Blogging by the Sea

Overcoming the Monster - The protagonist sets out to defeat an antagonistic force (often evil) that threatens the protagonist and/or protagonist's homeland. Examples: James Bond (Ian Fleming), Jaws, Star Wars: A New Hope, Harry Potter (J.K. Rowling)

Rags to Riches -The poor protagonist acquires power, wealth, and/or a mate, loses it all and gains it back, growing as a person as a result. Examples: Cinderella, Aladdin, Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë), The Prince and the Pauper (Mark Twain), "The Ugly Duckling" (Hans Christian Andersen

The Quest - The protagonist and companions set out to acquire an important object or to get to a location. They face temptations and other obstacles along the way. Examples: The Iliad (Homer), The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Voyage and Return -The protagonist goes to a strange land and, after overcoming the threats it poses or learning important lessons unique to that location, returns with experience. Examples: Odyssey (Homer), Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), Back to the Future, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis), Peter Pan (J. M. Barrie),

Comedy -Light and humorous character with a happy or cheerful ending; a dramatic work in which the central motif is the triumph over adverse circumstance, resulting in a successful or happy conclusion. Comedy is more than humor. It refers to a pattern where the conflict becomes more and more confusing but is at last made plain in a single clarifying event. Examples: Much Ado About Nothing (William Shakespeare), Bridget Jones's Diary (Helen Fielding), Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Big Lebowski.

Tragedy -The protagonist is a hero with a major character flaw or great mistake which is ultimately their undoing. Examples: , The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde), Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Rebirth -An event forces the protagonist to change their ways and often become a better person. Examples: "Beauty and the Beast", A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens), The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), Groundhog Day,

I find it interesting that all those millions of books, movies and stories out there can be so neatly boiled down to these basics and yet encompass so much variety. And what makes them all unique? The endless permutations of the conflicts involved and the plethora of characters caught up in those conflicts. Conflict is the STRUGGLE! This struggle can be between characters, between your specific character and the society in which he lives, your character and the forces of nature, and in today’s world, your character and technology, and lastly, internally between your character and him or herself.

Years ago, I added the book Goal, Motivation & Conflict, by Debra Dixon to my shelf and it has been my mantra ever since. To paraphrase GMC: WHAT does your character want - the Goal, WHY does he or she want it – Motivation, and WHAT stands in the way? That last question is the conflict that drives the story. What is your character willing to do or sacrifice to get what they want? Some things to consider when you start throwing obstacles into your character’s path are their relationships to others, their sense of duty and responsibility, how they cope with failure, and what moral temptations or dilemmas arise? One absolute requirement for good conflict is the stakes. WHAT will be the cost?

As my personal illustration, I decided to see how many different aspects a single event might have depending on the character and what they have to lose or gain. I opted to consider a fire that destroys the local corner store in a city neighborhood and how it might cause conflict and end with very different results. Here’s what I came up with:

What if the owner of the building has been trying to buy the store operator out of her ten-year contract so he can level the building and put up something more lucrative? (A power grab or a desire for more money.) Maybe your character is the store owner and it’s been in the family for three generations. (There’s history here.) Or it’s a relatively new enterprise, but it’s your sole mode of providing for your family? (Another, though smaller, desire or need for money.) Perhaps your character has been working in this store their entire adult life and is too old to seek a new career. It’s possible your character was homeless and camped there when the fire broke out and is now seriously injured. Or maybe the store owner’s teenage son was making out with his girlfriend and both perished in the fire. Perhaps your character is the woman who operates a similar store across the street – how will she benefit from this? Or did she start the fire to reduce her competition to ashes? What if your character felt wronged by something totally outside the store, but torched it for revenge?

So, you can see how a single event might impact each character in entirely different ways. I’m sure you can come up with a few more scenarios to this fire in a small store on the corner in a busy neighborhood so you can begin to appreciate how more than 1,700 different novels were boiled down to only 6 major plot lines, or where Wikipedia’s list comes from.

I could give you a list of plot devices or the cliches often used, but instead I’m just going to leave you with these links to a list of 50 of each that included all the ones I could think of and more.

PLOT DEVICES: https://nofilmschool.com/list-of-plot-devices

THE CLICHES: https://nofilmschool.com/storytelling-cliches

My first published novel featured a man who had fought in Vietnam during the era when I came of age. It was partly inspired by my brother’s time there and things he shared with me over the years, but more than partly because I did the brainstorming and asked myself dozens of questions similar to the query about the fire above. For my protagonist/hero, the experience in his relative youth had left its mark on him, just as it had the thousands of young men and a significant number of women who were sent into the cauldron of that poorly understood war. My own brother and others I sat down to speak with were generous with their memories of the conflict, the place, the people, their fellow soldiers and, unlike today’s soldiers, the welcome they did not get when they survived and came home. Their individual reactions to all of the above were a lot alike in many ways, yet very different in others, so I was able to create a character using a piece of this and a bit from that, and color his reactions and his current viewpoint by those reflected experiences. When my story starts Matt Steele has been tagged to run for president of the US on his party’s ticket. Ultimately my Steele’s arc is most closely aligned with the rebirth option noted above, but given that I am a pantser, this was never set in stone while I was writing. I created the character, threw him into the fire and went along for the ride while the story unfolded. But that story was informed by conflict that had been experienced and shared with me, by the men who went to war and came home to build their lives around the wounds, the triumphs and the losses.

In my Tide’s Way series, I worked closer to home - well, not home specifically since I’ve never lived in coastal North Carolina, but in the day to day give and take of family life, love, children, work and community – falling generally into either the quest or Cinderella categories. A bigger challenge for me was when I dove into my police procedural series since I have never worked in law enforcement, nor had any family members who do, but the generosity of the deputies I rode with and the Citizens Law Enforcement Academy provided me with an amazing amount of inspiration and ideas and those stories would, I think be categorized as the Quest. My only historical to date was inspired by a sailing trip I took to investigate a deserted island off the coast of Maine. When it occurred to me to wonder what if I’d actually fallen into the old cellar hole and woke up in another century, I began to ask myself those dozens of questions and toss around all kinds of possibilities. That story falls neatly into the voyage and return category. In my new series, I’m incorporating some of the typical tropes (plot devices,) but tying two stories together with the same or similar conflict yet separated by time: one current and one historic, but both in the same setting and place. Obviously, I hope this new twist will be as much fun for my readers as it was for me to write and all the intertwined stories are easily defined as Cinderella or rebirth stories.

As surprised as I was to read that there are only 6 or 7 major plot themes, it turned out that all my stories do fit somewhere on this short list. I bet yours do as well.

