Writing

There are few things in the world that I hate more than writing the “product description” for my books. Better known as the blurb, this is that annoying little paragraph that we put on the back cover of our books so prospective readers have an idea what the book is about. It’s the most difficult task in the novel process as far as I’m concerned. What I believe I need is a professional blurb writer. Someone who can read my 80,000 words and condense my novel down to a short paragraph that is an interesting and exciting tease for my book. Of course, due to budget constraints, that simply isn’t going to happen.

So, what’s a girl to do? Well, I fell back on what’s worked for me in the past when I want to learn something:

1. Bitch, moan, and complain about my lack of skill.
2. Fall into a small depression about my lack of skill. Nothing serious, but a little brooding never hurt anyone.
3. Attempt to take the easy way out by simply writing something and seeing if my fat cat lazy muse will show up and help out.
4. Bitch, moan, and complain about my lack of skill and the muse’s vacation schedule.
5. Try multiple more times to create something interesting.
6. Complain on Facebook to my sympathetic friends about my lack of skill.
7. Spend a morning on Amazon looking at other people’s blurbs.
8. Denigrate the blurbs as possibly being worse than the one I wrote.
9. Bitch, moan, and complain about my lack of skill.
10. Throw everything out and write two sentences that sum up where the book is going without giving anything away.

So, let’s back up just a bit in the list to number five. I could recite many happy sayings about trying and failing, and how failure makes you stronger, and all that other goody two-shoes crap, but the truth is that I have never met an author who wrote a great blurb on the first try. We are simply too close to our work when we begin this process. We’ve spent a lot of times, writing and rewriting. Now we’re expected to compress all that work and time into a few sentences. That is so not happening for most of us.

Perhaps I’m doing this in the wrong order. Maybe I should write the blurb before I write the book. I can often tell someone what the book will be about before I write it and become overwhelmed by my characters. I know more than one writer who works this way, so perhaps I should give it a shot. Write the blurb and then put it away until the book is complete.

I’ll be talking about items number seven and eight in a separate post. There is simply too much to share about those steps to add into this post.

So where does a writer’s motivation or inspiration come from? And is motivation different than inspiration? Do you have to be inspired to get motivated? Or vice versa? We’re talking about what really gets you off your butt to write.

Motivation: noun. The reasons behind someone’s actions or behaviors.
The first synonym for motivation is inspiration.

Inspiration: noun. The process of being filled with a feeling or with the urge to do something.
The first synonym for inspiration is motivation.

I’ve often heard my writing buddies talk about their muse, but I’m not sure I have one. At some point in the past, I discussed the concept that muses (if they exist) needed to be treated like willful teenagers and beaten into submission. I could be wrong about that. Not the part about beating the willful teenager – just the part about them being a teenager. After writing a few books, I now believe that a muse would be more like a rather fat tomcat, lounging around until he feels the need to make noise, waste, a hairball, or more useless damn cats. The muse hangs about until they decide you need some inspiration and then drops it on you. And, much like a cat hacking up a hairball, that usually happens at some incredibly inopportune time.

Now, I fully admit to having voices in my head, and they are a bunch of chatty Cathy’s sometimes. But what is it that gets me off my butt to do this? No one forces me to come out here and sit down at this desk, but I’m here almost every day, working on something. Writing, rewriting, or just faking it until I make it.

In October, I accepted the challenge of the NaNoWrite, and I spent November accomplishing the goal of 50,000 words in a month. That novel has finished beta and will move into edit in the next quarter. But, finding my new plot has been slow. I had ideas, but no inspiration or motivation. Until now.

I was lurking on a message board and saw an editor chat for a publisher who shall remain nameless. Their particular genre is not my cup of tea, but the chats are often interesting and useful. There was discussion going on about what they were looking for in character and storyline. It had to do with the idea of an alpha male and the wallflower female, who is really much stronger than she thinks. She brings out the best in him and we can see his true self, and she learns to get off the wall. Ugh. Really? However, one of the questions was, what if she’s only a wallflower because she’s a tomboy?

Bingo! A scene flashed into my head and I have the concept for the book. There is a real appeal to a “Fish Out of Water” story. Most of us can relate to that. Lord knows that I’ve been one more than once. I pounded out the opening 1000 words yesterday and today I’m laying out the plot line.

So was I motivated or inspired? I don’t really know and I’m not really sure I care. But that lazy fat cat is off the couch and on the move.

Mr. Scott has not always been a fan of my name choices. While he doesn’t read my books, he does have to suffer through my discussion of those books and characters. Our first real conversation about names occurred when he read the first two chapters of Protecting Parker.

