Writers in the Storm

by Susan Squires

Reading is all about suspending disbelief.

Readers stare at a two-dimensional piece of paper or a flat screen with glyphs on it and imagine they’re traveling to unknown lands and meeting interesting people. They treasure being whisked away from everyday life. It’s an addictive experience.

As writers, we want them addicted to our books. It’s our burden to help readers suspend disbelief and come along with us for the ride.

When you write paranormal romances, your world may contain vampires, or magic or time travel. That’s a lot of disbelief to suspend. One wrong step and the book is put down, perhaps never to be picked up again.

So how do you get readers to suspend disbelief?

I’ve found that the main ways are familiarity, immersion, and speed. I’ll give some examples at the end from my books.

Your readers will follow you anywhere if they believe in your characters, your settings, and your events. So you must make them very real and immediate. As you do that, you have to keep two things in mind: recognition, and immersion.

The reader has to recognize who or what you are describing so they can relate to them.

You know how to do this. For settings, use five senses in your descriptions. Imagine how it would be to really be in that scene you’re setting. Choose a few evocative details so you don’t bog down the story (see “speed” below). Make sure the reader recognizes the description, so they can relate. (That means very few made up words, especially at first.)

Your reader has to recognize your characters too. How do you accomplish it?

• Make your characters complex with opposite traits and flaws. You want your readers to be thinking, “I know a person like that.”
• Be sure your characters react like real people. “I’d do that, too, if I was confronted with that situation.” That’s why you DON’T write the “too dumb to live” heroine. No one wants to identify with someone too dumb to live, even if sometimes we are.
• Make your characters vulnerable, because vulnerability gets us on their side immediately.

As you begin your story, don’t start out with an info-dump about the world, the society, the rules of the paranormal, or anything else. Start with a setting or event that readers can relate to. (Or, if you don’t start with the familiar, at least give your reader some pretty quickly.)

Let the weirdness creep in gradually, like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs the reader can follow to your new world. It helps if you put yourself in your character’s place. What would she be thinking about her world? She wouldn’t deliver a lecture on politics. She wouldn’t explain that the light switches work differently than they do on earth. Layer the detail in through the character’s eyes. That way we’ll believe it.

This also achieves what I call immediacy. Readers need to be inside the action, right along with the character, in order for the world outside the book to disappear. That’s why showing what happens, and not having the author tell you what’s happening, is so important. Every time the author intrudes, it gives the reader a chance to say, “Oh, right, this is just a book.” We don’t want them to remember it’s just a book.

Let’s talk speed. If you keep your story moving, readers don’t have time to think.

They can’t help but go along. They’re flipping pages, dying to see what happens. They’ll buy a whole lot more strangeness when the book creates a sense of urgency. That’s why it’s important to start in the middle of the action, not only for the book as a whole, but also in each scene. That doesn’t mean you can’t leave space for the reader to catch their breath. But the book should gather momentum until it’s racing toward the ultimate moment.

Isn’t this all this just good writing? Sure. Yet reminding yourself of these principles as you write, and especially as you go back and edit, makes a book that readers can’t put down, no matter how crazy your premise, or how wild the action gets.

Frequently, I layer in these principles in editing because I can’t think of them all as I write. And they work just as well for historical settings, or unfamiliar social worlds.

Now for some examples.

When I was writing BODY ELECTRIC, before SciFi romance was big, I knew I had an uphill battle. My premise was that a brilliant hacker falls in love with the artificial intelligence she creates. And then they have to get him a body. Even I wasn’t sure I could sell the reader on this, but the book ended up getting a lot of attention. Publisher’s Weekly named it one of the ten most influential paperbacks of 2002.

I glanced back through it, to see just how I got readers to come along for the ride.

Here are the first lines:

“Vic Barnhardt slammed on the brakes of her black BMW. Adrenaline surged through her. She’d almost hit him! The guy in torn denims screamed something she couldn’t understand as he thumped on her hood with the wooden handle of his sign.”

I wrote this scene during editing when I realized that the book didn’t start fast enough. So I put her in the middle of a protest against her megalithic computer company employer, Visimorph. Lots of action and danger to draw the reader in, but almost nothing paranormal.

Only in the second scene did I go back and begin laying in the situation, hinting that it was the near future, showing Vic working illicitly after hours to create her AI, Jodie, always on the verge of being discovered.