For all of us, creating compelling conflict includes one other very important ingredient – creating characters the reader can care about or hate – with passion. Next month, we’ll discuss how to create those compelling characters to go with our convincing plots.

Today, I leave you with this: there’s a joke that’s made the rounds on social media that goes like this: What has 27 actors, three settings, two writers and one plot? The answer? 671 Hallmark movies. In all fairness, there have to be a zillion viewers who keep tuning in or Hallmark would change things up, but their formula works for them and all those zillion viewers and even this formula fits easily into the comedy category outlined by Wikipedia. Unfortunately, you and I and all the other struggling authors today have tough competition and we need to up our game to have our novels find even a small share of the market. We need to take one of those six or seven main conflicts and find unique ways to present them. Updated ways to tell the story and interesting ways to resolve them so our readers will keep coming back for more.

Hop on over to my fellow Blog Hoppers and check out their wisdom for creating compelling conflict without resorting to clichés.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 4 Comments | Email

Saturday, April 19 2025

Fictional Settings

Last month we blogged about using real settings for our stories and how to keep them authentic. This month we are exploring how to make our fictional settings feel real.

I’ve enjoyed setting stories in places people can actually visit, which offers readers a chance to either walk down familiar streets, or revisit places they’ve been, but my Camerons of Tide’s Way series is set in an entirely fictious town on the coast of North Carolina. I was pretty new to the published world when the first book in that series came out and I really was clueless about a lot of things more seasoned authors already knew, but I got lucky. My readers love Tide’s Way and tell me often they wish they could go there.

The original story in that series was a stand-alone book set in Anytown USA. Then I met the acquiring editor at Belle Bridge Books at a conference. She liked the premise and contracted the book, but she wanted it to be a series and asked for ideas for follow-up books. The first thing I realized was that I had to get a clearer picture in my head of this town; How big was it, and what kind of landscape? My first thought was that I wanted it to be more than just a small town with a book store and a bakery and perhaps an old house converted to a B&B. My second thought was where?

Being a lover of the ocean, I chose to put it near a beach. Being an East Coast girl, this ruled out California or Washington. I ended up choosing North Carolina, roughly between Wilmington and Camp LeJeune. That second location was because the heroine of the second book I tossed around ideas for was a Marine and the Marine base being close by somehow felt right. I had that second book half written when I decided to spend a couple days in the area, scouting out stuff like the climate and the terrain. While driving around I saw the sign for the airport and decided, why not check that out, where I discovered the building was all on one level. That side-trip was a lucky decision: I’d already written the scene where my heroine’s husband is waiting at the foot of the escalator for her to arrive home. I quickly rewrote that scene. I also visited Wilmington proper to get an idea what the city close to my fictional town looked like and what the amenities were, just as I’d have had to do if I had a town named Driftwood Cove on the Massachusetts coast north of Boston. I’d have wanted to get the known surrounding cities right when my characters visited them.

But what about Tide’s Way itself? First, I needed to know how big I wanted my fictional town. That kind of dictated what needed to be there, like a town hall, a library, perhaps a police station. Although some small towns are policed by the county sheriff’s department and won’t have a police force or station, I decided my fictional town would have a police department, but it was small enough to share quarters with the town hall. Any place but the end of no-where needs a convenience store and gas station? But, what else?

I started with a hand-drawn map. I needed to know where things were in relation to each other and where my characters lived. And I didn’t want to have them next to an assisted living facility in one book, then behind the grocery store in the next book. No matter how good your memory is, it’s easy to make a mistake unless you have a concrete image and a map is the best way to do this. Since my fictional town was in coastal North Carolina, I needed to have access to the beach, as well. My map was an evolving thing as I wrote. If I needed to have my character visit a cemetery, then I needed to add it to the map. Or a childcare center. A church or churches.

That was the start of the image in my mind about Tide’s Way. I did, as I mentioned, visit this area of the country to get an idea on flora and climate as well. Now I knew what kind of flowers I might see along the side of the road or in people’s gardens. I knew that it would be cool enough in winter for my characters to wear warm coats and hats, yet warm enough in summer for flip-flops and tank tops.

While you are creating your fictional setting, don’t forget not only what kind of things grow there, but what kind of birds and animals might be seen. No village or town on the ocean would be real without seagulls. Any village in Maine could have sightings of a Moose, and in the dessert out west, there would be coyotes and ground squirrels. In a city park you’ll always see pigeons, but in other places you might see crows or eagles. Your fictional setting needs to have flora and fauna appropriate to the area you have chosen to set your story in.

So, now you have your layout (map) with physical structures, beaches, ponds, roads, parking lots and shops. You have an idea of the animals and plants you want to see and can feature encounters with. Now let’s get the rest of the senses involved. Since we know what kind of plants there are, you can have the scent of blossoms, or the scent of fresh mown lawns. If it’s near water, make the scent of the water fit the scene: swampy, salty, etc. Do you want your setting somewhere in Alaska? Make sure you include how long it stays light in summer and how short the days are in the winter. The closer you are to the equator, the less difference there is in the length of the days, or for that matter, the changes in temperature from one season to another. Suburbia and cities will be light even after dark with streetlights, stores and traffic – the country will be dark, often with no streetlights for miles. A city will be noisy with traffic, perhaps even the sound of airplanes landing at the nearby airport. The country will have the soft, often startling sounds of animals foraging for food at night, or a dog barking in the distance. Nearby streams or the ocean will add the sound of water to your setting. Did you put a school or a park in your setting? Don’t forget the sound of children playing.

The best part of a fictional setting is you can make it whatever you want. What best fits your story, or your characters. Does Sam love to ski? Put him in a mountain town in a chilly climate with lots of snow. If Barbara hates the cold, move her further south. Jenny loves to fish, so a river, or a lake or the ocean will all give her skills a place to be used. The most important part is to find all the assets that not only fit the character, but the general area of the setting. Your heroine might work in NYC and commute, but chances are, unless she has a lengthy commute, she won’t be living in farm country, and if your hero is a cowboy, then the city isn’t his best setting unless you want him homesick and miserable. (Although that is an option if it fits the story.)

All my historical writing has happened in real places, but even those needed to be researched for what existed at the time. But if you are writing a sci-fi set in the future, you have all kinds of freedom to create whole new worlds. For those folk, I’d only suggest you keep physics in mind and make sure that your science and innovative creation is physically possible – unless, of course, it’s another planet or outer space where anything goes.

