this one's just for me. This one's just for me. It's just for me. It's just for me. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, okay, so they can log on to their phone, check it out.
And this thing is pretty good with punctuation
grammar, right? Yeah, that's
awesome. I and this will be what people listen to,
yeah, yeah, yeah,
and people are eating their lunch.
We got like, some kind of Nacho thing going on here,
like a Chipotle style, maybe
even those brands like McDonald's and
Amazon
and Google, Wow, You.
I could test it again. Hello. How's it going? Yes, testing it. I was just seeing if it knows brand names like
Mercedes or
tango, Ambre, ombre,
Espanol,
tambien and Espanol. I
Oh, that is so cool. Oh, yeah,
porque lo dices, nada,
oh, but it prefers English. I
Hello. you awesome.
Hello everyone.
Thank you for Well, I
guess you're already here for lunch, but thank you for staying
for the keynote. Anyway, it is an honor to be here and to speak to you all and to chat with my lovely editor, Becca, as well. I just get to gaze into your eyes for the next 30 minutes. I'm really excited about it. It'll be a fun time. They're like, make
eye contact with everybody, and I'm like, eye contact with you.
We did some preliminary
of, like, what, what would people want to know from you? Yeah. And the first thing was, like, where, where do we start when we're starting from scratch, yeah, like, when we're gonna build a series, yeah, where do we go? Yeah, how does it work? Yeah. So before I kind of get into that question, just a quick kind of background
on Becca and I, so we have been working together for the past, maybe like five or six books, and so she is my content editor. So when we say, like, how do we build a series, we literally do build it very closely together, and we will plot out a series together. We'll plot out a book together, and we'll just discuss all of these things before I start writing. And also as a background, I do write contemporary romance, and I write in series of interconnected standalone so most of what I say is going to be built around those two things. But when, let's say, when, I want to do a brand new series, I kind of intertwine my writing and my marketing at the same time, so I don't want to, and I made this mistake of my debut series. It's hard for me to write a series where you're kind of, you know, meandering along and what I want to write, and then afterwards, I have absolutely no clue how to market it. And so that's something that I'm very conscious of when I'm building series now. So what I usually do is foreign, interconnected standalones. I figure out, how do I tie these people together? Right? Like, is it a friends group? Are they siblings? Do they work in the same like place, or the kind of like the same company. And I found generally that the tighter the ties between that group, like if they are best friends or if they are siblings, that tends to resonate with readers a little bit more than kind of looser connections. So for example, my best selling series, which is the twisted series. It follows the four best friends from college, and it follows each of their love stories. And I think that really resonates with readers, because it also allows them to feel like they are part of that group. They can kind of like self, insert themselves into that friend group and see themselves as kind of like the fifth member of that and so once I have decided how I will tie all of these characters together, then I start kind of mapping out, like, Okay, what do I want to do first? Like, what is the first book in this series? And that's where the marketing comes in, because I'm of the belief that usually in interconnected standalones, they can enter at any book, technically, but most people enter book one. And so I tried to make book one the absolute most like universal, marketable book in the series, and that is with like the most popular tropes, the kind of more like universal characters that people will enjoy the most. For example, my current series, which is kings of sin, it follow every book follows one of the seven deadly sins, and the first book is wrath. There is a reason I did not put sloth or gluttony as book number one, because I wanted to be the most accessible, right? Because that is the book that you're going to advertise the most, that you're going to market the most, and then from then on, we kind of just, I'm not one of those that will plan out an entire series from the very beginning, because I never go according to an outline. And so if I try to map out every book in the series, I just know it's going to be a waste of time, because by the time I get to like, book three or book four, I would have already changed my mind about where I wanted it to go. So I will usually have book one and then general ideas of what I want the other books to be, but they're flexible. I like, when you're flexible, yeah, I'm like, let's get to the point. And you're like, hi, yeah, I've,
this is how we do it. This is who I am. And I just, I just went all the way in there. I feel like, that's, that's the gift that I'm gonna give. So I was like, I'll scoot back really quickly. I feel like I did the math, yeah, we started together in twisted hate with, yeah, yeah, just like, strategy and consulting, yeah, and plotting. And we've been together ever since, yeah, it's been a few years. It's been beautiful. And I, like when you
talk about like that, you you find these most
marketable things,
and you build from the tropes. But like, when we talk about the characters, because we these characters are very real to us, like we approach them, not necessarily with like, how are we going to build the plot structure? Right off the bat, like, the first goal that we always have is, who is this person? What are they most afraid of? Yeah, what would hurt them the most, and then also, what would bring them the most joy? Yeah. And what do they really need to kind of be the fullest, like, best version of themselves. And so when we sit down to, like, set these characters up after we've kind of like baked in the marketing, because we want books that sell lots of books. We always want to sell books, but we also want to create those, like, those characters that are very dynamic, right? Like, we want them to be people that you want to fall in love with, that you want to be with in an intimate sense, but like you want, you want to be around them. You want to spend your time with them. And so when we sit down to like, really set up these characters, what do you think is like, the first thing that's most important to you that you know like about them? Yeah, for me, I think for every character, the most important thing is I need to know, like, what their emotional
wound is like, what is keeping them from being open to love in the beginning of the story, and that will shape basically everything that happens for the rest of the book, right? It also shapes the plot, like I create the plot around the characters, and not the other way around, because I think what happens in a book needs to help the characters grow like there needs to be an arc. So for certain plots, it doesn't make sense for certain characters and certain wounds. So they're very intertwined for me. And you know, once you figure out the wounds and how they're able to overcome it, that also helps me figure out what the conflict should be at the end, because that needs to be kind of like a reckoning, where they they face these parts of themselves and learn and grow from it, right? So I think that is the most important thing. Absolutely, we talk a lot about plot driven or character driven stories, and like for romance, everything is character driven.
So for me, a lot of my clients will say, like, they'll start before we are even into the beginning of, like, a call. They'll be like, Okay, but what am I doing for the third act breakup? And I'm like, Well, I don't know these people, so I couldn't tell you. They're like, well, what if I did this? And I was like, well, would that impact your character? Would that in push them towards growth? Would that push them towards their goal? Is that going to make them question these lies that they believe about themselves? Is this going to cause them to heal this wound? And like for romance, because it's so character driven, we build the plot around them to get them to that goal of health, to get them to that goal of progress. And sometimes right in dark romance, we it's the heroine's like devolution into darkness, an embrace of strength, instead of necessarily like classical goodness. So when we talk about building the plot, yeah, plotter. Pancer, well, I will say my my process for writing a book changes
with every book, and it has changed a lot from when I first started writing. And I feel like when people ask me that question, or when people answer this question, they expect writers to be the same, like throughout every single book for the rest of the career. And I don't think that's necessarily true, because, for example, for my debut series, I was full on Panzer, like, I didn't like, I just sat down on a computer and I was like, well, whatever comes out is what comes out for these books, you know, like I had no idea, and I just went with it. And then for this was the series, it was a little bit more structure. I don't necessarily do like a very detailed outline, but I will do like a skeleton draft, right? And I think the process that Becca and I have settled on that works really well for me now is we will, after we have figured, you know, the character and kind of what we want the dynamics to be, we will sit down and we will basically just fill in a sheet of like, okay, these are the scenes that we want to put in this book. It could be anything. It could be like the conflict. It could be just fun scenes that I want to put on there. And I have a very loose outline of it, right? And it helps me, because I, you know, if you're familiar with the cliftonstrengths, I am number one intellection, so I like to think a lot. I am constantly overthinking and I and it's easier for me when I look at that structure, like if there is something that is wrong, like if it feels wrong to me, or like, oh, like, this conflict doesn't quite work for these characters. It's much easier for me to change, like, two sentences in the outline than if I'd already written 40, 50,000 words, and I have to go back and change all of those words, because I think if that were the case, I would be much more resistant to making changes, even if I knew that I had to make those changes like I think there would be a part of me that would still try to make it work, because I already invested, like so much time and energy into writing that first draft. So being able to look at it from a bird's eye view from the very beginning has been very helpful. And I think even now, like just last week, we were plotting my next book, an upcoming book that I have, and we were kind of struggling for a little bit. Yeah, the original outline, I was just kind of like, you know, it wasn't fun. It wasn't really flowing. We were having a hard time figuring out what to put in the second act of the book. And I realized, you know, during our last call, I realized that the problem was there was a turning point that I had put in the book that happened too early, and it cut out all of the tension. And so I needed to shift it later in the book. And once I moved that turning point toward, more towards, like, the middle of the book, then everything else kind of fell into place easier, whereas, so that was easy for me to do, right? Because it was just an outline. But if I had been writing that draft, I would have already been like 60,000 words in, and I would not have wanted to cut like 60,000 words and start from the very beginning. You know? Yeah, we would both. We both would be crying, yeah, yeah. I would have very, I would have very panicked
emails sent to my
publisher. So when we approach outlining, I have, like, a very specific outlining method that
works really well for because I'm number two intellection, but like, also, so I don't want to be, like, too overloaded with information, but I'm also neurodivergent, so like, I work with a lot of people who are like, I can't plot. And I'm like, don't worry, we can do it, because there are different ways to do it. But like, the focus that we always have is kind of like script writing, storyboarding method, right? Which is, like, all the scenes that you want to write. But we also think about like, what are those reader expectation scenes. What are they really like? Because this book is book five in a series, what do they really want to see from this character? What are these moments that we know that we've been building to over time, and we want to make sure that we have them in there, and those are the things that we sit down to put into the outline first, because I think so often people write books and they're like, I will have this great scene, but doesn't work anymore. And I'm like, what if you built it first with the scenes you really wanted, so that it was a more joyful experience? And so we built an initial outline, and we both because being number two into election, I was like, doesn't I don't know. I'm I'm tapped out. I need, I need a break. You need a break. So we came back the next week, and we were working on it, and neither one of us were quite ready to get off the call. Yeah. So we just, like, kept talking, and we were like, what if we just throw out the whole outline we did last week, and we'll just build a new one that is more focused on joy and more and shifts things to change the pacing, be more character focused, and is just arguably more fun. Yeah? And so while the first outline technically works, I think sometimes we need the reminder that, like, this job is supposed to be a good time, yeah? And like, we're supposed to have fun with it, and we're supposed to write the scenes we really want, yeah, um. And so it's okay to kind of like make those shifts, because, especially in your early outlining, that you keep that joy really centric, and I think that that is something that we have really worked on over over time. Was like, but what was the scene that you really wanted to write? Because, like, when you're writing an intellection, right, like you're it can be overwhelming, right? Or it can feel kind of slow, or like sometimes, like pulling teeth, because you're like, I have so many options. Where do I go? But like, when you're headed towards a good time, yeah, and something you've been building to, it just flows so much easier. And you can really see that in your writing, like anybody's writing when you're enjoying what you're doing, your readers can feel that. And so your readers really feel that when we make sure that those scenes are like that scene, like the visceral scene in twisted lies where, like, his hand is on her leg. And I saw it so clearly, and I was like, Oh, my God, it's there. And you're like, I can see it. And that is a scene that comes up so frequently because the readers can feel that excitement. Yeah, I agree. And, you know. And for me, I, like I said, I've gone through iterations of what my
process is, from full on pant to where we are now. And for me, I I think there is a I think it's great when you're able to kind of give yourself a little bit more grace. Because I definitely went through a period for a couple of books where, you know, I was taking all these craft courses, and I was reading all these craft books, and I was like, Okay. I was like, I have to do this structure. Like, this has to happen at exactly 30% or this is going to be absolutely terrible, you know. And I was trying to force my story into this kind of structure that everyone says, you know, a story is supposed to follow. And I wasn't, and I was a little too precise with it, because I wasn't giving myself enough room to feel the story in the way that it was supposed to flow, like I was trying to fit it in a mold that wasn't quite right for those characters. And I think that was, honestly, that was a pretty big hindrance, because I was kind of ignoring my intuition for what I felt like I should do. And so it's a lot of kind of balancing back and forth between just, like, completely no structure, and then completely, like super structured for me to find this balance for me today. And this is not to say that the way I do it will work for everyone. I know some people really do need that, like, super structure, and some people just they can't have that structure at all. But I think it's fine. I think it's actually helpful if you kind of experiment with your process a little bit and figure out what brings you the most joy, like, what is the most fun for you, what is the easiest way for you to kind of tell the story that the way that you want to tell it absolutely, um, you, you just said, Well, I have to do it this way, right? And I think
that one of the things that I work on with a lot of my coaching clients is we don't use the word have to anymore, because, like, this is a choice to to write, right? Like, obviously, there's a point of, like, you know, we like to eat and have shelter and health insurance, like these things, they would be nice, they're great. Like, we have basic needs that need to be met, but beyond that, like, how you meet those basic needs are up to you, like reminding yourself that you have that autonomy to make those choices, and so, yes, learn the rules. There's a million right ways to do something, and there's only very few wrong ways to tell that kind of like to tell a story, right? And so figuring out, okay, well, you know intuitively what you should be doing, and it's okay to trust that. And sometimes it's refining what that trust looks like, but other times it's just throwing out the idea of, like, well, I have to do it this way, yeah, oh, I have to be, well, they're doing it this way. And I'm like, okay, you don't have to do it that way. You can, like, maybe reading or watching television or going for a walk is more productive than the idea of, well, I have to be sitting at my computer to be productive. So that leads me to, kind of, like, this next question of someone had asked, like, what? What are these tips for the optimal debt meeting of a deadline? How do we meet deadlines in this house? I'm laughing because there have been a few books. Rebecca was at my house as I was on deadline, and you could just see
the 50 coffee cups. Like, like, we literally count, like, I have a photo of how many coffee cups around my counter. They were just like, I like to think of them as, like, votive candles. Yeah, that's beautiful.