“The glowing silver symbols on the monitor burned in the darkness like the white light you walk toward after your heart stops beating. But tonight they didn’t seem like salvation at all. Music pounded through her earphones. Instead of helping her concentrate, the syncopated rhythms and whining keyboards of the Shards just scraped her nerves. Vic knew she was close, either to a break through or a break down… The smell of stale coffee and recycled air mingled with the vague chemical odor from her printer. Vic tapped her headset, clicking over to a soothing track of Organic R&B and took a swig of Diet Coke from the half-full can standing among several empties.”

Here I’m trying to put readers into that dark cube farm, with someone who’s on the edge. I insert some familiar things like Diet Coke among the unfamiliar names of bands, etc.

Lots of people have used work resources to do something personal, even if it’s just the copy machine. That’s something readers can relate to. I give Vic a character-based reason for her project, and some desperation to initiate a sense of urgency.

I ramp up the tension with an employee who knows she’s up to something and threatens to tell her boss. We learn that Vic has built a mole into the powerful secret computer in the Visimorph basement. I throw around one or two computer terms, but only one or two. Vic is surprised when the giant in the basement comes on line, and power surges through her desktop.  But the reader knows what’s going to happen here. And I think they’re ready for it.

“She had raised her hands into position, wondering what she should type, when the top box rippled. And a capital H appeared. Vic thought she might faint. An e joined the H.  Her hands, still hovering above the keyboard, trembled. As she watched, the screen slowly wrote Hello. A question mark appeared at the end, almost tentatively. Hello?”

This all happens by page 13. And, even with one word, I’ve started giving Jodie his own personality and vulnerability.

I won’t tell you how they get him a body. But by that time, the romance between them has grown to the point that you really want Jodie to have a body. Is the way they do it preposterous? Sort of. (No, I’m not going to tell you how.) Does the reader care? Nope.

Next I’ll use my new Children of Merlin series as an example.

Series are hard. For the first book, you can layer in the paranormal really slowly. But in subsequent books, you have some quicker explaining to do. So avoiding info dumps is really hard.

In DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?, the first of the series, I went back and re-wrote the beginning to give it more punch, using the old thriller technique of starting with the villain’s point of view.

“Jason saw his reflection wavering in the pool of blood under the streetlight. Pale eyes, buzz cut, burly. He looked like what he was: a hard man.”

At the end of this one-page first scene, the reader knows only that this hard man is afraid of an old woman, who leads something called the Clan, and they’re searching for the kids of a family named Tremaine, who might or might not have some unspecified powers.

No rules of the world. No explanations. Now it’s all about making the main characters seem approachable and real. So I opted for the mundane.

“Maggie O’Brian’s rig clattered into the dirt parking lot next to the diner. The four-horse trailer was one of those old iron slat jobs where the horses were tied in at an angle. It made a God-awful racket when it was empty. Truck wasn’t exactly new either. Ford F250, vintage 1970. But the big 390 diesel did the job. You couldn’t see much of the faded red paint under all the dust anyway, so the dings and dents didn’t matter. She climbed out of the cab. A kick-ass black Harley with minimum chrome and scarred leather saddlebags leaned on its stand in front of the diner windows, no doubt so the owner could keep an eye on it. Covered with road grit and sporting a couple of dings itself, it wasn’t a Sunday afternoon ride for some rich Hell’s Angel wannabe. That bike had seen action.”

The descriptions of their rides are really descriptions of the characters themselves, and the reader will know, if only subconsciously, that they’re made for each other, even when they don’t.

One way to make characters relatable is to tell the reader what they think of themselves and each other. Vulnerability is key to getting the reader interested.

This series is one of the few times I’ve let my characters be instantly attracted to each other. I always have a hard time believing that in a story. So I took pains to let the reader know that this attraction feels unnatural to the characters themselves. They fight it. We will eventually learn there’s a reason for that attraction. But because instant, violently sexual attraction requires more suspension of disbelief, I have to work extra hard to make the characters seem human and relatable, and…made for each other.

In that book nothing happens that the reader is sure is magic until page 30. By the time the magic really can’t be denied, the reader is prepped. I’ve heard readers say that they didn’t even like paranormal romance, but that this one captured them before they knew what had happened.