My last bit of advice would be to keep in mind to treat your setting like another character. Give it as much time and thought when you create it because you want your reader to fall in love with the place. You want them to feel like they’d be eager to take a vacation there or even buy a house and move in hoping to become neighbors for your characters. You want to draw your reader in to care as much about the setting as you want them to care about your characters. Give it quirks that add spice and interest. Maybe a holiday that only the folk in this little burg celebrate due to some event in the past, or a unique way of celebrating the holidays we have already. Or an annual event unique to this fictional place. (Boston has the annual Patriots Day Marathon and New York City has the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade so why shouldn’t your fictional town have a special day as well.) Maybe there is a monument so old all the wording has worn away and no one is really sure what it was for thus a myriad of tales have grown up around it. Maybe there’s a house or other place that is rumored to be haunted. Every setting, current, past, or future, has a history. Give your fictional setting some history to add to the fun.

Another bit of advice – I know, I already said one last bit, but this is important too. Now that you’ve created your fictional setting, you know it so well, you can just plop your characters down and let them start living their lives and coping with all the problems you are throwing their way. But you DON’T need to include every detail you have created in the story. Your knowledge of the place informs your writing and the lives of the characters you’ve created, but the reader doesn’t need to know every detail until it becomes a part of the story. If your character is visiting that cemetery in the dark, then you can mention the hooting of owls because that’s part of the setting, but you didn’t need to tell the reader that there were owls living there until then. I personally have stopped reading books by one of my one-time favorite authors because she includes reams of details that I don’t need to know and don’t care about, turning a 300-page story into an 800-page book. I found myself flipping pages, skipping whole sections that I found boring. Too much unnecessary detail slows the pacing and the action and turns the reader off.

As always, I’m sure I’ve only covered some of the possibilities so why not hop on over and check out the rest of the posts and see how they go about creating fictional settings.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 4 Comments | Email

Friday, March 14 2025

Settings: Keeping it authentic when the action happens in a real place.

The very first book I wrote (never published and likely to remain buried in my file drawer) was sort of set in London. I’d read dozens of Georgette Heyer books and thought I’d try writing a regency. The reasons it will remain just faded pencil on yellow lined paper are many, of which the setting is just one. I’d never been to London, so I wasn’t even familiar with the current day city. I also didn’t do a lot of research. I thought I knew enough about the setting just from reading other books set there. How naïve of me. Back then the internet hadn’t been invented and we didn’t even have email, so no google maps, and no searches to see what things might look like.

One thing you can’t do is “guess” or make something up that isn’t part of a real place. Anyone who is familiar with the setting will find your mistakes in a heartbeat and call you on it.

Today there are so many wonderful avenues for learning about a city, town, or country where you want to set your story. My personal favorite is VISIT the place. Turn a vacation into a deductible expense and have a grand time walking down the very streets your characters will find their stories unfolding on. Historicals will still require more research about what that place was like in the past, but even so, physically being there gives an author and insight into things you can only experience in person. Writing a story set in the future can have added things that don’t exist now, but it still adds authenticity to the story if a character thinks, or comments on something that “used to be here” or “remember when they tore that down?” And for current stories, there is even more to be learned.

I start with copious photos. Another plus of the digital age. Some of them I’ll likely print out and keep nearby as I write, and the rest remain in a file I can access when I want to remember what it looked like. These visuals are helpful for setting the scene and making it “feel” real.

I visit parks, monuments, historic buildings, street corners, public transportation centers, shops and more, and I chat with folks. Talking with people who live or work in these places can produce a fountain of information, some of which you might never have thought to look up or ask. When I was writing my first romance series, I set it in a fictitious town in coastal North Carolina, but even though my setting was to be a fictional town, I went there for a few days to check things out. I chatted with a gentleman who was trimming his lawn and learned about the tides and the climate.

I had already started one of the books in this series which opened on a scene at the Wilmington airport. I’d been in airports all my life and it never occurred to me to wonder if this was any different. My scene opened with my hero awaiting the arrival of his wife at the foot of an escalator and seeing first her legs come into view, then the rest of her. So, on this visit, I’m driving around Wilmington getting a feel for the city and I see a sign for the airport. Why not check it out? I thought. To my consternation, I discovered it’s all one floor. No escalator. Time to rewrite that scene. I hustled up to the security area for a better idea of what my hero would be seeing as he waited. Of course, the TSA guy came to my side in a heartbeat to remind me I couldn’t go down there. I explained what I was doing and that I had no intention of storming the security area. He described what I couldn’t see, then directed me to the information desk. The ladies manning this counter were thrilled to not only discuss the airport, but imparted information about the city itself that I might like to know. They also suggested more places I might want to check out while I was touring their city, and some of those very places ended up in my books, despite the fact that most of the action took place in the next town up the coast which was entirely a figment of my imagination.

When I wrote the only historical novel yet to be published, it was set partly on an island off the coast of Maine and partly in Boston and Salem Mass in the time of the American Revolution. I began with a day sail out to that island. It was at the time my book was set, an active community. Today that island is abandoned, but the cellar holes, an old cemetery and a few buildings still stand. I’d read about the island in a book about the area and its history, but being there ON that island gave me a feel for what it might have been like over 200 years ago. Then I visited Boston. I’d grown up just north of the city and had been there often but on this trip I was seeing the city through a different lens. What had it been like back then? I visited a couple cemeteries and a dozen buildings that had been there way back when. I noted the difference in the shoreline, where the wharves had been and where they were now. And I read dozens of placards that shared tidbits of information about Boston at the time of the revolution. Then I drove over to Salem and repeated my exploration.

Another way to envision a place in the past is when there are re-enactments. Definitely join that fun. The folk dressed up in costume are fountains of historical information. AND they do fun stuff like cook over open fires, or create things of leather or fur, or clay just the way it would have been done in the past. More pictures are in order because now you will have a visual of the clothing of the period. Museums are another great way to gain insights into the past and docents are even more willing to share information.

But now, you are back home and halfway through the book when a question pops up. Google is your friend now. Start with google maps and plug in an address as close to where you want to be. Then click on street view. You can virtually walk up and down that street and peek into yards, parking areas, down lanes and streets, check out the buildings, street signs and vistas.

I am currently writing a story set in 1928. Google is my BEST friend. In a single afternoon, I googled to find out what the most popular song was at the time, how men wore their hair, when the opening of a bridge happened, if peanut butter sandwiches, or even any kind of sandwich was a thing, what was the most common material used to put a roof on a house, was central heat available yet, and what about indoor plumbing? (This has nothing to do with setting but another great find online is when you are naming characters, plug in the year and find out what the most common given names were.) For the plotting of another book in this series, I wanted to know when the age of sail began to give way to steam powered ships.

And don't forget the senses - sounds and scents are just as important as what you see. Check out my blog on senses. A city street will be a cacaphony of noise, a country lane so peacefully quiet you can hear the grass rustle or birds chirping. A setting in the tropics will be swealtering while one set in Chicago in the winter, bone chillingly cold.

