The Romance of Writing a Novel

By Dani Pettrey 

Just like there are various stages or steps in a romantic relationship, there are stages and steps in the writing journey. Steps we can all reflect on and learn from. So what step comes first? Also known as ‘the initial spark’ comes:

The Attraction Phase: You begin to think ‘maybe I’ll write a novel or I have a story idea.’  This is what I like to call the daydream phase. You… flirt with the idea of writing a novel or a particular story and thoughts like ‘Should I do this? Can I write a novel? What am I getting myself into?’ run through your head.  

You hear quotes like:“There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the [computer] and open a vein.” ~Earnest Hemingway

“One must be a little crazy to write a good novel.”
~John Gardner

And you wonder if it’s worth it. However, at the same time as Beatrix Potter says: 

“There is something delicious about writing the first words of the story. You never know quite where they’ll take you.”

If you’re a writer, even if you’ve never written a word yet, you will be pulled to it. The story idea will grab hold of you and not let go. Then the question becomes whether you will answer the call.  You decide you are intrigued, you like the idea. It won’t leave your mind, so you go on to the second step.

The First Date: This is where you start writing, using any variety of methods. One thing I’ve learned as a writer and from my writer friends is that there is no one right way to write a novel. God made us all unique and therefore we all write uniquely. You take the advice that resonates with you and you run with that, ignoring the rest. God has His own journey laid out for you and yours will be like no one else’s, so there’s absolutely no need to compare.

A few fantastic quotes for this stage are:  “First drafts are for learning what your story is about.” ~Bernard Malamud.

“The only writer you should compare yourself to is the writer you were yesterday.” ~David Schlosser.

Then you move into the third step or phase.

The Second Date: This is where you really begin digging into your story. Perhaps you scope out available resources (books on craft, writing organizations, and writer groups), but in doing so takes a huge leap of faith. Announcing you’re writing a book can be scary because it lets the world in on your private story and many writers feel nervous sharing their desire to write a book. Hopefully you have wonderfully supportive response. But you do have a choice to make—will you turn away, decide it’s not worth the effort or will you move into phase four?

Make A Commitment: This is where you decide you are a writer. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t published yet. You are a writer all the same. A writer is, simply put, someone who writes.

By making the commitment, it means you’re going to get serious. You set aside regular, consistent time to write. And, you are going to not only write, but you are going to finish a novel.

"The hardest part of writing a novel is finishing it.”~Ernest Hemingway.

“Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have ‘essential’ and ‘long overdue’ meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.” ~JK Rowling

So, you continue on. You build your relationship with your novel, you get to know your characters, they come to live inside your head. You write on days you don’t feel like it. These types of days are often the most important days to write. You keep at it and hours, days, weeks, months, possibly years later it happens you’re married to it. You’ve finished your novel.  You time the end and you’re done…almost.

Next come the revisions and editing.

Pregnancy or Labor Stage:This is where the really hard work comes in. This is where you hone your craft. You look at word choice, you look at description, you pay attention to the tiniest details while keeping a watchful eye on the big picture.

As Stephen King says:“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

 And then, finally your novel is finished, polished and ready to go out into the world.

The Birth Phase:To quickly sum up this entire process succinctly there is a 5 Rule Quote I love, especially statement #5. It’s completely worth it. I love this quote because it fully expresses the beauty and power of story. Two quotes I love that capture this perfectly are:

“You can make anything by writing.” ~ C.S. Lewis

“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.” ~Dr. Seuss

The doctor is right. We need the power of story because it transports readers to seeing through another’s eyes, moving them to another place and time. Anything is possible through story, and it all starts with your God-given imagination. If you’ve always wanted to write a novel or write your second one, or fifteenth, follow these Romance Steps to get you to the best words in the world--and the often the hardest—The End.

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Praised by New York Times best-selling author Dee Henderson as “a name to look for in romantic suspense,” Dani Pettrey has written eight novels, which have sold more than 300,000 copies. Dani combines the page-turning adrenaline of a thriller with the chemistry and happy-ever-after of a romance novel. Her novels stand out for their “wicked pace, snappy dialogue, and likable characters” (Publishers Weekly), “gripping storyline[s],” (RT Book Reviews), and “sizzling undercurrent of romance” (USA Today). Dani’s adventure-focused Alaskan Courage series climbed the CBA best-seller lists, with Submerged staying in the top twenty for five consecutive months. The five-book series also won multiple awards, including the Daphne du Maurier Award, two HOLT Medallions, and Christian Retailing’s Best Award, among others. She turns her attention to crime and law enforcement in her home state of Maryland in her new Chesapeake Courage series, starting with Cold Shot, which Library Journal called, “a harrowing and thrilling ride.” For more information about her novels, visit danipettrey.com.

How to Think Like an Agent

By Janet Kobobel Grant 

If you want to connect with an agent, the best way is to think like an agent. Here are four tips:

1.     When we read a query, a proposal, or sample chapters, we look for a reason to say no.

It’s not that we’re inherently curmudgeonly (well, not all of us), but we have heaps of potential projects to look over. That means we have to be exceedingly picky about what we say yes to.

TIP: Presenting your idea or you, as the author, as run-of-the-mill will in not garner you a yes. Tell the agent what makes your idea and you a standout. If you don’t know what that might be, then you’re probably not ready to submit to an agent.