So that brings us to HE’S A MAGIC MAN, and the task of not doing an info dump in the first pages of the second book of the series to “bring the reader up to speed.” I again found a scene from the villain’s point of view useful.

“The old woman wheezed, gasping for breath. Time was running out. “Jason,” she whispered. “Come closer.”

I’m hoping the reader is intrigued enough by the first words of the book to want to know what she’s going to say. Facts can get revealed in conversation, and conflict can disguise what you’re doing.

The conflict here is that the old woman knows that Jason wants to kill her. At the end of that short scene, we know the old woman is dying. She thinks a sword buried somewhere in the Caribbean can save her. But since she has no time she needs a Finder to get it for her. This will create suspense when we first encounter someone who can find things. That’s all we need to get the story started.

That means I can get busy making my heroine into someone you can relate to. I let Drew tell us how good it is to know you have a destiny, while she displays her sophistication at a museum opening of Anglo Saxon artifacts sponsored by her parents. She comes off as a little smug, but we see why her friend Jane loves her. And I give Drew the first big setback to her certainty. She thinks she’s found her one true love in her professor, Roger.

“Girls did fawn on him of course. Understandable. There was one now, earnestly discussing bronze belt fittings, gaze glued to his face. The girl was stuttering something.

And Roger’s expression went soft.

Drew sucked in a breath. The exhibit seemed to recede. She knew Jane was standing beside her. But it all seemed distant. Because she knew what was going to happen. And it didn’t take a magic power to see it…”

As Drew leaves, Roger invites the coed out for coffee. And even sheltered Jane knew he was the campus Lothario.

This accomplishes two things. Who hasn’t been totally, embarrassingly wrong about something? We can identify with that. And we’re on Drew’s side. She’s been taken advantage of by her professor. She’s vulnerable. So when she’s instantly attracted to a guy she sees on television, and thinks she got a magic power as a consequence, we’re protective of her. Even I was silently shouting to her, “You could be wrong, Drew. You’ll get hurt.” When he turns out to be an alcoholic who’s still in love with his dead wife, we’re pretty sure we were right.

Of course she’s instantly attracted to Michael (aka Dowser because he can find things), because that’s how the magic gene they share works. But the fact that they’re perfect for each other gets layered in slowly this time. I want the reader to WANT them to be perfect before they are.

Michael is fragile, because of how his wife died, and guilty over being attracted to Drew. So we feel protective of him too. That way, when we get to Michael’s dead wife speaking to him, Drew’s visions of the future and a woman who has the power to raise storms, not to mention chasing off to Caribbean islands to find the lost sword of Merlin, the reader is already so involved in Drew and Michael, they accept all the craziness that ensues.

To recap...

1. Make your settings as real as you can.
2. Use the five senses and a deep point of view to make the story feel immediate.
3. Make your characters someone your readers know, and someone to root for.
4. Don’t ever pull your readers out of the story.
5. Layer in the craziness slowly.
6. Have faith your readers will figure it out.
7. String them along, all the time giving them something familiar to hang on to.
8. Keep the story moving fast.

Your readers won’t have a chance to disbelieve. And they’ll be addicted to that feeling of being swept away to another world. Have some fun with it.

Can you think of examples from books you’ve read, or books you’ve written, where you’ve been using some of these techniques to help draw your reader into your world? Which ones are your favorites?

About Susan:

Susan Squires is New York Times bestselling author known for breaking the rules of romance writing. She has won multiple contests for published novels and reviewer’s choice awards. Publisher’s Weekly named Body Electric one of the most influential mass market books of 2003 and One with the Shadows, the fifth in her vampire Companion Series, a Best book of 2007.

Susan has a Masters in English literature from UCLA and once toiled as an executive for a Fortune 500 company. Now she lives at the beach in Southern California with her husband, Harry, a writer of supernatural thrillers, and three very active Belgian Sheepdogs, who like to help by putting their chins on the keyboarddddddddddddddddd.

by Jenny Hansen

You can thank my husband and his knee for this post.

The wear and tear of fifteen years of football finally took its toll this last year and he hurt his knee working as IT Wonder Man at a conference in San Francisco.

He came home limping and the pain got progressively worse until he had to cave and go to physical therapy.