XXX

There is literally nothing you cannot find with a quick search. Some of the things you come across will require more poking about to get more than one opinion. Not everything you read online is true or accurate so it pays to look for multiple sources but take the time. Make sure the settings you are creating are authentic and realistic. Don’t let a reader catch you out by guessing and getting it wrong.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 02:10 pm | Permalink | 4 Comments | Email

Friday, February 14 2025

Love makes the world go 'round

They say that love makes the world go ‘round. Yesterday was just one example – so many celebrating Valentine’s Day either with their sweethearts, the memory of their sweetheart, or just with family and friends, kids and grandkids or maybe even their pooch. So, this month our Blog Hoppers decided to blog about love and romance and how it affects our writing. Some of us write specifically in the romance genre, but do our other novels have a hint of romance as well?

Well, I’ve done both. I have a well-received, award-winning romance series: The Camerons of Tide’s Way.

I’ll start with what I dislike about the genre. For much of the genre it feels a lot like watching the Hallmark channel where the characters, plot and town names are more or less interchangeable. Always a small town. Always someone returning for urgent one reason or another after having escaped the town they grew up in and always the person they had a romance with back in the day is still there and unattached so the love gets rekindled. Sound familiar? The overall genre of romance is more diverse than that, but the strictures of the genre are relatively narrow. My first romance was turned down by the first two editors I pitched it to, because I’d colored outside those lines. Luckily for me, the acquiring editor I pitched it to a third time not only asked for the manuscript but wanted additional ideas for a series. She happened to like my coloring habits. And apparently my readers did as well. That first book Falling for Zoe, orginally panned because the editor claimed there was too much going on, reached best-seller status on Amazon and two subsequent books in the series, Healing a Hero and Worry Stone won silver in the Florida Writers Literary contest. I enjoyed writing all of them, but if I’d had to narrow my style to fit Harlequin, I’d never have wanted to see them in print. At least not with my name attached.

This doesn’t mean I don’t love a good love story. I really do. Early in my adulthood, I stumbled upon Georgette Heyer and not only have I read ALL her books, they still grace my personal library shelves. I won’t name names, but there were other best-selling romance writers at the time that I read one book and never picked up another.

As I matured and my reading branched out, I began to look for adventure. I discovered books by W.E.B. Griffin – he has several series out, one set in the lives of Army personnel, another with Marines, two with spies etc. They are mostly set during war time, but the thing that appealed to me most was the multi-dimensional characters and the fact that they matured and changed as the series went on. One of the first books I read was about a young officer who was excellent at his job, but in his personal life seemed to constantly mess up in the love field. Other characters started out young as well, got promoted, ended up with wives and kids. IN other words, there was always some romance going on in those books, despite the distraction of military life or international espionage. And I loved them. Vince Flynn, David Baldacci, Steve Berry and others got added to my reading lists with equal enjoyment.

XXX

There is always something that breaks the rule and gets away with it, though. For me it was Jack Reacher. While I’ve read nearly all of the Reacher series, I do find the main character something of a Flat Stanley. Reacher has family: brother, father and mother, but they are rarely seen and even their influence on who Reacher is as a man seems minimal. He’s an honorable man, but one who’s a drifter, with no home and no responsibilities. When he takes a woman to bed, it’s just about sharing their bodies with no love lost and no looking back. As Reacher stumbles on total strangers who find themselves in trouble he never hesitates to jump in and right wrongs, along with delivering his kind of justice to the bad guys. But there just seems to be something missing in Reacher’s character in contrast to the men and women who people Vince Flynn’s stories or Tony Hillerman’s, who all have more depth to their personality.

But now, about my writing and how I incorporate romance into my non-romance stories. My first published Novel: a mainstream suspense -The Candidate, was set in the midst of a campaign for president of the US, and both my main character and two of the supporting cast had love stories woven in. It is not a political story, though. It’s a people story. My main character was happily married and that was part of who he is. Two secondary characters met and fell in love in that maelstrom of political conflict. Matt Steele, the hero of that book, has made missteps in his past that come to light and influence his campaign forcing him to make a choice between honor and possibly losing his bid for the White House. And that other budding romance is threatened by the opposition, leaving them with difficult decisions as well.

Crossfire:

Bullseye

I’ve also started a mystery series set here in my hometown of St Augustine, Florida. My heroine is the only female on the major crimes squad in the Sheriff’s department, for which I interviewed the real-life female on that squad to get authenticity to what it was like for a woman in that world. My heroine, Jesse Quinn, has a personal life as well. The series starts with her, the divorced mother of two teenagers. But she meets someone who clicks and there is a hint of romance added to her life. To me, the reality is that all of us juggle our lives, between the different hats we wear and more often than not, that juggling act brings conflict. When I read, I want the characters in the book to feel real. I want them not to just be a broker, or a banker, or a cop or a soldier. (Or in the case of the Hallmark brand, bakers, librarians, or book sellers.) I want them to be sons, brothers, sisters, mothers, lovers and friends, and often even pet owners.

My latest series, the first one Unspoken Promises will be out in April, is a cross between women’s fiction and romance so I get to have it all. Except perhaps the action of a cop’s life or a spy, or even someone in the limelight of a political arena. But there is a ghost and a love story over 200 years old. And the conflicts of real life along with a heavy dose of romance. (This is the image of The Captain Patrick Murray House which is the setting for my new series. It will be on all the covers. Note the widow's walk where my ghost is keeping watch.)

For me, Romance is the spice of life. But perhaps some of my fellow-blog-hoppers have a different take on the subject so here’s the list for you to go check them out.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 6 Comments | Email

Friday, January 24 2025

How does AI impact authors and their writing?

To be honest, the only change to my life as a writer that AI has brought about is that I now add the stipulation along with my copyright notice in the front of every book published that my work may not be used to train AI.

I wonder how many people understand how AI learns how to write, or how to create art in any form. For those who don’t know, AI learns how to write through internet crawlers that copy billions of words without licenses or permissions. That means, AI is stealing from work previously created by a human. When a live person does this, we call it plagiarism and it’s punishable under the law. In a school or college setting it can net you a flunking grade. Yet it’s okay for AI to do so? I beg to disagree.

Writing is at once, an adventure and a slog. An adventure that inspires our creative side. Or a slog that can often inspire an author to decide it’s time to go clean the mudroom, mow the lawn, or fold laundry. We’ve created a term for this stall – it’s called writer’s block. So, along comes AI in the form of apps like ChatGPT, Bing and others, that will do the slog for us. AI is meticulous about the rules for writing that we had to learn the hard way and still often transgress. And because AI has scrolled through billions of already written documents, it only requires a few hints to be typed in, and off it goes to create something new. Or is it new? I contend that it is not new since it has just reworked what someone else wrote.

