Leigh Michaels'

Classroom on the Web

As I struggled with writing my first few books, I remember thinking that if I could just hang in there long enough to learn how to do this, each book I wrote would get easier. Not so. I still find myself writing a sentence only to wipe it out and try again (and again, and again) as I’m figuring out how the story should unfold.

Now, I’m not talking about story troubles here– figuring out how the plot develops or what the character’s motivation is. In that respect, every story and every set of characters present a unique set of difficulties. But that’s another article entirely.

I’m talking about story-telling troubles. Even when I know the story, I sometimes have great difficulty structuring it on paper. What does the reader need to know? When does she need to know it? What doesn’t she need to know–now or ever? What comes next? What bit of information should be included in this sentence? On this page?

So here are the things that most often send me up the nearest telephone pole–and some strategies that I use to get back down on the ground.

Our characters are the products of their experiences. What has happened to them in the past sets up what will happen in the future– how they’ll handle life-altering challenges, which opportunities they’ll seize and which ones they’ll avoid.

But how much of that does the reader need to know? And where do we put it in? Lindsay Armstrong (The Bridegroom’s Dilemma, Harlequin Presents, January 2003) said, "Obviously some stories don’t work without a significant look at the past, but getting it right is one of my biggest stumbling blocks as a writer these days."

If the characters have a history together, more backstory will be needed in order to explain how they got to this point. But pour all that history out in a gush and your reader won’t wait around to find out what happens in the current story–she’ll be at the mall. So how do we keep her interested and involved?

Tell it in dialogue. No, I don’t mean writing "Remember that day when..." followed by a pages-long speech giving the details about what happened. Share the events by references in what the characters say, and let the reader draw the lines that connect the dots. In Maybe Married, I needed to establish that my hero and heroine were so poor at the time of their divorce six years before that they shared a cheap shyster attorney– setting them up to find out now that they’re still married after all. So I put that necessary background into dialogue.

No details, no extended explanation. One wisecrack, and the point is made.

Use an incident or a characteristic which reoccurs– perhaps with variations– in the different periods of time in the story. In The Daddy Trap, my heroine had been a spoiled only child who expected her husband to treat her with the same indulgence that her father had, and I illustrated that by using scents.

The variation on the theme helps to show not only the backstory but how the character has changed in the meantime.

Use several small flashbacks rather than one big one. In Promise Me Tomorrow, my hero and heroine shared an immense amount of backstory, including an unplanned pregnancy, a marriage of convenience, a miscarriage, and a divorce. All of that is important enough that the reader needs to see it happening so she can judge the events for herself, rather than simply getting the more mature interpretation of the characters in the present-day story. But a flashback taking in all of that history would have overwhelmed any book. Instead, I split it into a half-dozen smaller flashbacks scattered through the first half of the book. As a result the flashback becomes a powerful secondary narrative.

Stick to facts, not emotions. Two people who come face to face after a period of separation have a lot to catch up on. But if the situation was painful enough to divide them before, they’re not going to be eager to spill feelings–and leave themselves open to more hurt– now. They’ll have feelings, but they’ll talk about events, incidents, or conversations in a concrete way, without letting their emotions show. In Wife on Approval, my main characters meet unexpectedly:

"So it is you."

Unless it’s critical, skip it. Even when characters have a lot of shared history, not all of it is important to the current story. In Maybe Married, my main characters married in college and split up only a few months later. But what was important enough to end their marriage then is either still important (and thus will be a really big issue needing to be solved in the current story) or it was fairly trivial (and thus will make them look petty even now). So rather than flash back to the scene or go into detail about their last quarrel, I summarized. I happened to do it in dialogue, but it could have worked equally well in one character’s thoughts.

And even that bit of information about the quarrel is left till late in the story, after we’ve established that they’re not the same people any more.

If characters don’t have a shared history, they’re going to be even less eager to talk about what’s happened in their pasts. If the incident was very painful or if it can be interpreted as reflecting badly on them, they aren’t likely to share it on first meeting– especially not with someone they regard as either a rival or a potential love interest. And men are much less likely than women to talk openly about any experience which has been painful for them. So if your characters are just starting a new relationship, how do you tell the reader what’s important about their backgrounds?

