Over the Author’s Shoulder
The Boss's Daughter
Let’s listen in on author Leigh Michaels as she recalls the process she worked through in order to create the characters in her contemporary romance, The Boss’s Daughter.
"I began working on the book which became The Boss’s Daughter when my editor asked me to write a book with an office setting and some sort of twist that would make it less conventional than the usual office romance. The twist, of course, is that the heroine is the boss. That’s hardly unconventional in the real world, but romance heroes are usually presented as the one whom other people answer to, not the ones doing the answering.
The hero
So making Dylan a personal assistant, what Amy calls "a glorified secretary, making phone calls and excuses," was honestly a challenge. First I had to figure out why he was content to do that job. Obviously being a personal assistant couldn’t be the pinnacle of his hopes and dreams, or he wouldn’t fit the heroic mold very well. At first I thought perhaps he’d made his fortune and was now content with an ordinary job which allowed him time to do volunteer work–-coaching softball teams for inner-city kids, that kind of thing. But if that was what he wanted to do, why hadn’t he endowed a foundation and gone to work for it and really done some good?
Anyway, I wanted my employee-hero to be completely subsidiary to the heroine, not just working for the fun of it and having complete freedom to quit anytime he wanted. Or at least, I didn’t want her to know that he had that sort of resources.
So I thought perhaps he was undercover, hiding his identity while he was doing a job. Crime and drug enforcement and that kind of thing aren’t my sort of story, so those were out. Maybe if he was the big boss of the corporation, checking on the performance of the branch company... but that had problems, too. Not only would he have to work under a false name, but his face would be familiar to anyone who’d paid attention at the corporate meetings. And if the heroine was the boss–the one in charge of the company–then having him there to spy on her performance was a little uncomfortable, too. For one thing, it implied that she wasn’t doing her job well. But if he was working for someone else instead of for her, I’d lose the original premise entirely.
So the idea of a CEO hiding out in a branch office didn’t work. But the notion of being undercover still appealed, and that led me to think about other reasons why someone would take a job at a lower level than he was qualified to hold. Learning–getting an education–is certainly one of them. And that started me thinking of reasons why Dylan would want to learn about a business without everyone knowing what he was doing. I decided the most logical reason was in order to do his real job better.
So what was his real job? And what kind of business could he learn better from a perch inside than from simply asking questions openly? And why couldn’t he ask questions openly, anyway?
The background
That was when the idea of an auction house specializing in antiques first popped up. Antiques are an enormous field, one that’s very hard to study in an academic setting. It takes a lifetime to learn, and even then antiques people specialize. But what if Dylan couldn’t specialize? What if he had to know it all –- or at least know who to ask or where to find out? What if his real job was connected with a magazine or a publisher of books about antiques? If somebody in that position showed up and started nosing around, the information he got would likely be so skewed it wouldn’t do him any good. He needed to see the real picture –- that’s why he couldn’t ask questions openly.
In a big auction house, everything crosses the block at one time or another. The auction house has experts on staff and on call to tackle any field. In an entry level job, he’d be limited to one area, but if he was planted in the boss’s office, free to move around, to look at everything, to talk to everybody... he could learn a lot in a short time.
However, if he was working directly with the heroine–-if she was the boss–- she’d have to know what he was doing. Or if she didn’t have a very good suspicion, we’re back to the problem of her looking as if she doesn’t know what’s going on in her own office.
The heroine
Besides, how could she have hired this guy without noticing that he was fun to look at? And how could she have worked with him for any length of time without realizing that he was even more attractive than on first sight? So why hasn’t she done something about it before now? Well, those problems had an obvious answer. She didn’t hire him. She’s only just become the boss.
But how could she suddenly become the boss of a major auction house? Obviously she can’t have been hired out of the local antiques mall–-she wouldn’t be qualified. So I worked through much the same reasoning that Gavin does in the first chapter, as he’s explaining to Amy why she has to come back to work–-because she has the experience and the name. But wait a minute. If she’s so qualified and so experienced, why isn’t she working there now?
Building the action
That’s when I killed off Gavin and Carol’s marriage and created Honey, in order to give Amy a solid reason for abruptly leaving a job she loved. Catching her father (and boss) in the act of adultery would be a bit hard to forgive. At first, though, I thought the divorce had already gone through and Gavin had actually married Honey.
Then I got to the question of why Amy suddenly has to come back to the auction house. It was sort of a natural to tie that in Honey and the divorce as well. It’s always been my rule not to create two explanations if one will do–-so why give Gavin another source of money trouble when I could just back the action up a little and have the divorce settlement still pending? Besides, Amy would be a lot more likely to cooperate if it was her mother’s security at stake, not just her father’s finances. And taking him out of action with a heart attack was almost poetic justice–-the old goat, messing around with a woman his daughter’s age!
You may notice, as you read The Boss’s Daughter, that when Amy calls Dylan a glorified secretary her father says pointedly that he’s not. That was very deliberate–- just a hint of foreshadowing. Because of course Gavin knows exactly what Dylan’s doing. Dylan’s there with his full approval. That is one of the complications to Gavin’s situation, of course–-he can’t turn the business over to his personal assistant, because he doesn’t really have one. He really does need Amy.
And just to tidy things up, and because it isn’t fair to the reader to spring something on her at the end without any warning, I put the magazine right up front too. A job at the magazine is one of the opportunities Amy has to give up in order to go back to the auction house. The reader just doesn’t know for another hundred and fifty pages that it’s Dylan’s magazine.
It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes the heroine comes to me first. Sometimes it’s the problem. Every book is a little different. But that’s that’s how The Boss’s Daughter came into being."
Copyright 2003 Leigh Michaels. This article was originally presented as a lecture in Leigh's Start Writing Romance class at Barnes & Noble University (www.bn.com)