets.

It would be interesting to know if you all like how I write one kind of POV over another - feel free to share!