2.     Remember we get paid exactly nothing for reading what you wrote.

An agent receives a commission off of money his or her clients earn. That means every minute we spend on submissions is a minute away from selling something for our clients.

TIP: Use those first few seconds that an agent looks at your query to best advantage by showcasing the most attractive, amazing or unique aspect of your project. That might be a stunning title, your one million faithful blog readers, or an idea that’s about a perennially popular topic or genre with a surprising twist.

3.     Connect with each agent in the way he or she specifies on the agency’s web page or other agency listing.

See #1 and #2. This means emails addressed to “Sir or Madam” are hard for us to take seriously. Such a salutation says you’ll take any agent who shows interest in you.

This means do not phone an agent to spontaneously pitch your project. Such conversations turn into the agent providing a brief history of how submissions work, which might be helpful to you but that agent will not be interested in looking at your project.

TIP: Do your homework before contacting an agent. Know how that person wants to be contacted, what sort of books the agent represents, and some of the agents’ clients. Imagine, if you were an agent, how you would respond if a potential client wrote this in an email: “I’ve read and loved books by these four clients of yours: ____________, __________________, ____________, __________. I think you and I have similar taste in books. For that reason, would you consider looking at title of your manuscript, a genre or category of your project…”

Showing you’ve done some research on who the agent is, aligning yourself with that agent’s sensibilities, and treating the agent like a real person, will have the agent taking special notice of your work.

4.     Remember that part of an agent’s job is to find the next breakout writer.

Yes, we’re busy; yes, we make no money while we’re reading your proposal; yes, we see a lot that isn’t even vaguely what we’re looking for…but we’re looking. We’re always looking. And nothing gives us greater joy than finding.

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Janet Kobobel Grant is founder and president of Books & Such Literary Management, which consists of five agents and more than 250 clients. The agency began in 1996 and represents New York Times best-selling authors; and RITA, Holt Medallion, and Daphne du Maurier Award winners along with a host of other awards. You can find out more about Janet and Books & Such atwww.booksandsuch.com. Janet is active on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JanetGrantLiteraryAgent and on Twitter @JanetKGrant. Each Books & Such agent writes once per week on their blog at http://www.booksandsuch.com/blog/.

In Praise of Total Immersion (Or Why Authors Need to Submerse Themselves in Their Work)

By Joanna Campbell Slan

My house is a disaster, the laundry is piled high, my dark roots are showing, the message light on my phone is blinking, my refrigerator is empty, and frankly, I don’t care. Yesterday I put final touches on the first book in my new Trash to Treasures series, Tear Down or Die, featuring Cara Mia Delgatto. When I’m tap-tap-tapping away toward the finish line, the world could fall apart around me. My work-in-progress becomes a great black hole, sucking me into an alternate universe.

My husband calls on the landline to ask me how our beach is doing after a spate of storms. He’s in an airport, somewhere. I don’t exactly remember where. I tell him that I don’t know the condition of the local beaches. Ditto with our lawn. Mega ditto with the flowers we planted. I don’t know and I don’t care. I haven’t left our house for six days.

A friend sends a panicked email, “Are you all right? I’ve been calling your cell phone. ” I lie and say the charger is lost. The truth is I didn’t want interruptions.

When I am in the white-hot heat of writing, I speak aloud the dialogue. I act out the gestures. I cry along with the characters. I laugh with them, too. And it gets worse. Last night I dreamed I owned a Chihuahua, because I wrote one into my new book. This morning I woke up and wondered how I was going to justify a new dog to my husband. My real life Bichon Frise companions, Victoria and Rafferty, tried to nuzzle me awake. But I kept patting the covers rather than stroking them. I wondered where the Chihuahua had gone. Had he fallen off the bed?

All of this can be explained away because it occurs in the present tense. But when I write a book my new series The Jane Eyre Chronicles, things tend to get a bit dicey. As I pick up where Charlotte Brontë left off, I am transported to the year 1820. At real life social events I have nothing to say about leaks in the White House, but I’ll discourse for hours about how King George IV was bullied by his mistresses. Recently someone asked my husband if dementia ran in my family. He shrugged cheerfully and said, “My wife has always had an active imagination. The dividing line between fantasy and reality is a chalk smudge to her.”

Of this I am convinced: The more I believe in my creations and the more real they are to me, then the more vivid they will seem to my readers. Just as a long bath in hot water changes a raw egg into hard-boiled, so does immersion take my insubstantial ideas and turn them into solid images on the page.

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Award-winning and national bestselling author Joanna Campbell Slan is the creator of the Kiki Lowenstein Mysteries (an Agatha Award Finalist) and won the Daphne du Maurier 2013 Award for Death of a Schoolgirl book in her Jane Eyre Chronicles series. A native of Florida, Joanna is the author of twenty-one books, eleven of which are non-fiction. She also writes two other mystery series. In her past life, Joanna was a television talk show host, an adjunct professor of public relations, a sought-after motivational speaker, and a corporate speechwriter. She is the mother of Michael Slan, a professional poker player, and is married to David Slan, CEO of Steinway Piano Gallery-DC. The Slans and their two dogs make their home on Jupiter Island, Florida.  An indepth interview with Joanna can be found in the November/ December issue of Southern Writers Magazine. Visit her at www.JoannaSlan.com Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/JoannaCampbellSlan

Twitter: http://www.Twitter.com/JoannaSlan