It was, yeah. I
mean, I, and I'll be totally honest, I am the type of writer that will
write to Deadline like I and it doesn't matter how long, like, you could give me four weeks, you could give me four months, I will be like, at the I will be at that finish line, like, right as I need to get there. And I think it's just like the way my brain, like I said, I need intellection. So my intellection, my thinking, will just fill in that space for however long. Like, if it had a choice, I would probably be thinking about a book for like, 10 years, and I would like never publish it, but what I found works, and I hate to say this, because it's one of those things where I know you hear this advice a lot, and it gets kind of monotonous, but then it also kind of sucks, because the advice is actually true, is I go off my phone, like I when I am on hard deadline, I will put my phone in another room, in like the most hard to read, like, I'll put it in A top cabinet where I know I'll be too lazy to like, go and try to search for it if I ever needed that dopamine hit of like, I need to be on social media. And I will actually turn off the night. I will turn off my phone the night before, because iPhones take forever to load up in the morning, and I also know I will be too impatient to like, try and turn on my phone in the morning and wait for it to load up. So it's just like, out of sight, out of mind. And I listen to so I listen. There's like an app called Brain FM, which is kind of like binaural beats that are supposed to help you with focus. And I don't know if it actually works or if it's just a placebo effect, but I will listen to that when I am writing, because I think I have trained my brain in the sense that I will do certain things, and my brain will know, okay, this is time for me to write, you know, like it's just a trigger for it to know this is work time and this is not play time, which is what that is. And I also, you know, there was a point where, when I was on deadline, I would try to push myself to pull all nighters, right, and I would be trying to write until three or four in the morning, and they weren't even really good words, and I had to go back and edit them anyway. And now I found that, you know, it sounds cliche, but a good night's sleep will literally the words that I will get is so much more productive the next day, once my brain actually has time to rest and to think about all of these things. And I mentioned earlier that I do a skeleton draft, so if you're not familiar with that, is, is basically, I will have a first draft and I just fill in as much of the scenes and chapters as I can, right? And I It doesn't necessarily have to be a complete chapter or scene. It's just anything that I know about that scene, like some chapters can be full and then other chapters will only have, like, two sentences. And I do that until I get to the end, and it helps, because it gives my mind a bit of a structure and an end point, which really helps motivate me a little bit more. And so when I am on deadline, I try not to force myself to finish chapters that I am not feeling like I will just hop on to the next scene and just try to get my words out that way. And I've just found that that really alleviates the pressure of me trying to hit like a certain word count or certain chapter goal every day, which actually kind of hinders my creativity a bit. So, yeah, yeah, being and understanding what motivates you that deadline, that like hard limit,
or the idea of not being stressed out and being ahead, whatever that is, and understanding what motivates you is really important. Like, I know same. If you give me four months, I'm going to take all four months. If you give me two weeks, I'm you're going to get it on the exact day you said you needed it, because I don't want to let you down. But also, again, my brain is is a fun it's a fun zone. I want to switch gears a little bit, because you have seen a lot of really beautiful success, and I want to talk a lot about, like, how do you both target your demographic, but also approach your writing with a sense of bravery? Yeah? I Yeah. You know, it's interesting because it's, I think it's a little bit different. You
know, when I was writing my earlier books, before really, I had any type of success, it was a much different experience, because I went into it not really thinking of the audience. I was just like, oh, you know, like, probably no one's gonna read this anyway, so I can just write whatever I want. It doesn't really matter. And I think that changes. You know, as your audience grows, and you have to be and there's more pressure, and you have to be more cognizant of kind of your reader base, because also, readers are not shy about telling you, like, what they want. Like, they'll be in your DMS, they'll be in your emails, and, you know, they'll have theories about what will happen for future couples. And it's kind of hard, especially when you're trying to form a story, to really block out all of that noise. Because I'm like, Well, what if what I'm writing, and this is the story I want to tell, but it's so opposite their expert like, or their theories, or what they want to happen to this book, right? Like, it is really hard to kind of take that balance. But I think for me, one of the things that I am always a strong believer in is you can never please anybody, like everybody with your work. And if you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing nobody, right? And it's like, don't be afraid to lean into the things that your target audience wants, whether even if it's not something that everyone wants, even if it's something that some people hate. You know what I mean? Because my belief, especially for negative, you know, literally about to ask you about what you're talking about. Yes, if you're looking at negative reviews, like, one of my things is, I would never change anything in my book that someone gave me one star for that, another person gave me a five star for right? And it could be, you know, it could be like an alpha male. It could be like a certain scene. It could be like an angst it could be a third act breakup. Because apparently, you know, some people don't like third act breakups, so, but I would never change that, because if you do change it, then you're alienating that first audience that enjoyed your books in the first place. So it's and I think having that in mind is really helpful in terms of being able to write a book where you don't necessarily try to pull your punches in a way that you're trying to make it more palatable to a general audience, right? Because I always believe that no matter what you enjoy reading, there will always be someone out there that enjoys the exact same thing. And they are, they will probably go feral for it, and you just have to lean into the things that make your work, what they are, even if they are not for everyone. You know, I think actually wanted to ask you about twisted love, right? Because I was like your best seller,
we love it. We're into it, um, but there we run into this problem a lot when we're plotting, because you'll be like, Oh, Alex did that already. Yeah, I'll be like, Oh, what about this? And she's like, I was like, just kidding. I know Alex did that already, didn't he What about the scene? You're like, Oh, I did that. I just had a twist of love. And I think one of the big things when we talk about that, like writing with bravery, or writing what's like, true to you is like, when we think of that breakout hit, because so much of that breakout hit defines your brand going forward, it's a lot of like, what they those readers who found you continuously want from you. We have you put everything you ever wanted in that first book. But like, what? What did that feel like? I mean, when you take, took that step, and you built that thing that, yeah, it has a ton of one star reviews, but also a bajillion five star reviews, because you created these very, I wouldn't say divisive scenes, but I would say scenes that really resonated with some people and created a reaction that was memorable, but like, as you're talking about, like Writing with bravery, or finding that demographic, finding your specific reader, because each of us have our own, like, Venn diagrams of readers that that overlap, but like, what is that? What did that really look like? And how do you take writing with that same kind of bravery you took from twisted love? How do we maintain that, yeah, as we move forward, yeah. I mean, listen, twisted, love, I yeah, I literally just put in a bunch of things that I enjoyed as a
reader into that book. And that book, I never thought, like much many people would ever read it. I was like, oh, you know, like, this is a fun time. I wrote it in like, a month over Christmas holidays. And, I mean, it took more time to edit that, but I wrote it in that sort of time period, and it was very freeing for me because, like, I saw I had that freedom of being like, well, it doesn't really matter what I write in this book, because no one will ever read it, and it will just be an enjoyable process for me, and this book will be for me. And I know it's not, it's not like a mainstream book, right? Because there's a lot of themes in that that are not necessarily palatable to a general audience, but it was fine, because I had a very specific avatar in mind, and it was helpful to me, because I was my own reader avatar. And so I know, like, you know, the things that I like are what my target audience will like. And it was, and that was what made, I think, writing the second book of that series so hard. I think, you know, it was one of the most difficult books I've ever had to write, because all of a sudden, like, I had all of this pressure, and like all of these people, you know, waiting for the book and all of their theories, and I'm like, oh my god, what if it was just like a one hit wonder? And it was, you know, just the first book did well. So that book was very difficult for me to write. And I think even now, because I have a wider audience than, I think what I originally intended with twisted love, and they we kind of a broader, kind of a more broader spectrum of romance. So I and to be fully honest, I don't know if I can ever fully get back to that same sense of freedom that I had when I was writing twisted love, yes, but I also have to when I look at the books that I was trying to write, I still realize that the books that do the best and that resonate the most with the readers are the ones where I kind I still leaned into it a little bit, and I didn't pull my punches as much by trying to make the characters more more appealing, I guess, to everybody, like, I know everyone says, for example, like everyone says online, on social media, that they don't like a third act breakup, which is totally valid. But when I look at my books, my top four, like bestsellers by far, all have, like a major third act breakup. Well that follows So and, you know, and so, I think kind of keeping that in mind and knowing what my audience responds to the most really helps me kind of drown out the voices that are not necessarily my target audience, because I can even tell by when I see the reviews, even when I look at their favorite books, right? What are their other favorite books? I can generally tell. I'm like, Okay, if you like this book, you will probably like my book. And if you if your favorite books are these certain books, and you probably will not like my books. And I kind of have that idea of mine, and I will keep it in mind when I'm reading or like looking at reviews, I'm like, is this person actually my target audience, and are they reviewing in a way that is constructive to what I want to write in the future? Or is it just, you know, someone that picked up my book that I'm very grateful for, but they're not necessarily who I am trying to reach. You know, when I want to talk about that demographic, but I kind of want to like, I mean, we
initially, when we had sat down, we always like, I have all these questions and like, yeah, all these other things. But I think something that I really did want to talk about that relates directly to the heroine's journey is what the difference is between the twisted series and the kings of sin series. Yeah, and we were like, we're so silly. We should have figured this out earlier. And that that friendship of those the twisted series, is so much stronger, and it brings when we talk about Theodore Taylor's like, universal fantasies, or we talk about what these ideals, or what we're reading for this escapism we are looking for, right, that sense of community, and so the twisted series, you we have this like, very intensive sense of community. And as we're looking at, like, the future of what women want now, right? It's not so much the CEO who makes all the dollars, and we like that too, but we also want to be the CEO who makes doctors and he brings us lunch because we forgot to eat anyways, like we always do because we're too focused. And so when we think about this, like audience, because I think your audience is a little bit younger, yeah, you have this very fresh Tiktok, brand new readership that's like vast and wide and beautiful, but a lot of the things that they look for are that community, and we want to see that in equal parts, that friendship, as much as we're looking for like that romantic relationship. We love the gravel, but like we also love the bonding moments that we get to have with our friends because we're choosing to spend time with these characters. Yeah, they're just as real to us, you and I, like as as they're being created, but they're also just as real when they're in your backpack or in your purse, or, like at the airport, we're like, oh, just gonna go hang out with Stella. Now it's fine, but like, when you think about building these What do you think your readers are, like, younger audiences, like, really looking for from you? Yeah, in terms of, like, yes, we have the specific reader that you like that's like they they're here for the darker, slightly more toxic hero. But like, when we think of these other characters, or just the general sense that you that they're really buying into when they buy into you. Yeah. Where do you what are some things key points that you can define by that? Yeah. I mean, I think even though there may be different types of heroes and kind of different types of themes throughout my books,