In our heads, his knee would need replacement and he’d be doing physical therapy to get used to the new knee. In reality, his work at the conference threw his body out of balance and the therapist spent eight weeks strengthening key muscle groups until he was back in balance. (He's fine now and we're doing Crossfit.)

My bloggy self always perks up at the mention of words like "balance" and maximum potential, so I sent Hubby in with some questions.

What was their goal for him?

To strengthen weaker muscles to balance with the stronger muscles to keep his kneecap aligned. His pain was from his kneecap (patella) literally being pulled toward one side of his knee.

Keep reading about what they did to achieve this balance because I swear it sounds like what we do as writers.

There are three components that assist you in keeping your body in balance:

• Your vision
• Your inner ear
• Your musculoskeletal control

(Say what??)

The example they gave him:

When you hold your arm out in front of you, you see your arm. As you look at your arm, you remain upright through the balance of your inner ear (which is the only aspect of this that is really out of our control). You sense your arm through nerve impulses transmitted from the core strength of your muscles which attach to your bones.

All this lets you keep that arm held out straight and still, for much longer than you might think you could. Try it…the act of staring at your hand, out there at the end of your arm makes a huge difference in the amount of effort you need to expend for this exercise.

The reality is that if any of these three components are out of whack, the arm (or the leg, or even your entire body) will no longer be able to stay upright. Focusing all three components on the task is what makes it work.

So how do we relate this to writing?

Let’s change the order around a bit and dig a little deeper.

Part 1 – Your Inner Ear

Your inner ear is your voice. Voice is the cadence that is essentially you; it’s what makes your work stand out as unique.

The best description I’ve ever heard of “voice” is:

Imagine you are sitting in a café, telling your friend a story. The way you tell a story is quintessentially you. You don’t stop to think about how the story sounds when you’re talking to your friend, you just tell it. The visual and verbal cues you get back are what help you time the rhythm of your story and play certain parts of it up or down.

The best part, and the hardest part, about writing is that we do it alone. There is no one across the café table, or computer screen, to tell you what’s “just right” and what is falling flat. We learn to recognize what works on our own (through Craft) or we find a great critique group.

Part 2 – Musculoskeletal Control.

Techie Definition: This control is essential in our balance and vital to our ability to walk normally. The mechanics of human ambulation, or walking on two legs, is quite unique in nature. It has been described as consisting of a cycle of `controlled falls', which highlights the complexity of distinguishing between a fall or stumble and normal, controlled walking.

This definition immediately made me think of a blog Kristen Lamb wrote on the importance of learning to fall.

For the writer, “musculoskeletal control” is Craft.

The more you exercise your writing muscles, the more balanced and resilient they become. It took me ages to recognize (and accept) that it doesn’t matter whether you can lift a five pound weight or a fifty pound weight, what matters is that you can do it a lot and do it smoothly.

In writer-speak that means: a good writer with the courage to approach the page every day is going to be published long before a great writer that approaches the page sporadically.

Just like targeted physical therapy can turn a weak knee into a strong one, daily writing can turn a good writer into a wonderful, well-disciplined one.

Craft must be practiced and honed with daily writing. All the greats say this – Anne Lamott, Natalie Goldberg, Julia Cameron – and it has always been the thing that made me groan the loudest.

Who has the time? I can’t! I don’t wanna!  My inner Lazy Ass said all that and more.

The reality behind these complaints was: I’m scared. What if I fail? Won’t that make my writing so important I will want to die if I fail?

We all have these fears, just like we all have that rat bastard inner critic. The fact is, no one said it would be easy. Writers are a tough breed and my money will always be on us. Just hitch up those titanium panties and sit your butt in the chair to write (as soon as you’re done reading this post :-)).

Some great Craft posts:

• “A Deeper, Richer Understanding of Craft” Part 2 by Larry Brooks (THEN read Part 1)
• Any Craft post by Sharla Rae – she’s amazing at separating huge concepts into bite-sized pieces.
• New and Improved Writer’s Toolbox by Laura Drake

Part 3 – Your Vision

Your visual strength is what you rely on after you’ve gotten the words on the page. Your vision translates into editing.

I know wonderful writers who have lyrical prose and the ability to create fantastic worlds with engaging characters. Yet they are still fighting to be published. Why?