AI can even write poetry, create new images of things that never existed, or paint pictures. But the one thing it struggles with is innovation. It also cannot feel, think or empathize. These deficits leave the writing somewhat bland and devoid of emotion. The whole point of reading for pleasure is to become immersed in the lives of the characters, both good and evil, and caring about what happens to them. If the characters don’t leap off the page and grab your heart, where is the pleasure? Or the reward?

For years I’ve picked up books with a great blurb and a teasing premise, only to be completely turned off by a lack of editing. Sometimes so off-putting that I’ll toss the book aside unfinished. Now I have to wonder, if I find an equally appealing blurb and then discover there is no emotional connection, will I have wasted yet more of my limited income?

Our literature reflects who we are as a culture, as a people, as a country and society. If AI becomes the only source of reading material, will we simply be conforming to the past and never growing into the future? Our knowledge and how we lived in 1225, or 1525 is vastly different than 2025 and our literature reflects that. As an example, if AI learned all it knows from work written long before the Civil War, slavery might still be viewed as an acceptable norm. Even as recently as the middle of the last century would have us stuck in a world where woman either were housewives and moms, or never married and went to work as teachers and nurses. We’ve come a long way in both those areas and our literature mirrors that.

AI does have a place in our world. Reports, and instruction manuals, daily ledgers and so many other things are great examples of places where AI can save a lot of time and effort and still produce easily digested information. Yet, as an author, I see the speed with which AI can create literary works (I use that term literary in the loosest possible terms) to compete with human authored work as a serious threat to human writers, both economically and culturally.

Personally, I won’t be resorting to ChapGPT or similar apps to help me write. I’ll tough out the slog part of writing and continue to hone my work manually. I’ll be as excited about my characters and their growth as I hope my readers will be. As a reader, I definitely will never waste what precious time I have left in life on a heartless, uninspiring novel created by an AI bot with no ability to think, feel or emote. Reading is meant to be an adventure and I enjoy it being an adventure when I'm writing, too.

Now that I’ve had my say on the subject, you might like to see how my fellow Round Robin Blog Hoppers view or use AI in their writing.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:39 pm | Permalink | 2 Comments | Email

Thursday, December 19 2024

A Christmas Story 2024

“We’re going to be late for the bus if you stand there any longer,” Sam informed his brother in his strictest voice. But it was hard to make his voice sound as threatening as their mother’s.

“But she looks so sad,” Philip replied turning away from the fence.

“She always looks sad. Now come on. If we miss our bus, it will be all your fault.” He could have just left and let Philip be the only one to miss the bus, but then he’d get in trouble for not watching out for his little brother. He sighed. Loud.

Finally, Philip gave a tiny wave and turned away. He looked as sad as the dog sitting all alone in a dusty patch of ground with an empty bowl and a dirty old tennis ball.

Sam had to admit that it was hard to walk by each day and ignore the little dog’s plight. It wasn’t a very big dog, and it seemed friendly anytime they’d ventured over the fence to talk to it close up. But it was filthy and it probably had fleas like their dad said.

With a hiss of brakes, the bus came to a stop when they were still half a block away. Sam grabbed his brother’s hand and ran, dragging the smaller boy as fast as his short legs could carry him. All the kids were already in their seats when they arrived, panting, and climbed aboard with the driver scowling at them for the delay.

“You boys need to leave the house a little earlier in the future. I might not wait next time,” the bus driver warned.

“Yes, Sir,” Sam mumbled as he hustled Philip in front of him down the aisle and into a seat.

~ ~ ~

“I want a dog for Christmas,” Philip announced around a mouthful of mashed potatoes, at dinner that night.

“If you’re lobbying for that mangy mutt down the street, you can forget it,” Mr. Ford said with a frown. “It surely has fleas if not something worse.”

“It probably sheds, too,” their mother added. “I have trouble enough keeping the house clean with the two of you traipsing in and out with dirt on your shoes and leaving your stuff everywhere.”

“But I’d give her a bath,” Philip pleaded.

“And I’d feed her,” Sam added in support of what he knew was his little brother’s most fervent wish for Christmas.

Mr. Ford’s eyebrows went up. He waved a fork in Sam’s direction. “For how many nights before you forgot?”

“Every night. Like forever,” Sam promised. The dog needed fattening up. Its ribs showed and it definitely would be hungry. Very hungry.

His father snorted and stabbed at the meat on his plate. “Not going to happen. Not in my lifetime.” Then he turned to his wife and asked about the guy who was supposed to come to service their furnace.

~ ~ ~

On Saturday morning, Sam grabbed his football and headed out to find his friends. He found Philip struggling to open the gate. His arms were full of old towels Sam had seen his mother toss in the rubbish the day before.

“Where are you going with those?” he asked as he clicked the latch to open gate.

“It’s been kinda cold the last couple nights and I think my dog is shivering.”

“It’s not your dog,” Sam reminded his brother. “You just wish it was.”

“Star is so my dog. Since no one else wants her, I decided she’s mine. Even if Dad won’t let me bring her home, I can still take care of her,” Philip insisted with a lift of his chin.

Sam had not known that Philip was worrying about the poor pooch even when they weren’t where he could see her. Sam felt sorry for the dog, but out of sight was out of mind and he was busy with a dozen other things. Apparently not so for his brother.

“She needs more than just a few towels for warmth,” he warned.

Philip hung his head. “I know. I counted the money in my bank last night, but there wasn’t enough to get more than just one can of food at Wilson’s store. I sneaked her some of my supper, but it’s hard to get enough into my pocket without getting caught.”

So, that’s what Philip had been doing when their mother chided him for dropping his biscuit on the floor. Sam tucked his football under his other arm and jammed his hand into his pocket. He’d grabbed a few bills out of his secret stash in case he felt like having a candy bar later on. He stuck the money into his brother’s pocket.

“It’s not a lot but maybe enough for some kibble that will last a few days. Just don’t let Dad know. He’d kill me if he found out I was helping you.”

Philip grinned. “You’re the bestest brother in the world.”

That warmed Sam’s heart. He draped an arm about Philip’s shoulders and gave him a bit of a hug. Then he watched for a few minutes as his brother lugged the arm full of cast-off towels down the street to the empty lot that Star called home.

~ ~ ~

“Why did you name her Star?” Sam asked Philip as they settled in for the night.

Sam had the top bunk and soon, he’d climb the ladder to his own bed, but Philip liked to have Sam tell him stories first. Philip always fell asleep quickly when Sam stayed to keep him company.

“’Cause that spot on her forehead looks a little like a star.”

Sam pictured the little dog in his head. Maybe it did look sorta like a star. A little, bit anyway. “Did she like the kibble?”