one thing that I always make sure to do is, no matter what the male main character does to other people, whether he's really polite or really nice to them, or he's more morally gray at the end of the day, he will always treat his love interest with respect, right? Like he will never cheat on her. He will never treat her in a way that compromises her safety. And I think that is kind of one of the core fantasies as, at least for my readers, right? That read to me that no matter who the hero is, that love interest is going to be his, like, one and only person that he focuses his time on, right? He's, like, obsessed with her, no matter he could be, you know, like a kidnapper, he could be a hacker, you could do all of these things, but for her, he is like a teddy bear. And that is one of the themes that I am very conscious of keeping throughout my books. And there is also this sense of found family. Like I said, all of my books are interconnected standalones, and when I look at my readers, and I look at their fan made content, whether it's their social media, whether it's fanfiction, whether it's fan art. Yes, they love the couples, but almost all of the fandom content actually revolves around the friend group. It's not about individual couples. It's about who they are as a group, as this found family. Because I think, you know, there is a sense of like comfort of being able to see these people who are always there for each other, who are loyal to each other, who even if they are separated by time and distance, they'll always be there if you need them. And I think especially in the world that we are in today, where we can feel kind of isolated and we can kind of feel lonely, especially for people who are in the younger age bracket, who tends to make up the majority of my audience, there is a lot of comfort and a lot of universal fantasy and being able to see a friend group like that. And, you know, I am someone that really loves to see strong female friendships in groups. I don't necessarily, you know, I I like to see having very healthy relationships with the other people in the group, and I think that is something that is very appealing to them, and they can self insert themselves into it. I mean, a lot of people will come to me after they read the last book in the series and they're like, Oh my God. You know, I felt like I grew up with these people, and ending the series kind of felt like I was saying, bye to my best friends, right? Because it's very easy for them when they're reading a group like that to you know, see themselves the fifth member, because they are living vicariously through these characters, and they make it so real and so relatable to them. And I think that is actually a very it's one of the strongest ways, I think, to build a fandom is to be able to create a world where there is enough flexibility and imagination for people to kind of spin out their own stories and their own ideas about what happens in that world. Absolutely, I think we are moving a little bit away from the exaltation of like the SIS
hat hero and more into buying into a fandom of a world, of a place of a community, yeah, and I think that that is something that you've done with so much strength in the twisted series, and then also in your upcoming series that will come out in October. But we start to see this like build of community and of having each of your heroes, not only do they really respect and value the heroines, but they also stand behind their dreams. And there are no like they can have any dream, but that their dream is also very valuable. So the readers are buying into the that heroine's journey, right? They're buying into the dream, because also the the other main character is as well. So I think that that is something that like, when we had that moment, I was like, Oh my God, my world has changed. And then we are watching Gail, and I was like, Oh my God, this existed before last week, if only I'd known, but I, I didn't. So, no, no, I really know I'm very aware of this, like, beautiful need for community, which we get to have here. And so I'm so grateful for you guys for listening to us chat and and drone and be excited and geek out between ourselves. Of how, how did how? How do you do it? How do we do it together? And how do we constantly center not only like your joy and my joy as creators, but also the joy of the reader, right? Because they're choosing to spend their time, it's not just their money. They're choosing to spend their time with you, to to escape or be entertained or have fun. And so I'm also very excited to be entertained, escape and have fun with the rest of our panels today too. Yes, definitely. Thank you guys so much for listening to us chat, and I'm excited
for the rest of the conference. I
was like, I'm gonna look for the designated adult in this room. I know I was like, Oh, my God, it's me right now.
That's okay. No, no, I can be the adult. I've
been the adult many times. It's
good. I'm a little sweaty, but I'm liking it. Yeah,
it's good. I showered yesterday, and this morning was a twofer. Um, okay, so really quickly before the designated adult returns. Um, my name is Becca Hensley Mysore. I refer to sometimes as the fairy plot mother, mostly because that's what I named my company as. And I've been doing this quite a long time. We've been doing this together quite a long time. And I want to see if anyone has any questions for me that aren't about my hygiene habits.
It's okay. If there are none, I'll just
I'm like, did we make eye contact? No, it's fine. Oh, okay.
And then you two glasses. Oh, I love everybody in glasses.
You You've talked touched on this, but can you talk more about how
you work together
and what
that would look like for someone else in this room
if they were working with a Content Editor or with you? I think that's, I
think that's a really important question that we should answer right now, because we're like, how did we do it? And we're like, how should you do it, though, do you want to go first and then out I can follow. Yeah, so Becca and I work for together, so usually, when it's time for me to
start a new book, we will hop on a call and we'll just kind of feel out the major questions that we have, right? And it's usually about the characters, or if it's something that I'm uncertain about, like, oh, how do I if I want to, you know, write a book about a certain for example, one of my heroes coming up is voluntarily nonverbal, and it's something that I have never written before. So we're kind of like figuring out the big story questions, and we'll usually have a second call where we drill down more into the actual scenes and the plot of the book once we've done all of that character and big story work. And for me, what I like to do once we have the outline together is I tend to send my book in chunks to my alpha readers as well as to my editor, because I'm like, Okay, if there is something wrong with this story, like I need to know as is happening when I've completed the entire story, right? And so Becca will be there every step of the way to kind of give me the feedback and ways to punch up the scenes and any questions that you know, if I haven't already addressed it, she's like, Hey, keep this in mind, like for the rest of this book, this is something that you need to do or that you need to think about. So it's a very collaborative process between the two of us, but that's generally the basic outline of what it looks like. Yeah. And so for us, not everybody, not every developmental editor, Content Editor, would say it would be, as I
would say, collaborative or involved. Everybody has their own process. Some people are very protective of their stories, and they're like, I'm not going to send it to you until it's done. Also, just help me hit these things, or I'll have people where, you know, we're in it from beginning to end. And I think everybody is very different, but I think that your editor needs to be somebody who is going to be able to keep it real with you, but they're looking not just at the health of the story, but like, mental health, right? Like, I'm not out here trying to shred somebody's book, but I'm also not looking for them to make decisions that maybe they don't have all the information about, right? Like, I'll say, Hey, if you make this choice, here's a heads up. Here's some off, like, possible reactions, some pitfalls we could run into. But I think that that's kind of when you look at working with a developmental editor, sometimes it's a resource issue or decision where you want to allocate things, how you want to collaborate, what you're really looking for out of a relationship. I think it's something to establish right away, like we have established like a set, like, a solid sense of respect for each other, a solid sense of understanding of who the other person is, because we're so collaborative, how to have a difficult conversation quickly and like, move forward where we take our egos out of it. Like, are you walking into a relationship with an editor who has a large ego, and how is that going to impact your vision? So these are all kind of questions that we look at and pay attention to. Like, when I work with other clients, and then for Anna and I, it's very collaborative in the sense of, like, yes, it's it's her, like, her name goes on the front of the book. It's her world. But together, we're able to be the creative support, because this job is so isolating to create everything from your brain by yourself, and I have, like, a very intimate understanding of that, but like, it just depends on what it is you're looking for out of that relationship. So we're, I think I know that we're out of time now, but I just wanted to kind of, like, really fully answer that question. Of, like, when you're looking to work with an editor at like, a higher level or in your story, what does that really mean in terms of, like, respect and process? It's very individualized. I have like, a couple 100 clients that I've worked with over the last nine years, and everybody is just so different. And I think finding somebody who respects what makes you is the most important thing, because what works for Anna does not work for Lauren, like does not work for Helena, like, these things are not all the same. So I hope that was helpful, and we're really grateful for your time, and now the designated result is here. So I'm gonna go pass this mic off. So thank you guys so much. I really, really appreciate your time.
I wasn't told about that. Okay, chair, stay
here. Hi. Well, that was wonderful. I want to say I'm looking forward to the striker, mainly because I'm obsessed with soccer. So thank you.
We're gonna take a five minute break, bathroom, you know, potty time. I have nothing else to say. That's. That's it.
New York Times best selling author of over 15 romance. I just turned in. Number, 2020. Romans.
Host of the podcast, faded mates with Jim Prokop, who is back there, back and also one of the people that I forced to be here today. So without further ado, the art of conflict with Sarah McLean. Hi all, I am going to move very fast, because I have 75 slides, because I usually do this in two hours. So we're going to move as quickly as possible. You just heard about me. So we're going to skip this,
maybe, okay,
and we're going to jump right into this, which should be very fast for everyone. When I think about the role, I think about it this way, it is two or more people falling in love against seemingly insurmountable odds, or stuff happens while knuckleheads fall in love, right? We all know. Readers. All know, when we start a book that at the end, they're going to get together, right? So the joy of reading romance is not about the ending. It's about the journey happily ever after, though, is the end game. It is non negotiable, and the romance has to be the center plot. So to help me, as I'm moving through my world, I spend a lot of time thinking like reading news stories or watching movies that are not romances, and thinking, how could we put more romance into this? Like, why don't they kiss in twisters? I That's another session, more hours. But basically, romance, is the genre of feelings. Jenn, and I say this all the time on the podcast, which you can listen to every Wednesday. And because romance is there, that specializes in feelings and emotions.
