Example 1 of writing for clients: Perking Up Boring Romance (Action) Writing

Example 1 of writing for clients:
Perking Up Boring Romance (Action) Writing

By Neale Sourna

Hey, are your stories of sizzling love fizzling out like tired champagne that’s more flavored water than sparkling? Well, let’s generate some sparks and flames. And it won’t be painful, not unless you make it so. So don’t.

You see it in films and TV shows, two actors standing together and supposedly in a budding or growing or full-blown relationship … and yet you don’t believe them. You feel nothing for them, not truly. You don’t care what really happens to them, especially not as two who should be together.

When someone writes this, you say you can do better: when it’s your own characters it’s … painful, and frustrating. Have you written…?

TO OUR SENSES

One of the easiest ways to get deeper into your readers’ minds and hearts and into your characters, because CHARACTER IS EVERYTHING, is to take several editing passes through your stories, concentrating one at a time, and add when your couple can see, hear, touch, smell (let’s say “scent,” sounds less odious), and taste. It adds flavor and sparks interest right away.

Why?

Because all of us, or nearly all, have all or most of these senses and know what a fresh, crisp sweet apple or a fresh, crisp tart apple tastes like. The scent of hot bread, floral cologne, musk on a warm body that you love. Or musk from a body that repels you.

Naughty right? Plus, you’ve just drawn us into your world that we feel the hug that relaxes you and the bite of a whip from a sadist that draws your blood and makes you bite your tongue to taste…?

This is especially useful for those of us who think A LOT and say our characters do too. They think, they thought, they realize….

Get out of your head, and theirs. Try using all of your senses for your people. The first time I did this in a script it made everything pop and more rich. Of course, don’t use it in every sentence, but you can add that spark, so do.

DON’T FORGET SENSE #6

Depending on your story and the type of characters, your couple or one of them may have a sense of “knowing” when the other is arriving or feel agitated that they must call home or get to wherever they are because their partner needs them badly.

Or it may just be a feeling of faith in which one or both KNOWS the other will rescue them, love them, hasn’t truly left them.

Or that “jinx” thing, when two people say or do the same thing at the same time. I do this all the time with family members and close friends. We’re just on the same track, feeling the same vibe, or recalling the same shared experience and now this is the another layer to it.

AND DON’T FORGET THE LACK OF OUR SENSES

“When I entered I couldn’t sense him, not even that gentle scent of his cologne, and not that vibration that signaled … him and his nearby presence.”

“Disconcertingly, although we were in the dance’s embrace, I felt, sensed her pull away from me; her body hardened, edged away from me; but, the worse was that, while still holding her, I abruptly felt alone.”

DISCOVERY & RESPONSE

Your characters, your people experience their world, like you and I and our family and friends do. They are real, in that world, and can be in your readers’ minds and hearts. Who hasn’t grown up and had to have it explained to them that, no, Sherlock Holmes who lives at 221-B Bakers Street isn’t and never was a living, breathing person. Are you certain?

Your characters live, love, suffer, die, and get reborn as vampires and zombies, okay, vamps and z’s are only in some cases. You, however, are our Guide in this individual world you have shaped, you are the Guide to who your people are and how they discover and rediscover themselves and react and respond to it.

Think about an historical era character who is rescued by a gentleman and, perhaps, now owes him her “virtue” and maybe even her life. And when he asks can he contact her family, she has no answer. Why? I don’t fully know yet, it’s a new work in progress for me; but, for her, his question:

Makes her stutter to a pause, and discover she’s uncomfortable giving him that information.

She also discovers she feels bad about withholding this from him because he’s been really nice, respectful, and he’s kind of really attractive.

And she’s not going to cave and give her private information now; it’s a can of crawly worms she doesn’t want to got into yet, or maybe ever. She will much later, but not now, which also helps your storytelling, postponing, delaying consummation and climax.

That’s only part of it, half of your writing because you are telling an intimate story of two (or more) people interacting and he’s in the scene, too, and he’s been gracious, kind, etcetera and he’s a man who commands respect and the world usually bends to his will and although he understands that she is afraid; still:

He’s gonna wonder what the heck is up with a woman all alone in the world who’s just survived multiple traumas and he’s giving her carte blanche to return to her family or at least contact them. 

If you yourself helped someone escape a violent danger and took them home, wouldn’t you feel or think this is strange behaviour; especially in a time when most women never went farther than five miles from home their entire lives?

He’s also thinking he’s powerful and wealthy, or at least you are thinking and feeling these things for or with him and wondering if maybe she might just decided he’s a big, juicy catch of the day for her and she’s got, hm, who or what she’s avoiding as family?

Now with all our SENSES involved with them and your layering of your possible or actual lovers DISCOVERY of their own confusions, senses, and sensuality in conflict with themselves in wanting to be attractive and tractable but, instead, generating a negative RESPONSE….

WATCH YOUR TONE!

Okay, you don’t want to get too naughty, or you do; you don’t want to fall into erotica, and just want to stay in romance or romantic. Fine. That’s your choice, it’s your story make it your style(s), done in your way.

I and my friends can read Dr. Seuss like it’s porn; it’s all in the tone that you control as soft or hard, making it merely romance, harder romance, erotica romance, romantic erotica, or erotica. “What’s in a name?” What is your tone?

Some stories require an austere, upright, aloof manner. Others require an open friendly, “Here, dude,” or “Here, girlfriend,” sense to it. Hm, another SENSE, people. 

Stream or watch a recording that you can control, by going back and listening and watching and listening for how words are said, which words are used (because differing education levels and other matters can alter or change that.

I love theater and work as a stage manager sometimes, which gives me the chance to watch actors choose, discard, and make new choices in rehearsals how to express those words, or the hidden meaning or a contrast of them, and what movements or stillness, how LOUD or how softly whispered, or intensely hushed….

You don’t have to work backstage, but you should have the eyes and ears of a stage manager who has scrutinized over many hours and many weeks the many ways to express what the writer wants AND what the director wants as a layer of that director’s expression of the material. 

If you can go to live theater dramas, comedies, and tragedies done in our local area. Yes, we all watch television and all watch films but you don’t always ACTIVELY LISTEN for HOW actors or “real” people caught on the news SAY things with their mouths, SAY things with their eyes, or just with their mute expression or body attitude. HOW they move their bodies, HOW they express with and without words.

Does a character hum when they are nervous? Sing when they are happy? I’ve been known to hum “Whistle While You Work” when I’m intensely annoyed at work but must still handle many people or difficult ones. 

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Client's requested rewrite changes in next post.