“She gobbled it down like crazy.”

“I hope you didn’t give her the whole bag at once.”

“I’m not that stupid. Of course, I didn’t give her the whole bag. I hid the bag under the crate in Mom’s garden shed. I can sneak a little out to Star every day.” Philip rolled onto his side and backed up to curl against Sam. “Tell me a story about a little lost dog.”

Sam sighed. Not a sigh like waiting for Philip to hurry up, but a sad sort of sigh. He didn’t know what would happen to the dog. Eventually he’d run out of money in his stash and the dog would starve to death. Philip would be inconsolable.

Sam’s brain scrambled for a story with a happy ending and then told Philip about a dog who liked tennis balls and could fit three into it’s mouth at once.

Philip giggled.

Sam went on to explain how the dog collected balls from the park behind the tennis courts and had a whole box of them. By the time he got to the part where the box overflowed, Philip was snoring softly.

Sam climbed out and snugged the covers up over his little brother’s shoulders. Then he climbed up to his own bed and settled in.

A dozen different plans to change his parent’s minds ran through his head but none seemed likely. If only he could think of a way . . .

~ ~ ~

He woke with a start. Something was pushing at his back. Sam grumbled. Philip didn’t often climb up to snuggle with him, but sometimes when he had a nightmare, he would. Sam rolled over to put his arm about his brother.

Philip’s hair tickled his chin. Hey!

Sam shot up to sitting. Philip’s hair wasn’t that long. Sam rubbed his eyes and pulled the blanket aside. Curled up in the middle of his bed, with a big red bow around her neck, Star blinked up at him.

“Philip!” Sam hissed as loudly as he dared since it was still dark out and he didn’t want to wake his parents. “Philip! Get up here!”

He heard his brother stirring.

“Waaa?” was the sleepy reply.

“Get your butt up here.”

Star put her head back on her paws and closed her eyes.

Philips bare feet plopped softly on the steps the upper bunk. Then he was crawling up the length of the bed. “Why did you wake me up, Sam?”

“What is Star doing in my bed?”

Philip straightened so fast his head hit the ceiling. “Star’s in your bed?”

Sam peeled the blanket back some more to reveal the whole of the sleeping dog.

Philip launched himself forward, gathering the dog into his arms as he fell against Sam, with a happy giggle.

“Santa must have put her here. See the bow around her neck?”

Sam wasn’t about to tell Philip Santa wasn’t real, but if Philip hadn’t brought the dog home, then who did?

“Are you sure you didn’t bring her home?”

“I was sleeping,” Philip said, still happily petting the dog, but looking earnestly into Sam’s face with a puzzled frown.

Sam wasn’t sure what to say next. But then he heard a soft murmur and looked out over the rail of his bed.

His mother, her fuzzy winter robe clutched about her middle, had a finger to her lips. His dad, glancing over his mother’s shoulder, winked.

Sam sank back into the warmth of his bed and wrapped an arm about Philip and the little dog. “I guess Santa must have known how much you wanted to have this little Star in your world.”

~ ~ ~

I hope you enjoyed this little story and I wish you a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful, Happy New Year. Now perhaps you'd like to hop on over and find out what my fellow Round Robin Blog Hoppers have written for your holiday pleasure.

~ ~ ~

Other blog hoppers:

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 08:15 pm | Permalink | 2 Comments | Email

Friday, November 15 2024

Creating Careers for your Characters

The beginner writer adage has been mentioned before, I know, but newbies are urged to “Write what you know.” And that’s a great way to begin because knowing the places or the jobs or what it’s like to be a mom etc. makes it a lot easier to write believable fiction. But after the first couple books things change. Unless you’re writing a series with the same nucleus of main characters, eventually, you have to start looking outside of the box you’re familiar with. Hallmark seems to get away with having the same small-town scene, usually snowy and close to the holidays and the characters always seem to be in bookstores, bakeries or bed and breakfasts. But the rest of us need to get a little more inventive.

Which leads to finding the right job for your characters. All your characters need some kind of career, unless they are old enough to be retired or still in school, but the ones you need to be most concerned about are the main ones. So, how do we choose?

Sometimes it depends on the genre. If you’re writing suspense, police procedural, PI or international espionage, then the career is pretty much set and your next job will be making yourself familiar with what those jobs are like. Sometimes the genre doesn’t determine the career. I have a wonderful book titled: The Occupational Thesaurus – A Writer’s Guide to Jobs, Vocations and Careers, by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. This truly awesome reference not only outlines the career/job options, but it includes information like required training/education, useful skills and talents, helpful character traits, sources of friction, how this occupation might impact the characters and their needs, how to twist the stereotype and reasons why a character might choose this occupation. With a guide like this, if you already have a plot, and you have some ideas on occupations, you can look them up to see which best fits your plot or other characters and conflicts.

Choosing the right career or job is critical to whether you plot works. If you have a long-distance trucker or a soldier trying to strike up a romance with a woman who hates to be left alone or left out – there will be serious conflict. Now the question is, will this conflict support or sink your plot? Sometimes it might be good to have two characters who have careers that create this kind of conflict which, in itself, becomes the plot or the story. Other times it might add pressure to the main plot. But there might also be times when the career choice is all wrong for the story you are writing. If your story is about someone who wants to be an entrepreneur, then turning them into an airline steward or a cop probably won’t work. Neither would someone who has zero fashion sense be much good at interior design or modeling, nor would a character who is shy do well as a real estate agent or a concierge in a classy hotel.

Once you’ve decided what kind of characters you need to people your story and support your plot, how do you break out of that box of writing what you know? Ask questions, visit job fairs, talk to friends and neighbors in the appropriate industry, shadow people in those careers, ask questions of perfect strangers if they are busy doing the job you need info about.

When I started my mystery series, my main character was a female detective on the major crimes squad with the sheriff’s office. I’ve never been in law enforcement, nor been related or married to anyone who is. So, I started with taking the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Academy which turned out to be so comprehensive I learned how the whole department operated and could have included key characters who worked in dispatch, accounting, with the K-9s or on any of the special squads. But my heroine was to be a detective. So, I sat down for a very, VERY lengthy lunch with the only female on my local sheriff’s department’s major crimes squad. Not only did she give me a clear vision of what her job was like, but she gave me ideas I might never have had on my own. She even made herself available to answer any questions that came up while I was writing the book and kept that promise. I followed this up with two ride-alongs which put me right in the car with them, experiencing a patrol deputy’s typical day. If I’d chosen to make my heroine a spy or an undercover deputy getting this kind of first-hand information might have been a whole lot harder, but there are always retirement homes full of people who would love to share old stories of their careers and you never know where that might lead.