Conflict
and the work is to figure out how to balance it right. Writing is work. Storytelling is work. External conflict is the most active. It drives the plot of the story. It makes sure our characters have enough to do. This is how we like pace the book. This is how we keep pages turning. This is how we, like get to the end of a chapter and like decide not to go to bed. That's often an external thing happening. But it is not enough to keep the emotion moving right, to keep those big feelings dialed up where we need them to be for romance, which is our work, internal is mostly reactive. It is, it's driving the emotion of the story, and it is the piece that we have to get right in order for us at the end to feel like, oh, man, that was a killer book, right? That was a book that made me feel big feelings. And then I want to go back and, like Jen always says on the podcast, like, just read the last third Right? Like, I just skipped to the chapter 22 of that book. That's often because, internally, a writer has done all the work to make us understand why. That's like, so powerful at the end, when they finally, finally admit that they love each other, conflict, should be layered, and this is the hard thing together, internal and external, keep the characters interacting the story moving. But without both, you won't have a cohesive story with a beginning, middle and end. You'll start in the wrong place,
you'll finish in the wrong place, and you
won't have that sort of emotionally satisfying ending that romance really requires. So let's look at some examples. I'm going to break this out into the issues that I sort of gave you character, the setting, this, the society, etc. So, um, these are just great examples. This whole session is going to be filled with examples of books that I think do this really well. Many of these authors are here. I don't think either of these authors are here, um, but this is I also want to talk about the fact that, like you can do conflict in small town romance, you can do conflict in quiet contemporaries, it's not, it's not only in the realm of historicals or fantasy. So in after hours on the last Angelina M Lopez tells this story of a heroine who is like returned home in disgrace. She has to battle this like handsome stranger who her family like, maybe likes better than her, which is one of her, like, big internal things that her family doesn't love her, but then she, and she's kind of like, happy to fight him, because she's a heroine who loves a fight, but then she realizes, like, she might like him too. And there's a lot of internal conflict in her character here. And then, I mean, Lorraine, he does conflict better than she might be the best of us at it honestly. And here's one where a hero is racked with guilt because he had a carriage accident. I'm not laughing. It's not funny.
This book begins, you owe me a cock, but whatever.
And he had a carriage accident, left his husband his I'm sorry, his cousin unable to impregnate his wife and his and his he is required, basically, the cousin says, actually, the front of the book is, I'll consider your debt repaid if you get my wife with child right, which is like, so internal this, and he's been in love with her forever. It's amazing. Anyway, I said it was going to go fast, but instead, I'm going to talk about books and to talk about books Nikki Payne fans here. I think setting white out is a classic romantic suspense. Ad Anders pits these two characters against the world in in Antarctica,
and there's on top
of it, like a crew of villains coming after them.
So there's a lot of
layering here and then, but Nikki Payne does it in a small town contemporary, right? She, her main character, is trying to get through the fact that, like she has just discovered that her she is the other family of her now dead father, she turns up at a beach house in rural Maine that she is planning to, like, renovate and find a new life around, but it comes with a sexy fake park ranger, and so who gives tours of the property as though he owns it. And so, like, there's something very setting based about this book, but also deeply character based
conflict in society.
Tracy live, who is here. Her most recent series begins with American royalty, which is set against the royal family. If you are a Harry Meghan fan, this book is for you. And we can think of all this society is baked in the society conflict is baked in here, right? An American rapper, the royal family, the British royal family in Clarence. Hold the heroine is literally deposited on a prison planet forever, which I mean society, right? And setting, yikes. And then so many of you have a fire in the sky by Sophie Jordan in your bags right now. This is a romance out yet, but you all have it, so I'm going to talk about it. The heroine here is raised in a royal household which made war and eradicated dragons from existence. Many years ago, she is engaged to a man who is from a long line of dragons, of slayers, and she discovers she's a dragon herself, excuse me, herself, conflict and sex. Alexis Hall's for real, does this so well? The This flips the age gap. It sort of it does a lot of work around like age and power and privilege and sex. A
young hero who has never experienced
with kink at all, like experimented with kink at all, realizes that he might be a sexual dominant and and he has no one to help him explore this. He finds an older submissive at a sex club, and they have to navigate the sex of it all right, with power, privilege, age, etc. And then Diana Quincy, who is here also this week. This is one of my favorite romances, a Duke and a widow have like the greatest one night stand of their life, and then she discovers that he has engaged her his stepdaughter, not great, not great, but they are super hot for each other. And so it's tough out there for these two, but they work it out this is the realm of taboo romance. Almost all taboo romance really plays with the conflict and the tension of sex. So think about your age gap books, your daddy romances, basically anything Nikki Sloan has ever written lives here and we know as readers that instinctively this is going to be really fun, because we get it right, we get it in our lives. So Susan Elizabeth Phillips said this incredible thing that I always repeat in this session, if your hero is a firefighter, your heroine better be an arsonist. And obviously it doesn't have to be exactly like that, but that's the vibe. Every bit of conflict in a romance has to work to bring the love interest together toward an hea. This is a place where we often have to murder our darlings. Me, especially you guys, I just turned in a book that's 500 pages long, and you end up to a point where you think like I've just filled it. There's too much stuff in here for it to actually be a romance. Luckily that this is not a romance that I just turned in. But so when we put in a side plot, a mystery, a secondary character. How are they driving this book? And I think that is also a challenge for those of us who are thinking along series lines. Often we say, I'm gonna write a series with eight siblings, and each one of them is gonna go well, if you're putting them on the page in the first book, they have to serve the first romance. They can't just be there to like vibe. So there is I said that this at the beginning. There is no conflict without character. And so we start here. When you're thinking about your characters, your these are questions that I sort of think through as I'm working. I do not plot, I do not outline, I don't do any of the sheets or anything I just write in the dark, it's miserable my way. Don't do it my way. But eventually, at some point, I'll go this. None of this makes sense. What am I doing? And then I sit and I do. I answer these kinds of questions, right? What are their flaws? What are their strengths? Do they have special skills? Why? Is a very big question here that I think a lot of times we skip over, what is the point of them having these flaws, these skills, like these, these strengths, what do they want versus what do they need? Here's a big one, what we want is often not what we need. Revenge. For example, I could wallpaper my home with books about men who want revenge. It's never a good answer, right? It's always a very good want. It's not a good need. What are they unwilling to sacrifice? This is a goal issue, if you've ever done the goal, motivation, conflict, work that this is, this is a big question that they noodle there, that unwillingness to sacrifice is your conflict for the whole book, and at some point that person is going to have to sacrifice that thing, and they're going to have to do it for love. What scares them? What's their deepest wound? What does normal look like for them? These are all sort of really interesting questions to ask as you're thinking about your characters. And don't forget, you're doing this for two characters or three characters or four characters, for many characters you have in a relationship in this book. Ultimately, the questions and answers of the I'm sorry, the answers for each of those questions for each character are going to have to intersect. These aren't the but the biggest question is, why do these two characters? Why are these, or I'm going to say two, just for ease of use, but why are these particular characters in this relationship, in this book? Why not a different book with a different person? This isn't an existential question, though it certainly can be. This is about making sure you have the gas in the engine to tell this story. Because if it's a romance novel, it has to be driving characters together, right? We readers are in it for the Breathless, earned happily ever after, not for anything else. Everything else is just fossils. So the reason why this is about conflict, though, is these characters have to simultaneously partner with each other and then also stand in each other's way again, because the end of the book is The happily ever after.
The other 300 400 pages are them getting there. So I
always think about my characters as villains to each other at the start, even if they are friends. So the question ultimately is, how do they impede each other? So I know this is a hard question, so I'm going to go through some examples. So if one character wants to save her business, the other character is a threat to the business. This is a pretty easy one. This is the bedrock of Hana Khan carries on by Uzma jalaladine, if one character wants to do penance for some perceived harm that they've done, but the other character, who needs to receive the apology and maybe make good with it, loathes them. They might manipulate them in some way. They might end up say, asking them to go into a fake relationship, like in Kate Claiborne's luck of the draw in a history Well, somebody wants a bride for their son, and the bride that they choose won't be a model prisoner and won't marry the son, but would definitely marry the dad. That's mafia mistress by Mila Fanelli, she is also here this weekend. If a one character wants a peaceful life with no drama and her best his best friend, but the second character has unrequited love feelings and quits on day one, on page one that's scoring off the field, one character wants a divorce after a loveless marriage, and the other character just refuses. There's the unwanted wife by Natasha Anders. A character wants to stay focused on hockey, but his boss and slash one night stand, one night stand is also his boss, and it's tough for him to get away from it. That's Odette stone. So you can see we've got two characters who want to bring their best friend into their relationship. The best friend you know, is terrified of love and relation, loving and commitment. So there's a Katie Robert book. I mean, you can see a Christina Lauren book, where one character has a genetic matchmaking company and needs good marketing and find and they but his perfect match through the algorithm wants nothing to do with him or love. There's a soulmate equation, celebrity dance competitions. You can see it in every one of these books, a character who is literally poisonous to everyone and always works alone but finds the one person he is not poisonous to who is essential to his to vanquishing his enemy. These are all ways that we can see characters standing in each other's way, and not just in paranormal or romantic suspense. So let's talk about external conflicts, the stuff that happens. So here are good examples. I just listed a bunch of other examples. I'm not going to read all these, but you can imagine, like all the forces that are you're experiencing outside of your head live here in external these are conflicts that have to be actually physically overcome, not necessarily resolved. The problem can still exist at the end. There is still a prison planet at the end of hold. They're not on it, but the prison planet still exists. But a believable he a has to be overcome in these books, or has in order for believe, excuse me, in order for believable he A to be overcome, they have to overcome the external goal, the external conflict. Sorry, and this is often the direct result of the main characters perceived start of the story. So what are they unwilling to sacrifice. This is that question coming back to it, and is it power, wealth, you know, the business that they've been working for for their whole life, the killer that they're willing, you know, they're the killer that they're chasing, if they're a, you know, Detective, for example. Or revenge, again, we come back to revenge, really good external goal, because it's never right, but they are unwilling to sacrifice this goal. And so ultimately, the test in a romance will be, are they willing to pass over and make this sacrifice for love? Fun fact, they don't have to actually sacrifice. They just have to be willing to. And we have to believe it. External conflict is also where we where stakes live. So when we ask ourselves, like, what is the external conflict? The question is like, what are how? What are ways that we can amp this conflict up? You know, obviously not everything has to be dialed to 11. We just want to dial it up to keep the love interest with each other on the same page. So this is where stakes come into play. Remember that this is plot largely the the romance itself should be driving the plot, however, so thinking about how the stakes and the conflict, the external conflict can drive backs can be served by backstory, by the setup, by all the side characters, by the B plots, everything has to come together. All this external conflict has to come together to serve the romance in the end, anything like I said, that does not keep the main characters together on the page, will detract from the romance, and you gotta be careful. You are gonna have a great session on high concept later. But broadly, one of the things that I think about related to high concept is the books themselves in the concept, because there's such conflict built into the concept, right? So if you think about, say, Lily choose to stand in where she is, the main character looks exactly the same as a very famous actress who needs, who needs, like, time off and she is hired to stand in during a full kind of press junket with this very handsome other actor, and people don't know who she is. She's playing a part these kinds of, like, big high concept ideas we can understand instantly, like, Oh, she's not the person who everyone thinks she is. And therefore, there is con, there is there are stakes, what happens when she's found out. Gail talked so much about tropes this morning that I'm going to blow through this. But there's so much discussion of tropes in general today there they are not story and they are not plot, but they often like offer the template, right? So when we say only one bed. The reason why you like that is because they don't actually, they shouldn't actually both be in that bed right now, right? Like it's the tension of the bed, like fake relationship is sexy because they're not in a real relationship. And what if they get found out? Like we understand innately that the tropes are conflict driven, but they're not enough. So plot is not story, and a story requires characters and nuance and feelings, and that means that we have to get away from external conflict at some point. So we go to internal conflict. For this. Internal conflict, are the force. This is the forces within the characters that keep them separate on the page. So they're still on the page, they're on the page together because of external conflict, but now they're internally when they're on the page together, but they still can't be together emotionally. We're not the end of the book that's internal keeping them separate, and it will also make emotional resolution seem pretty impossible for the for the reader. So these are our knuckleheads, right? And this is all the deep character work that we just did starts to come into play. What do they want? What are their fears? You know? What are their what are they unwilling sacrifice? Also come in here. These are often the things that keep a character in stasis, right? Like we need to scare a character, sometimes to move forward. And that fear often comes from from internal conflict, like moving moving characters forward from here, from this space they require. This requires emotional effort on the part of the characters to move the book forward, to move themselves forward. And emotional effort on our part to write the book forward. Big examples on the side, you've seen all of these in romance novels before, and things like not believing in love, I mean a classic, right, or being unworthy of love, having sexes you complexes. You know, loneliness, solitude, these kinds of things. Internal conflict is how you keep the happily ever after at bay through believable, emotional motivation. It's not enough to say like my character is afraid of love, like I have to understand why, right, like my character is, you know, has the savior complex? Well, then you better tell me what the trauma is that brought that to them. This conflict has to be emotionally overcome before we can get to a healthy hea. And this gets back to the beginning, like it has to be believable. It has to be healthy. Like we have to know when we close the book that if we opened a book 40 years later, about these two or they're still happy, right? They're still stable. Everything's going to be okay.
