Over the Author

Leigh Michaels'

Classroom on the Web

Over the Author’s Shoulder

The Corporate Marriage Campaign

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 CORPORATE MARRIAGE CAMPAIGN.

“Sometimes the process of developing a story hits all sorts of snags and dead ends and wrong turns, and that was the case with THE CORPORATE MARRIAGE CAMPAIGN.

I'd agreed to write a story for the 9 to 5 series-within-a-series -- in other words, a romance that happens in connection with the characters' jobs. The workplace is one of my favorite areas to find romance, so I was glad to have that framework to begin with. But my editor and I hadn't talked about anything beyond the basic idea of an office love story – and it turns out that was a good thing, because my original vision of the story didn’t go anywhere.

The basic idea I started with was very straightforward -- an engagement of convenience, based on a department store ad campaign. In other words, two people pretending to be engaged while they appear as models in a series of print and broadcast ads for a department store. What better way to promote a store than to show a young couple choosing everything they need to set up a new home, from engagement rings to towels to lawn furniture? And the engagement of convenience, like the marriage of convenience (known in the trade as an MOC) is a favorite device of romance. That’s because pretending to be romantic, while actually being at odds with each other, is a great source of conflict as well as offering the opportunity for lots of kisses and other intimate gestures.

And that much stayed the same, throughout the process. The finished story is exactly that -- an engagement of convenience and a department store ad campaign. But everything else about the story changed.

At first, I thought the heroine would be the department store employee, the one in charge of setting up the whole ad campaign, and not the model at all… at least not until the original models fell through – that’s when she would become personally involved. I was a little fearful that it might look as if she had really bad judgment to choose as her models a pair who couldn't stay the course, but I figured I could make that work if my heroine's boss was the one who insisted she use this particular couple. Make the models the boss's niece and her fiancé and we have a nice symmetrical problem that our heroine can’t be blamed for.

Then when the original plans and the original couple went sour, I thought my heroine would end up playing the bride herself. But who would be the pretend groom? I didn’t want her to be in a relationship already, because it would offer little room for excitement if she and her supposed fiancé were already on dating terms. I figured she would turn to her brother for advice and suggestions – surely he’s got a friend or two who’d be candidates! -- and end up bringing in the brother's law partner as her fiancé.

But after I'd written about a chapter of the story, I couldn't stay enthusiastic. If all this hadn't been her doing in the first place, then why wasn't it my heroine's boss who was in trouble, not her? It wasn't that I couldn't understand her feeling responsible, but I just couldn't stay interested in a heroine who was so concerned about losing her job that she'd perpetrate a fraud. If it came right down to it, why wouldn’t she quit her job rather than do something so calculated? (Okay, in real life sometimes we’re stuck with the job – but this is fiction.)

Besides that, I was having lots of trouble with the hero, trying to figure out why on earth he would agree to cooperate with this scheme. The only reason I could come up with was that he wanted to advance himself in his profession so he needed publicity – but that’s not a terribly sympathetic guy. To add to that problem, the more pages I wrote, the less cooperative he was, and the more reasons I could find for calling off the whole deal. After all, what was so flippin’ important about the ad campaign? Why not just cancel the darned thing?

I just couldn't see these two people being sympathetic enough to the reader that she'd care what happened to them (and in fact, if I didn't care, why should the reader give a darn?) The more pages I wrote, the less cooperative the hero was -- and the more reasons he had for turning my heroine's proposition down.

So I set the chapter aside and thought about it more, and that's when I decided to flip the roles. The convention of the romance is that the hero is most often the boss, not an employee — so okay, we’ll make him the head of the chain of stores.

That makes his problems much larger ones than hers were, when she was a lowly assistant advertising manager – which is a good thing. With my hero responsible for the department store's survival, it's no longer just one ad campaign but the whole chain of stores which is at stake, so his willingness to stretch the truth is more believable. Since he's protecting his sister by keeping her secret, he's more sympathetic than if he was just stepping in to make things look good for the cameras.

And the switch raised the stakes for the heroine, too. Since cooperating with the hero’s scheme holds out the potential for her to end up with a business of her own, she has a much better reason to cooperate. And making the battered bride the hero’s sister let her be a larger part of the sub-plot, so she and the heroine’s brother can have a small romance of their own, without letting her take over the story.

I was left with one problem, however – I’d intended for my heroine to be an employee of my own fictional chain of department stores, the Tyler-Royale chain that I’ve used in a number of books. (Any one of those books can be read alone, but together they add an extra dimension for the reader who's picked them all up and can watch continuing characters grow and change. For instance, Ross, the CEO of the Tyler-Royale stores, appears in all of the T-R books. His own love story is O’HARA’S LEGACY, but in most of the others he’s a secondary character, as in THE CORPORATE MARRIAGE CAMPAIGN where we see him with his kids, and meet his wife, but never get much history.)

But changing the story around meant I had to create a new chain of stores -- Tyler-Royale wouldn’t work after all, because it already has an active CEO who’s very happily married, and it’s doing quite well, thank you very much. Because I needed my hero to be in charge of the stores, and because I needed the chain to be in danger of failing -- or else there was no reason for this scheme at all -- I created the Kentwell chain.

However, I still needed a happy ending – and what better way than to fold this new group of stores into the successful chain I’d already built, thus freeing my hero to go back to practicing his real profession?

So I had hero, heroine, situation, happy ending. At last, THE CORPORATE MARRIAGE CAMPAIGN was ready to go – with a heroine, a hero, a problem, and a solution. Some of the events along the way were still hazy in my mind – they would develop as I wrote – but the basics were in place. Then it was time to write.

Once the foundation was in place and actually solid, then the story developed almost naturally – I could draw on all the normal stuff that brides and grooms do as they’re getting ready for the big day, but add all the humorous twists which arise when they have a big secret to hide and they're doing their courting under the glare of the television lights.

As I wrote, even the details fell into place, with one event naturally causing the next. For instance, there’s a good reason in the story for a wineglass to be hidden under the coffee table. But why not get even more use out of it? Because the glass is where it shouldn’t be, it gets knocked over, spilling red wine which stains the carpet, which leads to replacing the floor covering, a messy job which forces the heroine out of her home and into staying with the hero, which makes it likely for them to act on their physical attraction…

Every book is a little different. This one was a bigger challenge than most, because I kept having to go back and work things out anew. Each hero, heroine, and story develops along its own unique path. Every author works in his or her own way. But in the end, it's worth it!"

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