Not every career would have a course like the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Academy that I attended to fill that void in my personal experience, but shadowing someone in a career or just visiting their spaces and people watching is a start. If you want to set a story in an ER, then spend a day in one. If you share the reason for hanging around that doesn’t involve a medical emergency with the people who work there, you might be amazed at how much they would be willing to share. In fact, almost everyone likes to talk about their jobs, both the good and rewarding parts and the awful stuff that just needs putting up with. Need your character to be a teacher? Ask one if you can follow them through a day or a week. Ask a commercial pilot what it’s like to sleep in a different city every other night, or a car salesman how it feels to get shot down more often than they watch the new car drive off the lot. There are lots of jobs you can learn about just by watching, but never just settle for the watching. Ask questions, and better yet, tell them you are a writer and your hero is whatever they are and ask if they would be willing to answer questions that might come up later. I have never been turned down when I’ve asked this of people.

While Job Fairs are mostly aimed at showcasing careers to youngsters about to graduate from high school (or even college) this one place you’d get to visit booths representing a vast and varied array of careers. Some fairs, to be honest, are PR gigs, or political in nature, but people everywhere love to talk about their jobs, so, it might be a good place to find out what the education and training requirements would be as well as the expected pay scale and what kind of companies hire etc. And any man or woman at a booth that’s not being swarmed with kids would be happy to share information with you. They might not have details like the book I mentioned above about personality traits and talents, but they could definitely fill you in on the good, bad and ugly about their careers, where the best colleges or training schools are for this job, what their day-to-day life is like and especially, given why they are there, the rewards of pursuing their career. There might also be military recruiters available, but they aren’t likely to tell you the really ugly part about a military career. For that, talk to a veteran.

If you are writing historical novels, the whole career hunt will be different. Unless your book is set since the middle of the last century, your search will mean reading up on the history of the era, pinpointing jobs that fit your plot, and then researching what it was like in that particular era. There are still a few folks around who lived through WWII, but prior to that, it’s going to be reading research. Here I’d suggest journals when available or biographies. I’ve only written one historical prior to any living memory. My book was set during the American Revolutionary War. My absolute best resource was a book titled: The Spirit of Seventy-Six – The Story of the American Revolution as told by Participants. This book introduced each chapter with a summary of the events and ramifications, then proceeded to “show” the story through the eyes of those who lived them, via journals, diaries, letters, and official reports. While I learned a lot of details about the war I’d never learned in school, I also got a peek at what their lives and jobs were like. Be curious – read about the lives of people in your era, especially as it’s told by those who lived them.

Whatever your reason for choosing the careers you do, whether it’s one you already know, or one you want to live vicariously, do the research, and turn your writing into a book your readers can’t put down. And be sure to check out what my fellow blog-hoppers have to say about this month’s topic.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 04:40 pm | Permalink | 6 Comments | Email

Friday, October 18 2024

Indie or Not?

Some authors have been and always will be traditionally published. Some decided right from the get-go to self-publish. Then there are the hybrids. I’m one of those.

I wish I still had a traditional publisher. There are a lot of plusses. For one thing, I didn’t have to worry about finding editors or cover artists and formatters. I especially didn’t have to worry about marketing. I did do my share of self-promoting, but the publisher I was with had a woman I dubbed “The Energizer Bunny” of marketing and I appreciated all her efforts. Having a deadline was another plus as it kept me focused and on a timeline. I enjoyed being a part of my publishing house community and I’d still be there, except…..

My acquiring editor retired…. The head of my publishing house bought my next book, but with Deb gone, my manuscript was farmed out to a contract editor. There were several things I didn’t enjoy about this experience. The first was that she originally worked with a big NY publisher and she had a very VERY narrow view of the way a book needed to be written. I was asked to make changes I didn’t like or agree with, but having contracted my book, I was not given a choice. One of the biggest issues was that I'd carefully woven all the backstory my readers needed into my romance/time travel. My contract editor wanted it all taken out and put into a prologue. For one thing, I’ve known plenty of readers who routinely skip prologues and epilogues. For another it meant creating an action scene that had nothing to do with the story. As it turns out, readers didn’t care for it either. I submitted this book to the Florida Writer’s Literary Awards contest – a contest I’d placed silver in twice. While my time travel managed to move into the finals, all four of the judges panned the prologue and suggested that the book would have been far better had my backstory been woven into the plot. I knew my book and my readers better than the contract editor, it would seem.

In addition to this, my Energizer Bunny had moved on to a bigger publishing house – and why wouldn’t she? She was talent, energy and a great salesman. But that left a newer, less intuitive and less experienced replacement in charge of marketing my new book. Sadly, it did not do nearly as well as any of my previous books and the head of acquisitions decided not to contract the next book in the series they had already released four books for. I opted to go indie.

I found a good copy editor and I have a vigorous, candid critique group that was a great replacement for content editing. I was directed to a woman of great talent for creating good covers who not only read my manuscript to understand the story and get a feel for what the cover needed to convey, but she also took into consideration the covers for the previous four and kept the new covers similar in style and content. Now it was time to format and upload my book.

I hate to admit my age, but I have to confess, I grew up BEFORE computers. Kids that were born into this age of IT have a far easier time than I ever will understanding how things work online. I did my best, but still ran into problems. I was fortunate that a very nice man at Amazon was willing to reformat some of my images to fit their protocols. A fellow author helped me with some of my formatting issues, and after a long and stressful effort, my book was finally out there. I was thinking, at the time, that the next book would be easier. NOT SO! Everyone updated their software in between that first book and the second and the learning curve I thought I’d conquered, was out there again, perhaps even steeper than the first time. But I did get it done and book 6 in the series was released. I’ve since added paying for a professional in the field to format and upload my books to Amazon and Ingram.

Now the other stressful issue raised its head. I am NOT A SALESMAN. I am an author. I just want to write, not sell books. Every effort, from FB parties to give-aways to posts on all my various social media sites are an everyday slog that I HATE. You might think I’ve gotten better at it, but that hasn’t happened. I still hate it and I am no better at it now than I was five books ago. I just want to write. Not spend time figuring out how to sell what I write.

If I could go back to being a traditionally published author, I’d do it in a heartbeat. On the plus side, however, once I've paid for the cover art, the copy editing and formatting, I get to keep ALL the proceeds from the sales.

Either way, it’s a good thing I’m not relying on income from my writing to support myself. In today’s world there are few authors who can say that their book sales do meet this goal. It would be nice to make a best seller list again, but even if I don’t, at least I still enjoy the whole story-telling process of writing a novel. I enjoy the research that goes into each book and I love creating new characters and throwing them to the wolves so I can watch them figure out how to save themselves. And I love being a published author – both traditional and indie.