Internal conflict are the kind of so we know what they want, right? We've established what they want. Internal conflict is where like need comes in, right? So Gail talks learning related to heroine's journey like this. Need this sort of like, what is the quest that they're that our books are moving us toward understanding, family, acceptance, identity, security, all these, all these things, community. And these are also, this is, this is the work. This is the internal journey of these characters, this is what they need, but at the beginning of the book, they don't know they need this, right? They think they need something else. They think they need revenge, but they actually need community. Or they think they need the job, but they actually need security. What does that look like? Maybe it's not the job, maybe it's something else. While the reasons for these needs are often external, the needs themselves are often feelings like this is where we start to get into, like the squeaky work of layering conflict, the revelation of these actual internal needs is likely not clear, like I said at the at the beginning of the book, this is like a third act moment where they kind of like, get clubbed, like, oh shit, I love him, right? Which is really just a great moment in every book in romance. I'm not going to do this, but Gail talked this morning. We are always moving toward community and romance and so, or at least in most corners of romance, we are moving toward community. And of course, they all need love, right? Because that's the job. So we're in the business of love. And these are these books are transformative experiences for the characters. That's what we're doing. We're starting the book where the transformative experience begins, and we're ending it with that sort of awareness of love is love is end game. So internal conflict is more complicated for me because it's solitary, right? It lives in the POV of one character, not both, right? So you're doing it for two characters. You're thinking about internal conflict for two characters, but one character has to like living the experience of that internal conflict. The resolution of internal conflict will require the engagement and interference right of these other characters, the story, and also the rest of the stuff, the storylines, the plots, etc. But ultimately, this is the work of a single character, right? These are the stories. These are not just stories of characters falling in love. These are stories of characters learning to love themselves. And so this has to happen for every protagonist in your romance. And so this is where it's like communication and dialog. And like those lovely moments, those quiet moments between main characters start to really become powerful. This is true for friends to lovers, which is often a big problem when we're writing friends to lovers books, is figuring out a way to keep the tension tight, right? Because these are two people who really like each other, so why aren't they fucking like what is keeping them from being there? And here are four examples of books that do friends to leverage really powerfully that, I think. And but this, again, gets to this idea that, like, we are carrying our own baggage, and we have to unpack it first, and we can do that with other people, but ultimately, it's not until we've unpacked that baggage that like other people are in it with us for the long haul. So friends to lovers can really do that work, but it's big internal work, which is why I don't write them.
Conflict lives in the butt 1t
and
this is where we talk about so okay, the guys who wrote South Park, I always they don't usually come up around romance novels, but Trey Parker and Matt Stone have this great if you go to YouTube and you search like Trey Parker Matt Stone on like their writing process for for South Park, they give this great view about how they beat out the book on a big whiteboard, and they try to link all the scenes with, and then, I'm sorry, with, with something other than and then, like, if they beat it out, and they say, like, oh, I can connect these two scenes with. And then they know they don't have the story's not there yet, and that is because, and then it's just a way we tell a story without conflict, right? I woke up this morning, and then I took a shower, and then I came downstairs, and then I watched Gail caliber character, and now I'm here, right? And but that's not interesting. That's not there's nothing conflict laden there at all. But if we link our scenes with therefore, however, or as if that weren't enough, like these kinds of things, that suddenly, like, amp everything up and really pull everything out and dial up all the emotions and we think about consequences, then we've got something we're cooking with gas. So here are some good examples a heroine casinos in Victorian England, a hero owns the casino but refuses to give her access, therefore she must take matters into her own hands. This is a setup to dreaming of you. By Lisa clays, who is not here, but I wish she was a hero. Needs to focus on football in order to be the best athlete he can be. Thank goodness, he has a great assistant, but she quits, thereby throwing everything into chaos. American and Soviet agents must work together to uncover a plot to kill Khrushchev on his tour of the United States, while spying on each other, but they begin to fall in love, thereby making their work and lives more difficult during the Cold War. So what we see here is that we should be able to distill our ideas down to very easy beats, right? And obviously, tons more happens in here, right? Like tons more happens on the first page of dreaming of you Khrushchev is gonna die trap, right? But what's happening here is, as writers, when we're distilling it just to the romance, we have to be able to talk about the books this way, to really underscore for readers and ourselves, what the conflict is and why we want to read these books. So why can't we be together right now? This is what I said about Kate Claiborne. Made me this. Isn't she so talented? This is what I said about friends to lovers. Like, these are lovely people. Why aren't they just fucking right? Like, why can't they be together right now? The answer is conflict. It's whatever it is, right? It's the external conflict, the internal conflict. And that means that we have to learn to this is Kate made me this because I basically spend all of my time asking myself, like, why can't they be together right now? To the point where at the end of every scene, I literally ask myself a question, and I keep that in a notebook. It's the only non writing work I do around you know, plotting or outlining is answering that question at the end of every scene. Okay, we talked about this. Readers understand the conflict from the jump. External conflict is often the easiest way to begin. Internal conflict has a little more leeway, but we should be able to understand that characters have emotional motivation. Early in the book, we talked about this, but thinking about it, think about it broadly this way, right? What does a character think they want most in the world is where we start externally, right? This is our meet cute, our big sort of beginning, starting in the right place, externally, getting readers sunk into the story right away, and starting as close to the inflection point of the story as we can then we want to get to why? Why is that the external goal, and that's internal often, right? Like it's because of my desires. In order to get what they want, they have to involve the other main character, but that character has his or her own external goal, right, which should be working against the first character's goal, a villain thinking, again, going back to this, like villain, thinking of the second character as a villain. And then when the when the external goals are met, there's an internal twist that moves the goalpost. And I'm going to show you how this works. I do not necessarily recommend reading this book from 1965 it's, you know, from 1965 so, but I do think there's something valuable to the idea of scene versus sequel. So if you think about all books, this is much this. The easiest way to see this in action is to read third person dual POV, right? So, like most historicals, will be a very easy way for you to see this. Or, like older contemporaries, a scene is mostly an external work. So goal, conflict, disaster, right? This is, this is all that external, outside force stuff. A sequel immediately follows the scene, and is the reaction to what happened in the scene, right? This is mostly internal. And the reason why I say third person to it doesn't have to be necessarily third person, but dual POV is because often the PERS the POV switches right there between the two. So it's really easy for you to see how it works. I'm going to spoil the greatest romance of all time for you because I can. So this is Loretta Chase's Lord of scoundrels. If you've talked to Adriana even for a minute, she's talked to you about this book, I'm sure
in chapter seven and eight, the
scene. So these two people are around each other. They are in lust with each other, and there's been a threat constantly that she might shoot him. And she gets to his home, and he's in his
we're in his POV, or we should get somewhere we're in his POV, and they're just like,
he's in this, like, situation where they're just like, everybody's having sex around him. It's very like a bacchanal. And he's like, being a real asshole, like showing himself, like, trying to really, like, puff himself up and like, be, be a real jerk. And he, um, pisses her off, essentially. And she's like, Oh no, and she we switched to sequel, right? So that's seen. He makes her angry, right? We switch to sequel, and we're in Jessica's point of view. She goes home, she puts on a full on murder dress, right? We see her. She is pissed. She gets her pistol, she goes back to him, and it switches boom to scene, right? We're still in Jessica's POV. Here. She shoots this man. It is a is the greatest. I remember. Some people remember they were, they were when, like Kennedy was shot. I know where I was when Dane got shy. And then it switched immediately to sequel. And we see Dane, we see the reaction and the dilemma of this, right? And so he's like, I can't believe it. Why would she shot me? Right? And so there is this really remarkable back and forth here, where we see emotion, internal emotion from Jessica, turn into external, just chaos. And then back to the internal of it all. Because even, as he saying, like, why would she shoot me? He's like, she's magnificent. I love her so much, but I also am only in chapter seven, so we can't be together. Now, resolution further complicates, right? So every resolution of conflict further complicates the has to further complicate until we get to the end, right? So what we mean by that is, like, let's say we started at the beginning of a book, and we've, we've established that the hero wants revenge. It's always heroes. They want revenge. At some point in this book, they're going to get close to it, right? They're going to see themselves, like, almost get there, or, like, maybe they have a plan for revenge. That's like a 10 point plan to revenge, right? At some point, like some of this gets resolved, right? One of the scariest things to do as a writer is hand your character what they want in chapter six, right? And then see what the happens. It's terrifying because then you've taken all the gas out of the engine, right? You're like, Oh, my God, but let me tell you something. The best books do this, and like, your best book could potentially do this, where you hand them the resolution to their conflict, and suddenly you think, like, well, but now, if they have revenge, then, like, they're lost, like, internally they're they have no compass anymore, right? Like they're lost at sea, because they've been driving their whole life toward this, and now they have it, and we have to switch things up, right? The book has to get bigger stuff to layer. And it really ends up like making for bigger, bolder, more dialed up books. I think
ultimately, though,
this willingness to sacrifice becomes the big question, and I never feel like I have a book in hand until I know what the characters are unwilling to sacrifice. And this answer is not always easy, so you may not know, but that is if you're working on something right now, that is my question for you. Like, what are your characters unwilling to sacrifice? Because that's going to drive all the conflict in your book. Because, like I said, ultimately they're going to have to face potentially sacrificing it for love. And it could just be as simple as, like in romances, sometimes it's like, they won't they like they're unwilling to sacrifice their life, right? But then, like, we get there, and it might, it might come down to, it's, it's me, or it's you or me, and I'm gonna lay down, right? So you can get out, obviously, in that case, they don't end up having to do the sacrifice, and that's your problem for having to figure out how. So, how does it work? You do not have to read this whole thing, but I want to show you what ends up happening with me. This is a spoiler for my book, bombshell. This is the entire plot of bombshell structured out the way that I think, which is terrifying. So you can see each beat connects with not and then right then you can see external is in red, internal plot points are in blue, and you can see that they generally layer right. So you don't have to read bombshell for you to be able to do this. What I would just say is, like, think about take your favorite romance novel. It's easier if it's not your own, by the way. Reread it, enjoy yourselves. And at the end of every scene, figure out where you are be. Where's the conflict? Is it internal or external? How are we twisting? Like, how did this scene end and make us keep wanting to turn pages, etc? Ah. This thing the third act breakup. So I am a third act breakup evangelist.