Hint but don’t tell. Referring to the secret, without going into detail, plays fair with the reader by telling her there’s something important about this, but it doesn’t stop the story action dead while you explain it. In Bride by Design, as my hero and heroine negotiate the terms for a marriage of convenience, he asks why she’s even considering such an arrangement.

"I want to know why you’d settle for a marriage that isn’t a marriage."

Use sleight of hand. You don’t see the magician pull the card out of his sleeve because he’s making you look somewhere else while he does it. So as soon as you’ve dropped a hint, give the reader another explanation, or something else to think about. In the next few paragraphs of Bride by Design, the hero comes up with his own explanation–two of them, in fact– of why the heroine wants a marriage of convenience. Neither is anywhere close to the reality. In The Bride Assignment (November 2003), my heroine’s boss is the one who says that the heroine is "obviously not interested in being married again." The heroine not only doesn’t say it, she doesn’t even nod agreement– but the reader accepts it as fact nevertheless.

Push the explanation back, often right to the end of the book. The heroine of The Bride Assignment doesn’t come clean about what happened to her marriage till the last few pages–until not sharing her secret would be even more painful than laying out her embarrassment and hurt for the hero to inspect.

Use the smallest amount of backstory you can possibly get by with. Hold it in reserve as long as you can. And expect that you may have to tweak to get it right. As Anne McAllister (Nathan’s Child, Harlequin Presents, July 2003) told me, "It’s always a judgment call. And I rarely seem to get it right on first shot."

Sometimes, no matter what we do, the story seems to just dawdle along. It moves slowly; the dialogue plods; the foreshadowing is flat and sticks out as obvious; the explanations are exhausting; the descriptions are dull.

Sometimes, in an effort to speed things up, we add lots of brief scenes, or jump back and forth between POV characters. But jittery pacing is no better for the story than the slow and ponderous kind. Moving fast isn’t the same thing as moving forward.

Daphne Clair, who also writes as Laurey Bright, (With His Kiss, Laurey Bright, Silhouette Romance, May 2003) says, "A large part of improving pace is getting rid of any kind of repetition. No two phrases that essentially say the same thing. No repeated arguments in different scenes, no rehashing of the same problem without a resolution, and no showing and telling– choose one."

So if your story is dragging, here are some techniques for improving the pace.

Give preference to scenes where the two main characters are interacting. Instead of having the best friend telling the heroine about her experience, you might have the heroine tell the hero about the insights she gained from listening to her friend’s story.

Give preference to scenes that involve action rather than introspection. Sometimes following a character’s thoughts is the best and fastest way to share information– but before using introspection, consider ways in which you can show the action happening, rather than just having one character thinking about what happened.

Check your foreshadowing. Get it in as early as possible– it stands out less when it’s placed early in the story than after the action heats up. Put it in dialogue–it’s easier to hide. Don’t dwell on the clue– say it, then immediately distract the reader’s attention to something else.

Be ruthless with dialogue. Don’t waste precious lines on social niceties. Exchanges like "May I take your coat?" and "How do you like your coffee?" don’t advance the plot and they don’t show character–they just slow the story down.

Eschew explanation. If the heroine’s nickname is so exotic that you have to explain its etymological origin, kill the nickname and save yourself a sentence or two. Don’t tell us the heroine is self-conscious and hates to be late–show us instead. Focus your description on what makes this person or place stand out as different–and keep it brief.

Root out repetition. Words on paper have more strength than those which are spoken. Saying it once is enough– the reader will get it. If you’ve put in two hints, take one out. If your characters argue about something more than once, their opinions should have changed significantly in the interim.

Start scenes with action. Don’t summarize what’s happened since the last scene. Don’t begin with the heroine sorting papers in her office if the action doesn’t get going until she walks into the conference room.

End scenes when the action ends. When the hero walks out of the heroine’s store, that’s probably the end of the scene–so don’t have her turning to greet the next customer unless that customer has something important to add. Don’t end with the heroine drifting into sleep unless you want your reader to doze off too.

Vary the length of scenes. If they’re all long, or they’re all short, the story falls into a rhythm which soon grows dull. Give each scene the length and depth it deserves, depending on its importance to the story.

