All About Alphas 3 - the challenge

Several of you have written to say that you are concerned about writing an alpha who appears to be either too soft or too tough.

Jill is worried that the men she has as examples are ". . . more your laid back, take life as it comes sort of guys, which I love."

Rach would "really like your thoughts on getting the Alpha character somewhere between too 'ferocious' and just too damn 'nice'.

and Monique says just: "I don't want him to be horrid."

I'll come back to this but for now I want to say something that I feel is important. And that is that when you are writing a romance, you are writing a story with a short, intense focus on a particular time in your characters' lives.

A time of crisis.

A time of challenge

You are not writing a day to day, plod along, matter of fact time but a time when things come to a head, when crises develop, when questions have to be asked, problems faced, mistakes acknowledged, challenges faced and dealt with once and for all. And those are uncomfortable, difficult, complicated times. The times we would all try to avoid if we could.

But in a romance, if your hero and heroine are to be able to sort things out, resolve the conflicts between them - and conflict is a whole different Q&A - then they need to go through this difficult time, this crisis and then reach a final catharsis which has the reader believing that they can go forward into a happy ever after future together.

Let me try to illustrate this. And seeing as our archetypal hero is Hugh Jackman, who better to illustrate it?

Last night I watched an TV interview with Hugh Jackman. Lovely man. Tall dark, incredibly handsome, incredibly fit and toned, talented, successful . . . A perfect alpha hero. He has to have to alpha characteristics of drive, commitment, dedication, self assurance, determination . . . to get where he is. It's not just talent but the way he uses it.

He was also articulate, intelligent, charming, witty. So some would say there was the Gamma hero - and I'd have to agree. No reason why an Alpha can't have Beta characteristics.

Clearly a family man, caring about his children. He gave of himself to the interview and was a delight to watch. Beta characteristics there? Again no reason why not. no man - no person is soley and totally just one thing.

But he was in a relaxed and comfortable situation. And he was on public show.

Now imagine that after that interview this man went away from the TV studios, back to his home or hotel suite and met with someone who challenged him totally. Someone who - he believed - threatened his sense of right and wrong, his code of honour. Someone who maybe threatened his family, those children he cared about. Someone who threw him emotionally right off balance with feeling that he just didn't expect, didn't want, didn't like. Someone who emotionally put him with his back against the wall so that - whether right or wrong - he felt that he needed to sort things out, to take up the challenge that was thrown at him, and deal with it.

I can well believe that the person who set off those feelings in him would see a very different man from the one laughing on the sofa on the TV set.

And then later what if he discovered that his inital beliefs about that situation had been wrong all the way along - and he'd made some really bad mistakes?

Uncomfortable. Difficult. Possibly dangerous. You bet.

That's the sort of situation, the conflict, that your hero ends up in. That's the man whose story you are telling. The man who is reacting to a crises and to what he feels needs to be done to sort it out.

nd because you pitch him against a heroine who throws him totally off balance because he experiences feelings for her that he has never known before. And possibly because he feels that she is completely the wrong person to feel those emotions about, then his reactions - good or bad - are even more intense, even more heightened. He's in asituation that is out of his comfort zone, where the way he's lived up to know, the coping techniques he's used, the things that have worked in the past, no longer work. He's dealing with diferent sorts of dangers - emotional dangers - the ones that can break hearts.

It's like the old-fashioned knights who lived by a strong code of honour and didn't go round trampling people under their horses' hooves, or lopping heads off will-nilly - but when someone challenged them - literally 'throwing down the gauntlet' - then that was a different matter.

And the heroine is the one who throws down that - emotional - gauntlet. He's not like this with everyone else. Probably not with anyone else - just her.

(c) Kate Walker

To illustrate this, I'm going to use a quote that the wonderful Michelle Reid brought to my attention -(Thanks so much Michelle!) that sums it up beautifully

“His passions ran at gale-force turbulence with her. Everywhere else in his life
control and restraint ruled the roost. He was punctual, tidy, organised,
immaculate in appearance. He carried enormous responsibility. He was a rock for
his dependent and less able brothers and sisters to lean upon. He was in every
other field a strong, principled and honourable man, worthy of respect. She was
the fatal flaw that rocked him dangerously off balance.”