Is it those mean editors? Those crazy publishers? I regret to say, it rarely is. Most of these writer friends tell me it’s actually because their editing or proofing is not strong enough yet. Practice makes perfect and we’ll all get there if we keep at it and build a powerful writing team to provide help when we need it.

There is a reason why Oscars are given for film editing – it is the art of separating out the unnecessary footage to keep the viewers hooked. It works the same with books.

There is a famous quote by Elmore Leonard that frustrates the hell out of most new writers: “I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” The structure of a story is a lot harder than it looks because we have to learn what parts people will skip and why.

Some fantastic posts I’ve found on editing are:

• The Three Simple Stages of Self-Editing by Jody Hedlund
• How I Edit by Nathan Bransford
• 11 Resources to Make Editing Your Novel Easier by Virginia Ripple (the one by Jami Gold is my fave!)

Wherever you are on your writing journey, DON’T STOP. The best is always yet to come because we keep improving the more we do it. What you hear with your inner ear and see with your writer’s eyes will eventually be translated by the “musculoskeletal” strength of your Craft.

I heard Linda Howard speak at a writer’s conference in San Diego some years back and I’ve never forgotten her words, which meant so much to me.

“Everybody dreams,” she said. “But writers are special because they write down their dreams.

“As writers, we can do anything and be anyone. You can be astronauts or spies or time travelers. Writers can go to amazing places and build imaginary worlds for others to visit.

“The sad fact is that no matter how hard you try, the music and the magic of your dreams will never be equaled by the words you put on a page.

“Do it anyway.”

Every writer in that room started crying because it IS so hard to translate the grand scope of our imaginations into words on the page. The words never seem quite big enough or important enough to express the magic that lives inside our minds.

My hope is that, even on those days when you feel that all is lost, when you wonder why you ever believed that YOUR words were important, you keep at it.

Do it because you have to. Do it because you need to. Do it because the act of sharing those words is more than most people will ever attempt.

And finally, do it because no one else will have the inner ear to hear the words exactly as you do, the strength to birth them onto the page, or the vision to translate those words into the perfect story that floats from your heart to ours.

Do it anyway. You won't be truly happy unless you try.

What part of writing do you struggle with the most? Voice, craft or editing? I have the hardest time with structure and editing myself, and head-hopping, and conflict and…Oh, sorry. Enough about me. What’s your writing albatross?

Till next time,
Jenny

About Jenny Hansen

Jenny fills her nights with humor: writing memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, short stories (and chasing after the newly walking Baby Girl). By day, she provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. After 15 years as a corporate software trainer, she’s digging this sit down and write thing.

When she’s not at her blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter at jhansenwrites and here at Writers In The Storm. Jenny also writes the Risky Baby Business posts at More Cowbell, a series that focuses on babies, new parents and high-risk pregnancy.

by Fae Rowen

Because I write science fiction, I have to immerse my reader in the most important facets of my story's world with the first words. When you add this into the requirements of an opening hook, portraying the "real world" of your characters, and setting up the inciting incident, etc., the beginning of the book can seem quite daunting indeed.

Here are the first two lines of Keeping Athena, a futuristic romance about two warriors from opposite sides of the battlefield of space.

Athena WARme stared out her singleship’s viewport at the fighters racing toward her squadron. Keep Sphere ships obliterated the black of space.

From this, you know she's a fighter pilot in a squadron, and she's engaged in a battle against far superior forces. Yep, she's in trouble. Let me explain my thoughts for choosing these twenty-two words to set up the action and the heroine's world.

1.  The heroine is named and placed in a ship by herself, so it must be small.
2. She's under attack.
3. A squadron is between eight and sixteen ships, so she doesn't have a lot of back-up.
4. The enemy is named and the attacking force is large enough to fill the emptiness of space.

The air hissing into her helmet tasted off. Her life support was failing. Too fast. She couldn’t separate the pounding in her head from the alarm bell in the cockpit. Sweat coated the inside of her glove. In seconds the atoms of her body would be dispersed to Agra-only-knew what quadrant.

After her ship is severely damaged, we understand what's happening to her, even though we've never been in failing spaceship. First, I engaged the readers senses: smell/taste (the air if "off"), hearing (pounding of the alarm bell), and feeling (pounding in her head and sweaty hands). The feeling is visceral, something she can't control, so the reader gets a sense of Athena's fear. The last sentence states that fear, as a fact. This shows her warrior mentality.

