Get Over Yourself!

Hey, all. Suze here. Welcome.

Last night I attended a talk by a famous author at our local library. (I was horrified by the poor turnout, despite quite a bit of publicity, but that’s the subject of another post).

Now at the same time this talk was scheduled, a writers’ group was also meeting informally in another part of the library. And when I say “writers’ group,” I mean a group of people who get together once or twice a month and exchange pages and discuss each other’s work. The librarian in charge of the event approached the group to let them know that a New York Times bestselling author was speaking. Great opportunity, right? They could come in and ask questions and learn about the writing process and the publishing industry from someone who had achieved great success.

And not a one of them came.

I’m not kidding. They stayed huddled in their little group, apparently too wrapped up in themselves and their “art,” to meet someone who has achieved what I’ll bet each of them wants: publication.

Now I’m not knocking small writers’ groups. If I had not found the guts to walk into one a few years ago, I wouldn’t have met J Monkeys and Casey Wyatt and PJ Sharon, and I wouldn’t have a completed manuscript and a couple more in progress, and I wouldn’t be blogging to you from the Seven Scribes today. But there came a time when we realized we needed more than we could get from each other if we wanted to be published, and that’s when we rushed our local RWA chapter, even though we’re not all writing romance.

It ain’t all about the art. (Well, for some people maybe it is, but you’ve still got to get it published somehow) And it ain’t all about the genre, either. Good, sellable writing is, well, good sellable writing, and it doesn’t matter if it’s romance, mystery, YA, sci-fi, paranormal, or even (spoken in a hushed tone) literary. We’ve all got plenty to learn from each other. In fact, I’d argue that exposing ourselves to different genres and styles of writing makes whatever we’re working on fresher and stronger. As the teenaged Crown Prince of Hardydom is so fond of telling me, “Don’t judge.”

How about you? Any missed opportunities you want to admit to? Secret biases you want to come clean about (the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, LOL!)? If you don’t feel like confessing, tell us about a great speaker you’ve heard.

Interview with Lynn Kurland

Hi! J here – I stole Suze’s day to bring you an interview one of my very favorite authors.  I’m so excited to be introducing three time RITA Award winner and New York Times bestselling novelist, Lynn Kurland!!!  Lynn graciously answered all of our questions in wonderful detail, so we are going to give you the first half of her answers today, and the second half on Saturday.

First question: how on God’s green earth do you create such wonderful characters? Every one of your heroes/heroines is either a girl I’d like to hang out with or a guy I might actually consider dumping my wonderful hubby for.  They seem like real people, with real worries and foibles along with their integrity and honor.  But with all that, they don’t seem so perfect as to be unrealistic.  How do you do it?  

Honestly, you’ve given me way too much credit. Anything I know about character revealing–I won’t call it creating because I think the secret to good characters is trusting that you’ll find them loitering off-stage, fully formed–is thanks to great theater training during college and the influence of really great books when I was younger. I’ve also been very blessed with wonderful, witty friends, delightfully awful former boyfriends, and plenty of kooky people crossing my path. They all become grist for the mill.

 As for the particulars of getting characters down onto the page goes, I just turn them loose on my mental screen and take really good notes. And if they don’t show up on the page as vividly as I see them in my head, I revise and revise until the book reads like the movie looks.

You are writing in two genres these days.  How did that come about and what do you like about that?

I had always wanted to write fantasy and my first editor, the amazing and fabulous Gail Fortune, made that happen for me. It was a total gift. I actually really like getting to switch between genres simply because it keeps both fantasies and romances fresh for me.

They say that every author has a partially completed, quite-possibly-terrible, half a story shoved in a drawer somewhere.  What is yours?  What is it about?  What makes it terrible?  Would you ever consider picking it up and finishing it?

Oh, mine’s finished, terrible, and will remain in the drawer. Would you believe it’s a vampire romance, and it’s the first thing I submitted to Berkley? Thank HEAVENS that didn’t sell and Stardust of Yesterday did. Even light-hearted vampires are just not for me. I’d much rather stick to ghosts and good old-fashioned time travel.

What is the most surprising thing that has happened in your writing career?

That it became a career at all! I initially wrote because I didn’t like the way a couple of things I’d read ended and decided it would be interesting to write something where I could control the ending. The first time I sat down in front of blank screen and typed in a sentence, I about died of embarrassment. Who did I think I was to even pretend I could pull off a book? I had no idea that first sentence would turn into all this.

I’ve also been just dumbfounded that people seem to like these characters as much as they do. Whodathunkit? And to get to write what I want to write the way I want to write and have it sell more than six books per story? I’m still shaking my head over it. What a gift.

What is your junk food of choice? Currently, Ghiradelli dark chocolate with mint innards. By the bagful. My ample caboose can testify to this love.

Your romances have a language all their own.  Your lads are ever ready for a brawl, they have a pair of dirks stuffed in their manly boots whilst they prance on the strand for a goodly time.  How did you develop this lingo, which immediately identifies your books as yours? 

I wish there were some secret to it, but it’s just what comes out. I was really fortunate in that my first editor was a master at telling me where I wasn’t sounding like myself and leaving it to me to figure out how to fix that. It was an alarming amount of freedom, but instrumental in forcing me to learn how *I* sounded. I’m very leery of critique groups/partners for just that reason. For me, the fewer people I have adding their own particular spices to my stew, the happier I am and the more I sound like myself.

As far as lingo goes, I have just a couple of rules. I can’t stand reading dialect, so I try to make things sound medieval without lots of weird cannaes and dinnaes and verras—except for a very light sprinkling of them now and again and generally only with secondary characters. If I’m in a medieval character’s head I don’t use contractions, don’t use slang, try to make things sound more formal. If I’m in a modern day Uker’s head, I’ll try to work in the latest slang I’ve either badgered my cousins-in-law about or read in the Daily Mail so it sounds as authentic as a Yank can make it. Americans are just what they are. I live with really wordy people and that’s just sort of how we talk.

What story haven’t you told yet that you want to tell?  What is holding you back? 

Just a really long list of characters who are waiting in the wings. The only thing holding me back is time!

Check back on Saturday for more of our interview with Lynn Kurland! Among lots of other good stuff, Lynn talks about her battles with the Scribes’ nemesis, the Doubt Monster, and she reveals whose romance we will get in May 2012.