Mr. Scott asked, “What kind of a name is Parker for a girl? And, Gray! Who knows anyone named Gray?”
I pointed out that Parker Posey is a well-known actress, and that I knew several people named Gray. He was not appeased.

When the discussion about Blood Link was ongoing, he asked me about my female lead in the first book. “Why do you always pick guy names for girls? First Parker and now Sam.”

I hadn’t realized that I’d done that. I simply always loved the name Samantha and the nickname of Sam. I can rarely say Sam without following it with the name Elliott. I loved the name Samantha in the same way that I loved the name Parker. I’m not sure I could explain it beyond that.

“Can’t your women have normal names?”
Well of course they can, but when we read, we often want to be taken out of our own mundane lives. Most of us weren’t fond of our names at some point. Who hasn’t wanted to have an exotic name? I personally never really wanted exotic. I always wanted to be named Ann. It has a nice clean ring to it and sounds “regal.” My brother once confessed that he’d always wanted to be named Lance. Lance? Really?

Mr. Scott, to his credit, pointed out that some of my favorite actors as well as some of the most interesting and sexy people in the world had very normal names. Sam Elliott (well duh, I already stole that one), Hugh Jackman, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, etc. for men. Sandra Bullock, Rebecca DeMorney, Sophia Loren, and Catherine Zeta-Jones for the ladies. The first names are, to me, solid names that transcend age and trends.

When I started laying out A Shared Fear and planning the next vampire books, I sat down one evening and asked Mr. Scott for first names. He hemmed and hawed a bit, but when I pressed him about what he would have proposed for a girl’s name if he had a daughter, he came up with Yvonne. I hated it! But I’d asked, so I had to figure out a way to use it. I wound up shortening it to Evie, so Yvonne (Evie) Marie Duncan was born for A Shared Fear. She needed a strong male counterpart, so I went with simple and came up with Joe Graves.

Mr. Scott was on a roll after that, so I took notes as he came up with some great names that you’ll be seeing in future books. You’ll meet Brenda Livingstone in my next stand-alone novel Stuck in Korea Time, and Janice Bracken is the primary character in Saving Emily, both novels will be out in 2012.

Sadly, you will never see some of my favorite names as the lead characters in my books. My favorite name of Jack will appear often as a side character, but never as the lead. My father was named Jack and I could never write a love scene using the name. The same for the male names of Scott, Dean, Darryl, Dwight, Chuck, or Pat. Or the female names of Heather, Tonya, Jamye, Jennifer, Marcia, or Ramona. These fall in my too close for comfort category, since they are friends, family, and beta readers. While I have quite a few other names that might fall in that category, they are common enough that I can work around them. Still, most of those names will only get used for supporting characters.

The other thing you won’t see me doing is using the popular romantic names. I swear to God that as soon as Grey’s Anatomy premiered there were a thousand books with the names Derek and Meredith. I can barely hear those names now without cringing. Check out the romance rack and you’ll notice that they all have “interesting” names. I hadn’t really noticed it until Mr. Scott pointed it out and reminded me that most people in the world didn’t go through life with exciting names.

While a name is important to your character – it won’t matter one bit if the character isn’t interesting. So pick something you like and get to writing!

I had no trouble coming up with the names for Protecting Parker. Parker Cotton came first. I needed a name for a woman that could be confused for a male name and Parker worked. Cotton simply appeared on the page as I started to type. Gray Townsend was another matter. Gray was a name I’d heard at some point and thought was cool; it was also not a name you saw every day. However, he started out as a Jenkins, but one of my friends who read the first chapters told me how much she hated the name and I swapped it to Townsend.

As for the names in Blood Link, once again, I always knew who they were. As I created the team, their names came to me. Samantha Elliott was in honor of my favorite gravelly-voiced actor, Sam Elliott. Jay Evans needed a name that was simple and strong. His nickname of Cowboy was how I saw the character – the romantic ideal of the quiet cowboy who saves the girl and loves her forever. Captain George Bigelow has the names of two officers that I worked with years ago. George from Colonel George Zaniewski and Bigelow from Lt. Col Richard Bigelow. Both were officers I respected and admired. The character is known as Bee because most of the enlisted personnel wouldn’t call him by his first name, so he would have started out as Captain Bigelow, than as they grew closer, Capt B and finally just Bee, but his parents and girlfriend would naturally call him by his given name of George.

Choosing a name for your character might be an easy item on your To-Do List, or it could be an onerous task. I do fine when I plan my book. I have a feeling about the character and a name often comes to mind. When I really run into trouble is in the middle of writing when I want to apply a name to someone I’ve given no previous thought to. The character simply appears in my head and now I need a name. The problem is that I don’t know at that moment how important or unimportant this unexpected person might be.