I love them
often the third act breakup is incited by external conflict. It is always exacerbated
by fear and an internal conflict,
and that fear is the choice between safety and happiness. Humans always choose, almost always choose safety, and our work as romance novelists is to get them to choose happiness, right? So we take an external conflict in the third act. We burn down the house. We make them walk away. We send her to the train station for five minutes. We do whatever we need to do for them to like, either physically or emotionally separate for some length of time, and then we push the characters into being so fucking terrified that they might have to go back to not having love, that they choose to go forward with love. So ultimately, the third act breakup underscores this choice, right, I choose love, and it is in this moment that readers see that the characters have been tested, that they were given the choice to go back to stasis, that they were given the choice to sacrifice, and they were willing to sacrifice, and instead they move forward. It looks different in different books, because we all write different books, and it is not always a breakup. This is a continuum left to right of books that have third act breakups in them, from
like chill and fun
in Christina, Lauren something Wilder, to five fucking minutes in Lisa clapey says Mary Winterbourne to about half a chapter in Nikki Sloan's a doctor to a very big explosion and chaos at the end of Caribbean heiress in Paris. You can read all five of these, and you will get a sense of how everybody getting all twisted about third act breakups is silly, because you can do it any way you want. But the point of it is that if the rule is happily ever after, and the addition to that rule that I gave you is it has to be believed and has to be earned, and readers have to close the book, and 40 years from now, if they pick up this later, they're still together a third act breakup is the proof. It tests the it tests it tests the proof. I want to put a note. I want to do a note on Jenny Lynn Barnes's universal Ed, but What time am I done? Oh, good. Oh, great. Look. I have so much time I can slow down Jennifer Lynn Barnes's design. Has anybody heard Jennifer Lynn Barnes talk about this? If you haven't find find your way to this. There are recordings
online. You can she? I lastec talked her. She
was putting it into a book. I don't know if it happened yet.
Here is her theory. Her theory is that media best she she's a primatologist from the University of Oregon, University of Oklahoma. She also writes YA novels, and she's really interested in this concept that, like we as people, as humans, right, from from the apes, right, all come to a place where we have uni, universal pleasure centers. Obviously, universal is a questionable word, but just go with me, broadly universal pleasure centers. And she did this work with monkeys literally, and found that they, like kind of all primates gravitate toward these six pleasure centers, right? So there's beauty, power, wealth, competition, touch and danger, and my the qualifier for danger is safe danger, right? Like, person is in danger, but we as consumers are not right. Like danger isn't sexy in our real life. And the reverse is also true. So like beauty and also like ugliness, power and the lack thereof, wealth and poverty, the kind of inverse of them, are all sort of packed into this universal pleasure center. We like me where that is where. This is a main theme. We like to see people in these spaces, but to make a best seller, Jen says you have to layer it. You can't just do one. You have to do all of them. And so when we talk about layering conflict, these universal pleasure centers, each one of them works, because each of these things is a touch point for conflict, right? If I tell you a story about the most beautiful woman in the world, it's not an interesting story unless that's threatened in some way, unless she's threatened in some way. If I tell you a story about power, it has to be negotiating a new world of power. These are all conflict please. Conflict points, excuse me. So obviously touch means sex. But when you see these books kind of layered, this work layered, you can see how you layer conflict in a book to make it as sticky as possible. You don't want your readers put in your book down. I always say, if it takes you more than six hours to read one of my books, I've done something wrong. And I think, like we all intuitively feel that as readers, and it's because of conflict. And so this is just a useful tool for you as you're thinking about the books that you're working on now, as you're thinking about plotting like. How many of these can you layer in? So let's do some Tips and Tips and Tricks, and then maybe we'll get to questions. What if we throw normal into chaos at the beginning of a book, right? What if, what does normal look like? Like if my character is incredibly
powerful. And,
you know, and owns a,
owns a fortune, 500 company, right? And that company, like, goes under. What happens then? Like, how do we? How do we maybe listen? What if? What if it was a whistleblower who ended the company? I'm now like plotting a book that isn't very good in my head, but we'll just go with it. And the whistleblower is the love interest, right? Like, so there are these kinds of like, how do we take what's normal? How do we take what characters think of as safety and then move, take it away, throw it into throw it into chaos. What do they imagine their future to be, what if we remove that future, right? I thought I was going to get married and have, you know, and have this, like, magnificent wedding. I thought I was going to, you know, live a very different kind of life. My husband left me, my fiance left me at the altar, right? This is why we love books where characters are left to the altar, because it throws normal into chaos. How we can externally, up the part so and then internally, make everything more messy, like get a life. Chloe brown by Talia Hibbert is very internal. It's a very internal book, I mean, but the inciting incident, Chloe almost gets hit by a bus, or does get hit by a bus. It's close and and then like, but then the rest of the book is very internal. Is it's Chloe kind of like coming to terms with, like, who she wants to be, who she is, versus who she might be, and her neighbor helps, right? It's very quiet, but really beautiful. The opposite of that is something like a heart of Blood and Ashes, where, like a character is the heroine of the heart of Blood and Ashes is, you know, desperate to or actually, the hero of a heart of Blood and Ashes is heading off to wage war against his enemy, and the sister of his enemy, like, arrives to him and says, like, I want to help you. And he's like, struggling with this idea of, like, this whole family is enemy, but she seems not to be. But of course, you can't trust her, right? Trust is a really interesting piece of throwing normal into chaos. So all of these things are so we can that, like, what is zero state, and then conflict comes from changing that, whether on page or offsets, should complicate everything. Sophie Jordan likes to say,
you should put sex in at the
absolute worst time possible.
Oh, look, it's there. So yeah, she said so, and her she's very right, right? Because if you think of two characters who absolutely should not sleep together, because it will make everything much, much, much more messy, as readers, we love that, right? They should definitely sleep together right then. And this is what we mean when we say sex should serve the plot like post happily ever after. Sex teens are great, but they're not necessary to a book, because sex should complicate things. And what I always say in this moment is like, think about, like, the first time you had sex with a partner. It's weird, right? Like, feelings are there. Maybe they're not there all the way, like, somebody's definitely into it, more like, there's a lot of like, complicated wiki stuff that happens, like emotionally after that. And so when we put sex on the page, all of that has to come out. Often, sex is that sort of really interesting kind of scene that's both internal and external. But the fallout is, you know, often very clearly, one or the other. In a historical, it's often like, well, now we better get married, right? But in a in a contemporary like, it could just be, it's often very internal, making you realize this is why there's that terrible cliche of like, they do it and then these are, this often happened in older romances, where they would do it, and then he would be like, it's never felt this way, right? Like this is the best it's ever been. And then that would send him into just full on, like, panic mode as a hero, because, like, he'd never felt a single feeling other than physical orgasm, right? But now he was like, Oh no, thinking feelings, and it's terrible. And then there you go. Now you're off to the races internally. Give them something to work for, right? So this is a concrete goal. This is often an external thing, but like, this is like, the thing, the item, the widget, right? The missing person, the killer, the inheritance, the promotion,
you know, for our sports people,
the like the Olympic medal,
the title, the land, the you know, the throne in fantasy, often, and then also, like again, Talia Hibbert, Chloe, brown style, like the bucket list, the sort of sense of like I could change everything. Kylie Scott wrote this book recently called The Last Days of Lila. Good luck. It's such a great concept. A heroine like meets a psychic on the street, and she says she and she gives her lottery numbers, and then says and a bunch of other things, and then says, and you're gonna die. And he she says, you know, and your soulmate's name is, whatever the name is, and you're gonna die in seven days. And she's like, that's crazy. And then immediately walks out, what crosses the street, and meets the man whose name is that, who also happens to be a royal prince, because romance is unmatched. But anyway, the point is like, then she's like, I have a week, right? I have a week to live. I'm terrified. Like, is there a way to reverse whatever this curse faded thing is? But also, like, I have things to do, and I've like and now I might fall in love with this weirdo, like there's just so much, but it's so great because it sort of feels like the bucket list is moving forward. This is why we like these kind of life change revolutionary self books, too. But those are very quiet. They don't always involve psychics and Royal Princess, just like in real life, boundaries create conflicts. So, like, a ticking clock is a great way to build conflict, right? A road trip romance, I talked about something Wilder. I love a road trip because, or a house party or fake relationship that ends at a wet like, I need you to come with me to a wedding, because, like, we know, okay, like, as readers, we're getting closer and closer to an important date, like, where everything is going to shift and end back against the wall is kind of like my house needs to be renovated and I need to sell it, or I just got kicked out of my apartment, or I'm on a prison planet, you know, a real sense of like, Oh no, I have no choice but to move into action. All of this is about moving people proactively toward a life that is different than where they are when they begin. And I think that's the other piece, like conflict sets us up to move from where we are zero state at the beginning of the book to somewhere, right, like we don't end a romance in the same place we started it, and then keeping the world at bay, right? Celebrities, Royal romances, vacation books, these are all like, giving a sense of at some point the other shoe is going to drop. Like, at some point I'm like, this celebrity is not as gonna be done being in love with me, like Tom Hardy will stop being in love with me. I mean, not with me, if you ever met me. But, um, and then, like, secrets, fake relationships, criminal activities, circumstances of birth. You know these are secrets are great, but the thing about secrets is you can't keep them forever, right? Like, at some point the gas is gonna you're you're gonna lose gas from your engine, and you're gonna end up having to reveal that secret. I promise you, this is one of those moments where you're gonna go, I don't know what I'll do after it's revealed. Like, that's supposed to be the end of the book. Reveal it in the end of the first step. Trust the process. You are all very skilled, and have talents that you are that like, shock you in that moment when you're like, oh my god, a whole new plot just came to me. Put it all on the page. Common conflict, challenges, nothing is happening in this book. This is usually a big problem externally, like you need something. External conflict is pacing right. External conflict is the moment where you get to the end of the chapter, and again, you can't go to sleep. Return to the concrete desires of your of your characters at this point, think about tropes like, can you add another trope in fun and games? This often happens in the second act, that dreaded middle. Listen, I will also say, like a lot of writers say things like,
Oh, I love writing.
