Growing a book - 2

Okay so – here is a book-
The Italian's Forced Bride
- 53,000 words
- 184 pages
– 14 chapters –
and it all started from a seed.
And that seed was a single line.

Let me go off at a tangent for a minute. Yesterday I was saying that so many people think romances are ‘all the same’. They see those uniform style covers and they believe they cover uniform style content. And yes, it’s very, very, very difficult to write something new and original and amazingly different in a romance – they’ve been published for years and years (Mills and Boon was founded in 1908) and there are only so many variations on a theme you can come up with.
So what can you do to make your story that bit different/.memorable/appealing?

You concentrate on the characters.
Characters are people
(excuse me for stating the obvious but sometimes people both readers and writers forget that. Some writers create cardboard figures and then move them around to fit the plot they’ve created. And some readers say ‘I didn’t like it when he/she did that without realising that that’s exactly what makes a good character. We all meet people every day who do things we don’t like – that’s what makes them human.)
People are infinitely varied and fascinating and different. They are all pretty different from each other – and most of us are even different from ourselves at varied stages of our lives.
So you may only have a limited number of plots but you have an unlimited cast of characters.

To go back to my ‘seed’
There I was, getting dressed one morning. When I get dressed I always have the radio on – BBC Radio 4 - there’s always someone talking about something on there. Sometimes I listen with a lot of attention, mostly I wander in and out and pick up bits here and there, snatches of conversation. And that’s how I heard my ‘seed’.

A man was being interviewed. He was an athlete (I think!) You see I missed the beginning of the interview and if I heard who he was I’ve forgotten (my apologies to him – it’s not that he wasn’t memorable, but once I’d heard this line, I wasn’t listening any more, I was planning, thinking, dreaming.) He was talking about his baby son. And he said: “I looked at him and I thought – that child is the one and only person in this whole world who has my blood in his veins.”

Which is what set me off – the questions just kept coming:
Why would that be the case that the baby was his only family?
How could that have happened? Why?
When had it happened – that he had lost the rest of his family?
How would it make him feel?
How would he react?
How would he behave towards women?
. . .etc . . .etc . . .

By this time, my mind was buzzing with ideas. The what ifs were coming thick and fast – what if he found out that an ex-lover was pregnant with his child? How would he behave then?
And what if . . .

Ah, but that’s the bit I’m not saying because it gives away too much of my plot. But it’s where my own life experiences came into the book and I wrote about something that made me feel very emotionally involved with what I was writing. I must have put that emotion into the book as well because my friend and fellow romance writer, Michelle Reid, who has read this story already, sent me a note that said ‘You made me cry in the middle’. ( I was thrilled when I read that – I’m mean, I like to make my readers cry!)

So that’s how this book got started – that serendipity factor. If I hadn’t switched the radio on that morning, or if I’d got up half an hour earlier – or later – or I’d walked out of the room to get something from the bathroom and I hadn’t heard that line, maybe this book would never ever have happened. Which is quite a scary thought. Because as I write this, it’s sitting on my desk, 53,000 words of a story I’m proud to have written. (And – no, to the NZ journalist I mentioned yesterday, it was not written to a formula, it was not written cynically, it was a challenge and I very very definitely enjoyed writing it. )

People are always asking me that question – the ‘Where do you get your ideas from’ one. Most of the time I just have to reply ‘life’ because it’s life and people and their stories that inspire me. But this book, I could very definitely date from the moment of its conception and the second that that ‘seed’ was planted in my brain. From there it grew into first the details of a character, then the woman who was to be his heroine – then into their story at which point they took over and turned it into a complete book. With a beginning, a middle and an end.


The way I wrote the ending was interesting too – but I’ll have to come back to that. Maybe tomorrow.

You see, I have a book to write . . .