Moving characters from place to place and from time to time is one of the most challenging aspects of putting a story on paper. Sandra Marton (Keir O’Connell’s Mistress, Harlequin Presents, March 2003) says, "I often stall out on time transitions. Sometimes, I just feel like saying, ‘Lots of time went by and then they met again,’ but of course I don’t."

Whether it’s moving characters from one place to another, or skipping from one time frame to the next– or doing both at once– filling in the gaps between action sequences is difficult. Let’s say our heroine has a fight with the hero at work, then drives home to get ready for a date with the other man, but finds when she opens the door to greet her date that it’s the hero who’s come to pick her up instead of the guy she expected. How can we best tell that section of the story?

The initial temptation is to follow the heroine in something like real time–noting every stoplight and every hairpin–and, of course, her every thought along the way. But the trouble is, not everything that happens in this sequence is equally important. The argument is crucial, as is the heroine’s reaction to the unexpected man at her door and probably some of her thoughts. But unless your heroine is an eight-armed Venusian with feathers, her costume and grooming will be pretty much the same as that of every other woman getting ready for a date, and thus pretty dull for the reader to dwell on.

Instead, we can create transitions between the important bits without going into painful detail. We write the argument, then gloss over the commute and the getting ready with a sentence or two:

By the time she reached home, her temper was finally beginning to cool. A shower and facial helped to restore her equilibrium, and when the doorbell rang she was looking forward to telling George the whole silly story. When she opened the door, however...

And then we go on to show in more detail the heroine’s reaction to the man she didn’t expect to find on the doorstep.

Show only what’s important. Which parts of the action are critical for the reader to see happening, and which ones can be left to her imagination? Unless the heroine gets hit by a taxicab on her way to the Empire State Building, the amount of traffic probably isn’t important to the story.

Show what’s unfamiliar to the reader or unusual for the character. If the heroine’s crossing Manhattan by climbing from fire escape to fire escape, that calls for a little more description than if she strolls down the sidewalk.

Show rather than tell. Instead of describing the outfit your heroine puts on, show the effect it has on the hero when he first sees it. You’ll get the side benefit of showing them interacting.

Skip the ordinary stuff altogether. Leave a white space and start the next scene, being careful to establish the new time frame and place with your first sentence or two.

In some stories, long periods of time pass when nothing much happens–but the few things that do happen are important to the story. Sharon Kendrick (Back in the Boss’s Bed, Harlequin Presents, May 2003) says, "The worst was when I had to get rid of four months of a pregnancy in a sentence."

In the screenplay for The Fellowship of the Ring, Phillipa Boyens deftly handles the passage of a very long period of time: "History became legend; legend became myth, and for two and a half thousand years the Ring passed out of all knowledge, until when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer.... For five hundred years it poisoned his mind..."

Most of us don’t need to skip over three thousand years in a few lines, but Ms. Boyens does it brilliantly. And the principle works exactly the same way, no matter what the time frame.

Don’t avoid mention of the passing time. Admit that you’re slicing out days, or weeks, or months.

Refer to the important incidents which occur during the interval. Once your characters have had a life-changing experience, they’ll continue to grow and change even if they’re separated. Which few incidents best illustrate this growth?

Choose a theme and stick to it, so each event you show is related to the others.

Okay, let’s go back to our pregnant heroine and see how we can make this work–only in our example, let’s make seven long months zoom by.

Perhaps we’ll follow the seasons: Winter wasn’t bad; her heavy coat still fit. By the last snowfall she was beginning to feel a little clumsy, but.... By spring, her belly was getting big enough to notice, and without heavy winter garb to conceal her new shape, everybody noticed... The first hot days of summer brought misery. Now too big to move around, she sat...

All of those summary sentences have to do with the physical side of pregnancy. But you could accomplish the same thing by relating each trimester or each season to the emotional changes our heroine experiences. Or by noting the few occasions during the seven months that she encounters the hero, or hears news of him. Whichever theme you choose, sticking to one type of event will increase the impact of each of them.

Instead of ignoring the passing time, or dwelling on it, we’ve skipped across it like a stone on water, hitting only the high spots.

Those are the things that even after seventy-odd books still send me up a tree. How much history to put in, and where to put it. How to keep the story moving steadily forward. How to move characters in time and space.

Maybe someday I’ll learn how to do this after all.

article copyright 2003 Leigh Michaels. First published in Romance Writers Report.

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