I love the experience of writing.
I love just putting words on the page. I fucking hate writing. I hate it, and I hate because you get to the middle and you've had this, like, you know what the beginning is, and if you're like me, you kind of know where you're going to but the middle is just, Oh, I hate it anyway. Point is that this often happens where you have to, like, create the fun and games of the second act. And this means, like, sometimes it's about just building in an external thread where you can, like, they, Oh, they're, you know, they always have to go back to fixing the house right. Road trip romances are the best way for you to learn this. You may not write a road trip romance, but you should read road trip romances if you get here, if this is how you feel, because road trip, romance, especially historical, always, always has, like the promise of the premise of the road trip is like, there will be highwaymen, there will be only one bed. They will be washed out on the road, like they will meet strangers. They will, I don't know, fuck in a carriage, like, I mean, all kinds of things, right? Road trip. Romantic for this to show you how you can, like, amp up the second act without, like, doing too much. Without doing too much. I don't mean working too much. I mean, just like, adding too much. Christina, Lauren's something Wilder is a perfect example, also, of how you can do that in a contemporary it's like this raucous, fun adventure book, and it is a road trip. I think these characters can just talk it out. And it's only the first act you are in Sarah McLean land here, and that means you need to figure out what, what is wrong with these people. Internal conflict is required here. Return to their wounds and think about their motivation. Can you deepen it? Can you give them a little bit of trauma? I want, I want to be very clear that I'm not asking you to give them lots of trauma, necessarily, unless that's what you're into. But like, a little bit of like, oh, one time this bad thing happened to me, you know, broken up about it wouldn't kill us. And so, and the biggest question is, like, how do we in, how do we how do these wounds impede their ability to love, like, to be in a sustained, happy, believable, healthy relationship.
Healthy being the key here.
They're not on page together. You have a very big problem with pacing. If this is the problem in a romance, the main characters have to be interconnected. Think about how like if your heroine is a firefighter, your hero must be an arsonist, and they have to be
together on the page, right?
They both probably, in this place, need deeper, more believable reasons to be on the page together. You could have a pretty big plot problem if this is true, and I love you, can you scare them? Think about what the worst possible thing that can happen? First possible thing that can happen is obviously gonna be very, very bad, right? And I'm not talking about that again, unless you're writing a book where it needs to happen. But like, right now, if one of you stood up and you were like, this sucks. Like, I'm not getting anything out of this, right? Like that would be that would motivate me into action right out the door. And so there it is. And then you can threaten them with the idea that their deepest wound might be true, like,
I'm not worthy of love. Like,
what if, all of a sudden, you, like, showed them that maybe they aren't worthy of love? And then I'm going to ask you this sort of biggest question, which is, are you pulling your punches? Because you probably are, because we all do, which is why I always end this way, which is at some point in your writing book, in the book that you were writing, you were going to come to a crossroads, and you're gonna go, Well, I could write it this way and I can see how it would go, or I could write it this other way, and blow the whole fucking thing up, and I don't know what will happen next. And then you should call Sophie Jordan, which is what I do. And then Sophie Jordan will say to you, well, then you obviously know you have to write the scary one, because that's where the book gets really good, and it's true. So write into fear. Because if you're kind of terrified that it's all falling apart. It's probably full of conflict, and ultimately, we are all going to love it so much more because we don't see the path along with you there, and then you'll know it ends long before we do. So it's going to be great. And I'm here all weekend if you want to talk, also if you want to practice your pitch with me, come and do that. And, yeah, thanks for having me.
Like I said, this is a much longer thing. Usually it's two hours long. I go into lots, lots more, you know, extensive, sort of how tos. It's a workshop that runs for a full week with like, guest
speakers and other things you can find.
And, yeah, yeah, thank you. All right, let's give another round of applause for Sarah McLean. Wasn't she amazing? All right, okay, so we're gonna actually transition this room now where we're gonna have the staff close
this airwall So we can break up, break up the room for the breakout sessions. So just give us a few minutes for that. You can stay where,
where you are, and then once they put up the airwall, if you need to move to the other room, you're welcome to and then we'll get started as soon as we're ready. Just one more announcement, if you signed up for an appointment for a headshot that started at 2:30pm they're around the corner here in Grand Ballroom, G through K. So just make sure mind your appointment time and just pop over there. They're ready for you, and that's it. So just sit tight while we split the room, and then You can move to where You need To You Applause.
Hello, check one,
hello, check two. There's a coil right there. George,
thank You, Sir. You
Hi, I'm back. Hi, guys. In case you weren't aware, this is a breakout section for sex and characterization romance, so if you want it to be in the HA, HA HA for he a that's next door.
Anyway, I'm gonna stop talking. Even though I like the mic, it's fine, and we're
gonna listen to Nikki and Sierra.
Hello, hello. I love to see all of you. I see several of you who don't need to be in here because you already know everything. I'm going to say we're excited that you're here. There are some of our assistant, slash spouses, passing out handouts. So if you don't
have a handout yet, please flag down one of these hotties and you will have a hottie hand you a handout. So real quick, just who we are. I am Sierra Simone. I write sweet, closed door romance, as you all know. And Nikki, who are you? Um, yeah, I'm Nikki Sloan. And I also write sweet, clean romance, yeah, right, closed door. I think that's why we're all here. Um, so I am going to say really quick. We are going to be talking about writing sex explicitly. We're going to be, using some explicit language, and there will be some explicit
content, if that's not something that clicks with you right now, totally okay, but I just want to disclose that
at the beginning,
I like you being my clicker, that's nice. Okay, so erotic romance is what we're talking about, and I think that I mainly want to start with the principled maintenance is an affirmation of desire. Desire is at the core of what we're doing here.
I think that there are several definitions
of erotic romance, so I have done my best to kind of outlay where I think heat levels are. As all of us know, if you ask a reader what their heat levels are, they'll be like, well, one chili pepper is two people. Two chili peppers is when there's four people. And in order to be five chili peppers, then someone needs to be an alien or something. And so the definitions of heat level vary, so I kind of made a little standardized definition for us. But the main thing that I want to kind of tag here is that I think for Nikki and I, when we're writing writing erotic romance, we consider the erotic components of the story to be integral to the story. So you can still have spicy romance where the spice is not sort of holding up. It's not a tent pole for the rest of the story. Story, you can skip those spicy scenes and still get kind of the story. But Nikki and I are like, No, you will read the spicy parts. And so there is an official kind of definition. This is from the RWA. I know, I'm sorry, but it's useful, so we have it here. And this is novels in which strong, often explicit, sexual interaction is an inherent part of the love story. Character growth and relation develop, relationship development, and could not be removed without damaging the storyline. So erotic romance can be in any other sub genre. You can have paranormal, erotic or historical erotic, but this is really the central theme, is that the erotic elements are integral. If you take them out, the story does not stand. So a quick note, we're going to be talking about sex scenes. This is a shorthand, so I just want to disclose that when Nikki and I think about sex scenes, we're thinking about any scenes with a bent towards arousal and stimulation of the characters and optional and we want to sort of start putting some distance between ourselves and the idea that sex scenes are equivalent to vaginal intercourse. We want to kind of expand our definition of what a sex scene is, so that we're not kind of leaning into maybe some normative, like penetrative ideas of sex. And I'm just going to speak slightly going back everybody with the handouts, there's a lot more information in the handouts. We're just going kind of fast through this stuff. So, so if you're trying to follow along in the handout, you may have to flip pages kind of fast, okay,
all right. And so also we wanted to kind of note this very quickly before we move on and we're talking about how to craft an erotic romance. There are two different ways to sort of think of the engine of a story. So the first way is the way that you probably saw in the last session, that is a conflict oriented
engine for the story that creates your momentum.