Check out some of our other Round Robin Blog Hoppers and see how they get published and what they like or don’t like about the business end of writing.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 05:39 pm | Permalink | 2 Comments | Email

Saturday, September 21 2024

The challenge of a whole new genre

Can you believe it's September already and time for another Blog Hop? This month we are going to discuss the wisdom or experience of trying to write in a whole new genre.

Some writers swear that you should find your niche and stick with it. If you’re traditionally published and have an editor they will likely echo this advice since they prefer a known seller to an unknown possibility. And for many authors, this is likely wise advice because each genre has its quirks and the readers their expectations and it’s not like once you’ve learned to ride one bike, you can ride any bike. Think of it more like, you learned how to ride your training bike first but the day your dad took the training wheels off, things were a little trickier. Or, once you’ve completely mastered the two-wheeler, try a unicycle. It really is a whole new skill set.

But then there are writers like me who have an itch to try different stuff, be it writing or just life in general. I started my family young and grew into motherhood as my kids grew up. But when the last one graduated from college, my first thought was “What Next?” Well, my first what-next turned out to be jumping out of perfectly good airplanes. Which was definitely a whole new skill set. But I loved the challenge and the experience of flying through the air first like superman, then the extraordinary ride under canopy so far above the earth the only sound was the soft flutter of the parachute and I could see for miles and miles. I got my license at a jump zone on the border of New Hampshire and Maine, yet I could see Mount Washington to the north and the Atlantic to the east. Absolutely amazing.

But parachuting, I quickly learned, was a sport for daredevils. While I loved the canopy ride the best, all the far younger jumpers preferred the 125 mph plunge through space while doing tricks, and then, with high performance chutes, doing more stunts under the canopy. So, I was still looking for what next. I ended up joining the Peace Corps and was stationed in the South Pacific where I not only taught English as a Second language (I was not a teacher before that), but got to live in a very different culture, learn new craft skills, swim in beautiful turquoise seas over coral reefs with colorful fish, crawl through lava tubes and climb volcanic mountains, crew on yacht’s that visited our humble island and so much more. And the kids – they were the best part of that whole experience.

But before I left, I had friends my own age (in the 50s) who were sure I’d lost my mind. Give up my beautiful big home and live in God only knew what kind of conditions? Travel to a place where I didn’t know the language? Do a job I’d never done before? Thankfully, I didn’t take their advice because, if I had, I’d have missed the most fantastic experiences of my life.

So, here I am, a published author with a nice editor and a comfortable publisher and a relatively successful romance series. Why would I want to try something new? For the same reason I jumped out of airplanes and signed up for the Peace Corps. I was eager for a new challenge. A fellow member of a romance writer’s group I was part of at the time mentioned having participated in the Citizen’s Law Enforcement Academy. At the time, I didn’t see the point, but then, as my itch for a new challenge grew, I decided to try writing a mystery. Specifically, a mystery set here in this lovely city steeped in history that I now called home. So, I signed up for the academy.

Which is where the first challenge came in. Romance, with the exception of my one time-travel, didn’t require much in the way of research. But now I was learning how the sheriff’s office does business and what a deputy’s life and work are like. An eye-opener I’d recommend to everyone even if you don’t plan on writing a mystery since it’s an awesome way to gain a healthy respect for law enforcement in general and the demands and sacrifices of the men and women who serve.

The second challenge was HOW to write my story. In my romances, I was what they call a Pantser – meaning I wrote by the seat of my pants. I created my characters, the main ones with multi-page dossiers, so I knew who the players were. I knew what the basic conflict was, but I had zero outline or plotting before I sat down to write. I threw my hero and heroine into their respective trial by fire situations and let them take me with them on the journey to resolution and their happy-ever-after. But the mystery genre doesn’t lend itself to this approach.

For one thing, you have to know: Who did it? Why? With What? How? And Where? All ahead of time. And you also need a few red herrings to toss into the mix to keep the readers guessing until the end. But where do those red herrings appear? And when and how do you reveal the rest of the mystery? Suddenly I had to learn how to plot a book. I attended several workshops on the topic and I’ve got a few great books on my shelf, but it was still a HUGE challenge. Plotting my whole story out before I start. Really???

Fortunately, I do enjoy research, though, because that part of the new genre I enjoyed. I loved the whole academy experience as well as two ride-alongs, one with a very nice guy and one with a female deputy who happened to be a K-9 officer. So, I got to ride along with a K-9 while I was at it. And then there was a very long lunch with the only female detective on the major crimes squad and all my interactions with her whenever I needed a question answered later.

So, that’s one of the challenges of trying a new genre – the research. Another bit of wisdom tossed to new writers is “Write what you know.” So, if you happen to be a retired military pilot than writing a series featuring military pilots is probably a great place to start. If you are or have been in law enforcement, then writing mystery or police procedurals would be an easy start. Likewise, if you teach or have raised kids, stories about kids has a lot of built in knowledge. But eventually, no matter what genre you write in, you have to start branching out. For instance, in romance the basic story of boy meets girl and they can’t get together for some reason, how they overcome that reason etc is pretty much going to stay the same. How a detective goes about solving a crime and how the current laws might or might not be helpful along the way is knowledge you have without going after it. But not every character can have the same career. Not every murder has the same riddle. Not every conflict is going to have the same solution. So, perhaps research is here to stay even if you stick to the same genre. But do consider the scope of research you will be required to do if you choose a new genre.

The next challenge is. READ READ READ – in whatever genre you are considering trying, read books by best-selling authors in those genres, because one of the most important things you need to know is: What is the reader expectation? What kind of resolution will your new audience expect? I’ve heard the old saw on murder mysteries is that you can kill anyone, just don’t kill the dog. Which is probably pretty true. The poor dog didn’t do anything to deserve it so the reader isn’t going to be happy if the dog dies. If you are writing thrillers there will be an expectation for a nail-biting action throughout the story that isn’t resolved until the very end. In a romance there is ALWAYS a happy ever after. Spies need to be clever and deceit always a part of the plot, yet always a surprise. Paranormal has its own set of expectations in a variety of sub-genres from vampires to time travel. Even if you decide on non-fiction, depending on the area you choose, there are expectations that need to be met. And it’s imperative as the author of this new story to know what your readers expect so you won’t disappoint them.

And that’s my advice on trying a new genre. It’s not for everyone, but it is an adventure. And yet, it should not be an adventure into the unknown. If you decide to try it, do your homework, then go get ‘em and have fun along the way. And check out what my fellow-blog-hoppers have to offer on the topic.

Posted by: Skye Taylor AT 12:02 am | Permalink | 4 Comments | Email

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