The Veranchetti Marriage Lynne Graham 1989

Reading Matters

Rachel asked me to let her know what books I ended up reading over my Easter break so this is a sort of follow on post to that.


I finished my own book – writing it – just a week ago – sending it off in a haze after living eating and breathing that damn Spaniard for days – weeks. The next day, as I’ve mentioned, I headed for Scarborough and the problem was which books I was going to take with me. I’m always rather over ambitious when it comes to books on holidays – I take too many and forget that there might be a bookshop where I’m going. I also forget my ‘research reading’ in women’s magazines. I have a very bad magazine habit, It comes from the days when I used to have to share my one and only comic with three of my four sisters (The eldest was too grown up to read comics by then). That’s also the reason why I’m very possessive about my reading matter. The comic was shared between us in a rota – one week my elder sister would have it first, then she would pass it to me – I’d read it – pass it to the next youngest – she’d pass it to the ‘baby’ of the family. So a brand new comic or magazine is something I rarely got my hands on when I was young.

Which is also the reason why people don’t believe I’ve read half the books on my shelves. They don’t look read. Confession time here - Years ago I worked in a bookshop where I learned the trick of reading a book without breaking the spine or curling the cover – then I could put it back on the shelves. My excuse if that I was fresh out of university, newly married, paying astronomical rent on a flat and the BM was working for his MA so I was the only financial support for the two of us. I had to support my book habit in some way .

So, packing for Scarborough also involved collecting up some of the magazines I’d bought but not read and taking them to read too. Magazines are good for the journey – I can flick through magazines without feeling sick. Reading a book is a different matter. The magazines don’t have to come back home with me either. Once read, they can be left in hotel rooms or in the lounge - so someone else gets some free reading.

So what books did I select? I decided to be realistic. I had the magazines. I had the walk to Anne Bronte’s grave and the Michael Ball concert planned – I knew that I would do what I always do once I’ve finished writing – I’d fall asleep as soon as I sat down to read. So I grabbed a selection of the M&B romances that have been piling up waiting to be read for longer than I care to recall. I picked up Liz Fielding’s The Valentine Bride and loved it. But then I’d always known I would ever since I ‘met’ Max Valentine when he and Domenico and Theo took over the blogs from myself, Anne McAllister and Liz Fielding and set up their Grooms’ Contest back in February. I loved Theo’s book too. And I always admire the way that Liz Fielding writes.

Two other catch up bnooks that I thoroughly enjoyed were Fiona Harper's first title for the Romance - Blind Date Marriage and Natasha Oakley's Crowned: An Ordinary Girl. Both well worth reading. Natasha, as I've mentioned already, is one of the people I've seen make it from my critiques of her New Writers' manuscripts to published author, with another of her boks shortlisted for the RNA Prize. I'm thrilled by the way that she has found a truly personal voice in writing and a following that she deserves. Many of the New Writers' mss try too hard to copy older books and end up only sounding derivative. Natasha is one of the few whose work I think I would recognise easily. Fiona is a new voice in Romance who also cmae through the New Writers' Scheme - and deservedly so. Blind-Date Marriage won the RNA's New Writers' Scheme and is short listed for not one but two RITAs.

What else? Well, then I went back in time with two historical novels. Not ‘historical’ in that they are books set in past times, but books that were published in the past One totally new to me and one a reread. Both were published in the 1980s. The first of these was one that I had tracked down out of interest – because I wanted to read the very first book by the famous Lynne Graham. Bittersweet Passion was published in 1987 and was the only one of Lynne’s books ever to go into the Harlequin Romance line rather than Presents. It certainly read like something out of the 1980s – I wonder what would happen if I put my hero in skin tight white jeans and an electric blue tee shirt these days. I also suspect that this is the one and only LG hero who is actually a blond.

The other book was one of those finds I made in the second-hand bookshops while waiting for the BM to add to his collection of Rider Haggard books – or the Grim and Gruesome collections for his research on the history of crime – or . . .any other of the varied research interests he has at the moment. (One bookshop owner was so glad to see some of the more obscure titles go that he let us have them all for half price if we’d just take them off his shelves) Perhaps if we’d waited a while, he might have paid us to take them.

Anyway, while I was waiting and browsing, I looked through a collection of old M&Bs and found one that brought back memories for me – in fact it inspired one of my own books, in a back to front sort of way. I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.