In writing Saving Emily, I ran into the situation that I mentioned previously – Janice goes to the gym and meets an ex-SEAL who trains personal protection specialists. I’m writing away and suddenly here is this man on my page, and he has a role to play in my primary characters development. All I had was the opening moments of their conversation on the page when I realized that I couldn’t just refer to him as “the man” or “the gym owner.” I needed a name. The character is Hispanic, handsome, tough as nails, and of course, compassionate. I didn’t want to use the what might be considered a stereotypical name such as Juan, and I couldn’t use my favorite of Diego – he’s a character in my Blood Link series.

I live in Tucson, Arizona – you’d think this would be easy, but it wasn’t.

I resorted to my favorite trick for finding a name. My friends on Facebook. One of my closest friends has the maiden name of Islas, so I stole it. I’ve always liked this name – for the non-Spanish speakers it sounds like “Eas-Las.” It’s not as generic as Hernandez or Morales and has the added bonus of being short and easy to type! For the first name, I hit her friends list and found the name Oscar. While unusual and old-fashioned as an Anglo name, Oscar is quite popular among Hispanics. I love to hear my friend pronounce it – “Oh-score” but you have to roll that “r” just the right way. Oscar Islas took off like a rocket in my head. In fact, once Oscar had a name, he suddenly had a personality and a back story. I realized that Oscar had a real role in this book and adjustments were made to accommodate his presence.

Several of my Facebook friends have large numbers of friends, so I sometimes roll in and scroll the names. I’ll pick first names from one friends list, and then go to another friend and hijack the last names from them. I hit one of my younger friends lists when I’m looking for the names for twenty-somethings.

One of the things I do is look at the most popular names for babies in the year my character was born. This is how Emily got her name.

The other place I get names is from my genealogy work. The last names of several characters have come from Mr. Scott’s family tree. Lawton, MacKenzie, and Jamison are just a few of the ones I’ve used so far. Sometimes as I’m looking at a census record from the 1850s a name jumps off the page and an entire life story pops into my head. I jot those names down for later use.

More on names to come…

Having the right name can make all the difference, but many of those choices may be driven by the genre you are working in. I often use the name Fred, maybe because I don’t know too many of them. I’m not sure why, but this is one of those names that’s always there on my list of names – I just like it. Strong and simple, only four letters, which makes it a quick type, and rather old fashioned.

But what comes to mind for a writer when we see the name Fred? First and foremost you should think about what genre you are writing. As soon as you apply the name to different genres, different images come to mind.

Romance: Can you imagine a man named Fred in the role of the romantic hero? Do you see him as a tall handsome man with all the requisite muscles and ripples? Can the name work in a love scene. “Oh, Fred. Please make love to me.” It’s not really a name that lends itself to some kind of exotic billionaire business tycoon. In fact, I’m doubtful that most women will “feel the love” for the name.

Action/Adventure: Can you imagine Fred as the rugged adventurous explorer? While it isn’t a romance, there is often a romantic element in these books so we’re back to the question of a love scene. The name has a little more potential in this genre than in the romance genre.

Military/Western: Yes, I’m aware that these are often part of the action/adventure area, but names in these genres are regarded differently. These are “manly men” who may have a real name that is used on occasion, but are often called by a rank or a nickname. Trooper Fred MacLean would simply be known as Mac or Trooper. Fred is not the name we might know him by.

Suspense/Mystery: Is he the hero or the bad guy? In these genres, the name could also be effective because the romantic element is not the primary focus of the story.

Comedy: The name Fred takes on a life of its own in this genre. As a primary character the first one that comes to mind is Frederick von Frankenstein (Froederick von Frankensteen!) in Young Frankenstein. The name has been used very successfully for secondary character for many years from Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy to a more recent favorite of Fred Weasley in the Harry Potter series.

As I said earlier, I’m a fan of the name, and I’m intrigued by the character of Major Fred Blaine in my Blood Link series. He is currently a secondary character who may eventually have his own book. My Fred is most often called “The Padre” and is an Army Chaplain, who is also a Ranger, all while existing as a vampire. The dichotomy of a warrior chaplain appeals to me – these men of course exist and are historically well documented. Add into that the complication of being a vampire and you have the type of complex character who calls out to be written. Make him an Episcopalian priest rather than a Roman Catholic and we have the potential to mess up the whole works with a love interest.

Now go back and run through those genres with a few other names: John, Ichabod, Alan, Ezekiel, Derek, Bob, Dick, Hank, Harry, William, or Hugh. You can have a field day with some of them, but the reality is that certain names work better in certain genres.

I swear it’s even tougher to find a woman’s name sometimes. More on that later.