Soon afterward, she passes out, certain that she is dying. Here, she is regaining consciousness.

Since when is the cabin bulkhead on that side of my bunk?  She forced her eyes open, then squeezed them shut. The utter blackness couldn’t be classed as unusual, but the suffocating feeling of confinement screamed a warning.

She tried to sit up and banged her head against the same smooth metal her toes had rubbed against. Cautious, she explored the hard surface only centimeters above her face with her fingertips. Her breath came in short gasps, inhaling air that smelled medicinal. Where am I? 

Her heart raced. Panic set in. The Wraith had died in the battle, disintegrating with her inside. I’m dead, and this is my coffin.

Slowly, I'm doling out the technology of her enemy's world. I wanted to give the reader a sense of the "coffin" around her by showing how it felt as Athena explored it. Again, the visceral hits show her ratcheting terror, from cautious data-gathering, to medicinal-smelling air to panic. Terrified, she jumps to the conclusion she's dead.

Later, when she's a prisoner, the reader learns about the ecology and culture of the enemy planet only when Athena discovers them. Why would I want to make my reader wade through an encyclopedia of facts about an alien world, no matter how interesting that world is to me?

When world building, I have to restrain my enthusiasm for my creation so I don't info-dump unnecessary data.

Here, Athena discovers the enemy world is not like her own.

The metallic-tasting water irritated her eyes but made for great buoyancy. It probably contained a high level of useful elements that could, at some expense, be extracted. But then it could contain harmful substances as well. No wonder the Keep colonists developed a lifestyle using minimal fresh water.

The reader finds out the water tastes bad, but could be a resource, albeit a costly one, of useful elements. We have a reason for the extreme water conservation on the planet.

Soon, her swim takes a nasty turn.

A scaly florescent sea beast rose above the crashing waves. Jaws capable of swallowing her gaped open, revealing needlelike teeth, glistening and dripping a sticky pearly substance. The roar that came from deep in its throat was deafening. Slowly the creature slid back beneath the surface. The disturbed water collapsed on itself, filling the space the razorfish had occupied as if it never existed.

Laura Drake loves how I make up words to convey the idea of my worlds without having to use a lot of description. Razorfish is an example. You can build your own picture of a huge fish with razors for scales, for teeth--and I don't have to describe it any more than I did.

Here's an excerpt from my young adult science fiction WIP to illustrate that you can get a flavor of the culture through a short monologue. The main female character is a shuttle pilot.

“Okay, you dirt diggers. Listen up.” she shouted to the men who, duffels in tow, pushed into a crooked line. “I’ve got a couple of guests on this flight. They’re here to check on mine safety and production upgrades. If you’re real nice, they might listen to your suggestions.” She waved her tourists inside to take the seats she’d assigned them by the cockpit door. “Here’s your safety lecture. Same rules as usual. No pissing or puking anywhere but the heads. No fighting and no blood in my shuttle. If I have to hose down the inside between trips, I’m doing it with you inside. It gets rowdy, I make it real rough going in. Questions?"

She's just shy of sixteen, and fully in control of men twice her age. Yes, it's a rough world. And she's a no-nonsense, in-charge young woman.

One of the reasons I love science fiction is that the setting is usually tied directly to plot elements. And that setting dictates the futuristic society as well, if I've done my homework.

The same is true for historicals. Regencies have very specific settings--townhouses, country estates, ballrooms, carriages-- and societal rules which constrain the characters in ways that drive the plot forward.

Contemporary settings clue the reader to lifestyle. A young woman in Manhattan has a very different view of life than a single living in a sleepy resort town in coastal Maine.

Engage readers fully by setting your story in a world that strengthens your plot, characters, and their goals. When the setting also influences their motivation and conflict, you've used world building to its best advantage. Whether you blast your readers light years into the future or into the historical past, the world building rules and skills remain the same.

How do you use elements of world building, even if you're on Planet Earth, to enrich your plot and characters? Is setting your ally in the writing process?

Note: In case you missed Fae's World Building Posts, here are links to Physical Setting Part 1 and Social and Cultural Aspects Part 2.