But there is another way to think about an engine for a story, and this would be in sort of a mystery or a juxtaposition based momentum, right? And I wanted to tag this because I do think that in western storytelling, we lean towards conflict without acknowledging that there are other ways to tell stories, and those ways are equally valid. Nikki and I, we like conflict. We like friction, and so when we're talking about plot and character and setting and such, we will be talking about conflict frequently. But I just wanted to tag that there are other ways to tell stories, and I have a few links in the handout for people who've written some really interesting essays and kind of posts about this. Okay, so the first question I get from a lot of people who are writing erotic romance is, how do you sort of mentally distance yourself from the fact that your great aunt might read this book one day, and everyone has kind of, like, a different way to the space. So I can't define for you, like, how you can get here. I just know that you got to get here. And it's our sexy holodeck. And in the holodeck, everything is imaginary. The stakes are low, but you are kind of cordoned off from the consequences of the real world. For anyone who doesn't know what a holodeck is, this is a thing from is it Star Wars? A div is Star Wars? The one with the holodeck the next generation? I said that to piss him off. I know a Star Trek, but only because my husband watches it so in the if you know the holodeck episodes, right, they very rarely matter to the larger plot of the season. And this is because the holodeck is a safe
place that you can go and kind of like experience
a whole story without it having huge repercussions mentally. As creators, I think it's very good for us to have this kind of space, this laboratory, that we can go into and experiment, we can do research and development without worrying about career implications, the social implications, some writers need to have, like a physical space for them to do this. So for some writers, it's your favorite coffee shop is a home office. It's a corner, and that physical space will sort of mentally trigger right, this feeling of safety, this feeling of lowered stakes. Do you have anything to add to that? Yeah, so I'm like, for me, my holodeck is my bedroom, like in bed, that's where I have to write my sexiest scenes. I cannot write those at a coffee shop, or I can't even write those in my office. I have to write those in bed. It's just that's where the words come. So can you talk about tortoise enclosure, though? Sure. Yeah. Okay,
so the tortoise
enclosure, I'm so sorry. This is a John Cleese reference, and I'm sorry John Cleese, but it is a useful thing for me to think about. And he has this talk where he talks about how the creative mind is a lot like a tortoise. It's slow, and it
needs to be sort of set apart from kind of the hustle and bustle of the outside world. And so for kind of be able to manifest what's inside of them, they need an enclosure, a place that's sort of, it's free from email, it's free from notifications. It's free from teenagers who need a last minute ride to a thing, and this enclosure allows you to kind of let that slower tortoise brain develop and think and ideate. And I think it's very important when we're talking about erotic things, because for us to channel the erotic is kind of a private and physical process, like we have to sort of channel what we also find erotic and that's something that's can be very difficult to do when you're constantly being interrupted, or when you feel a lot of external pressures from, you know, well meaning agents or editors or whatnot. All right, so one of the most important things, I think, in erotic romance is your lens. I once saw, I'm sorry. I'm just referencing all these like guys that I don't super love. But Stephen King, one time said that the way he writes horror is by seeing everything terrifying. So for him, when he looks at elevator doors, he doesn't just see elevator doors. He sees a giant mouse that's trying to eat him, right? And that's how he comes up with his ideas. I think this is similar to how we can approach erotic romance, in the sense that everything is an opportunity for the hotness to come through everything health insurance can be sexy here, cars are sexy, suits are sexy. Dusty construction worker boots are sexy. Everything is sexy here, because that is the way that we are going to sit down and we're going to write this, and that is such an opportunity to bring in desire when it's not necessarily a scene that is explicitly about desire, right? If Angelina Lopez, who's one of my favorite romance authors, she has this series about winemakers in a country in like a principality of Spain, where they're all royal winemakers, and the wine is so sexy. I don't even like wine taste dirt, but when Angelina writes it, I'm like, Oh, I can feel it on my tongue. It smells so good. And because she makes everything, even barrels of wine, sexy. All right. So this is important to know. This is very similar to the concept of the ID list. Is anyone familiar with writing for your ID by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, I see a few hands. So there is this idea that I think was really developed by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, who is an expert in fiction, and especially the psychology of fandom in fiction. But there's this idea that we should be writing towards the things that give us pleasure, and not necessarily like sexual pleasure always, but like creative pleasure. And so I think it's important, when you set out to think about what is a creative pleasure for you. I think for a lot of people like this looks very different. For me, that's something that's like always gonna get me going a rich boy in a pea coat. Okay? Like anytime I think a pea coat is a universal pleasure. Anytime I rewatch the 2006 cinematic masterpiece, the covenant, I'm like, Yes, this is, this is the height of human art here, because I have five boys in peacoats. And so knowing that is always a helpful calibration. And this is what will help you develop your erotic voice later on. This is how you get known for writing. I don't know I was about to say thoughtful billionaires, but I don't think they exist thoughtful cowboys or, you know, thoughtful, sexy small town romance, right? This is how you develop your voice. Is knowing what you love to write genuinely. Yeah, and so with the ID list, you want to put everything down that like turns you on, not just like she said, not just sexually, but like anything that stimulates you or you get excited about. So if you're just watching like soap opera and there's like a cliffhanger that really turns you on,
go ahead and start, like a notes file on your phone and just start making an ID list, like, and then you can share it with your author friends, because, like, Sierra and I have shared our ID list, and there's so many things that I'm like, Oh yes, yes, yes. And I gotta put all those on my ID list too. And so then when you're writing, and if you're at a scene that you're like, you know this scene, I'm kind of bored writing this scene, you just go and look at your ID list and see what from my like, what's my catnip that I can put in this scene that will make it so much more enjoyable for both me and the reader. Will you talk really quickly about how you used it to develop filthy rich Americans? Sure. So, um, so when Jennifer Lynn Barnes gave this speech at RWA in the year of our Lord, 2018 2018 Yes, I I'm terrible at picking, like, what panels to go to. And so Sierra was like,
Hey, I'm going to this panel. You should come with me. And I was like, yeah, no, I'm kind of hungry.
I think, okay. She's like, No, you're going to this panel. I'm dominant in my entire life.
I'm very submissive normally. But I was like, you're
coming with me. So she, she made me go to the panel, and it was amazing. And so, so then I, like, I got the recording, and I listened to it over and over and over again. And then I started making my ID list, and I put
all these things on it, like, Oh,
I love a hedge maze. I love a grumpy guy that has a cat. I
love a wine grotto. I mean, all these like things, right? And then I just dumped them all into book, one of the filthy rich American series, and I was like such a joy to write that book. And it was for me, it was like a breakout book, because it was the one that readers most responded to, because all of the things that were turn ons for me were turn ons for readers, which I think leads us to the next slide, if I remember correctly. Yeah, that's the Sloan and Simone guarantee. I told her we should make business cards to say that if it's a turn on for you, there are other people out there who will like it. Imagine, like no one else will like a tall spider alien with a
spider wiener. And we did, and we're so glad that she didn't let that stop her. And so when you are writing and you are kind of exiting the sexy holodeck, right, like you have, you're in the middle of drafting, and it's the end of the day, or you're done with a draft, and you're like, I just don't know that this is going to work for anyone else. I don't know that anyone else wants a pumpkin shifter from a small town or something, and there will be people who want it. Someone wanted the door one. I liked the door one. So i It is our guarantee. There's going to be some if it works for you, if it lights you up, there are other people that it will and I would, I would also say, like, this is why we have to be on social media with a grain of salt, because I think that there, you know, you get on social media and everyone's like, I hate friends to lovers, and you're like, Oh no, I've just written like a friends to lovers, romance that I really love. But the truth is, there are so many other people out there who will light up at the idea of friends to lovers. It won't be me. I'll still read it because I love you guys. Okay, yeah, so just, just be brave when you're writing like and don't worry about the reader like, just write what you want to write, because they will follow you. Yes, all right, so we're going to talk a little bit about building a story. This is the way that I conceive of story, and then I kind
of force Nikki into agreeing with me. But you might have a different order that you like to develop your erotic story in, and that's totally valid. And okay, I don't want anyone to leave here and be like Sierra said, I had to start
with setting. So now I have to throw away all of my notes and start with the setting. No, please don't do that. So really quick before we delve into this, I just want to talk a little bit about fantasy versus reality. And by fantasy, I don't mean fantasy the genre. I mean like sort of the conceptual idea of fiction being a fantastical creation, that we are entering into, a realm where everything is imagined. I think that it's important to that oftentimes we are writing the fantasy of something, and the way that we add in realism is going to be sort of how we calibrate our unique author, voice and brand. So I give the example of writing like a medieval fantasy or a medieval historical romance, where you're going to do all of your research, right? You're going to figure out how sieges worked, and you know how they kept food hot when they brought it up from the kitchens, and how many strawberries a day? Henry the Eighth, eight or whatever. And it was a lot, by the way, I actually know this information. It was a lot of strawberries. But we are writing in romance. We are kind of writing the fantasy version of that. So while you might mention that the thrush on the floor needs to be changed. You know, the hay is kind of dirty. You're probably not going to talk about how many rotting chicken bones are in the hay on the castle floor, right? Like, this is not something that is necessarily going to pull the reader deep into the mindset. Like, that's just something about trash on the floor that I think is a is a universal experience. So the level to which you toggle your reality versus fantasy that is personal and that will help you develop your voice. So I know many authors who are more sort of in a realistic mindset. They do want you to know about the trash on the floor. And then some authors are so toggled onto fantasy that you're like, I don't know that this character ever has a period, or I don't know that this character has ever brushed their teeth, ever, because they never talk about that kind of thing. All right, so we're going to talk about setting with that out of the way, I like to go setting. First. I like to start with setting, develop character, and then, very last, reluctantly and under duress, I develop a plot. So setting, this is the time and place of our story. I think that it's very important for contemporary writers to remember that world building is just a crucial element of our storytelling as it is for historian sci fi writers, oh, this is the one that's animated. Yes, she's she made the PowerPoint. It's really nice. Okay, so I think that when we were writing an erotic romance, what we really want to do is we want to create a world that
implies an erotic
outcome. That means that
when you open up this book and you step into this world, the
outcome necessarily must be erotic, and we do that by maybe having a setting force proximity between the characters, right? Like we are in a place where they can't, they can't leave each other. We also might want the setting to force separation. We'll talk a little bit about this later, but longing and deprivation can also be very sexy things. We use this sort of white space of absence to highlight the longing and desire that the characters have for each other. Do we want the setting to engender friction and conflict? I mean, absolutely yes. We do want our characters to sort of not just be together, but together in a way that forces them to confront their own desire for each other, and we can build this into the setting, right? So Adriana Herrera has a great novella, mangoes and mistletoe, where our characters are on a baking competition show together and they're competing against each other, right? So the heightened tension of competing against each other as well as the force proximity that's baked into the architecture of the story, and that's half your work done for you. You don't have to figure out, how am I going to get these characters on the page again? Your premise necessitates that, your setting necessitates that. And this is very important to me, because I'm kind of a vibes girly. Does the settings stimulate the senses and how so if we're talking about writing a Great British Bake Off romance, right? Like we want to make sure that our readers are smelling and tasting that setting, we're not just going to say they're in a kitchen. We're gonna say they're in a tent and the sides are rolled up, but it's raining, and everyone's chocolate is still melting, even though it's raining. How it's a mystery. But this, this brings the reader physically into the story, and it's very important, as we talk about this, to remember that like on a neurological level, we are wired to respond physically to story we are you put people in an MRI machine while they're reading, and their mirror neurons light up. And so we want them smelling, seeing, tasting, hearing, because their brains will interpret that as reality. So talking a little bit about atmosphere, it's like a very pretty marble titty there. We want our atmosphere to be sensual. So just like I was talking about how everything should be sexy, here, we want the senses just constantly engaged, constantly lighting up. We don't want our reader to have any excuse to, sort of like, mentally dip out of the story, and we'll do this. So what do they see? This is very important. If you look at your handout, I've actually pulled out some chunks of books that I think do the senses pretty well. Yeah, so all of the senses, and if you can do more
than like, two or three in one sentence or one paragraph. Perfect.
That's exactly what we want. We want immersion, because immersion for something like smelling and tasting a cake is a prelude to immersion into the erotic and carnal, right? Like that. We've already got our reader kind of bodily journeying with our characters, so by the time we get to the first brush of the hand, we're already like, oh my god, they touch each other's hands. And so half of our work is done by being impactful in this way, yeah, and it just deepens the POV, yeah. So here's some elements for setting that I kind of like, ask myself when I'm so we have our natural settings. Obviously we have man made or, if you're in romanticy Magic made settings.
And then we also have technology.
So this is going to be really
crucial, I think, if you're writing contemporary, is making sure that your use of technology is or how you're not using technology is forcing erotic outcomes, right? So if they have cell phones, why aren't they texting each other? Why aren't they texting each other horny texts? These are the things that we'll want to make sure that we have answers for, that we're using technology or not using it in an intentional way. And then same thing with time period. So this is a very sort of easy element to ask ourselves these questions in terms of, like, how does it force proximity? How does it imply erotic outcomes? If you're in the Regency time period, right? You can't just go bone each other. There has to be some kind of setup, some kind of way that that's forced through the story, so your time period is going to how you're able to get your characters together, and what the consequences of that are going to be. I would also say that with settings, contrast is very powerful. I have some examples in the handout as well of books that I think do this really well. A shift in setting can signal something crucial is changing, and that the change will have erotic implications. I'm just going to use this example, not because it's incredibly sexy, but because everyone knows it. But most people know that the opening chapter of Twilight is Bella, leaving sunny, dry Arizona, where she's just a six or whatever, two forks, which is cloudy and lush and green, and she's a 10 there and but the the setting signals to us something's changing. Something's changing not just for her and where she's gonna go to school, but something is changing inside of her because of where she's going, she's about to change. Something interesting is going to happen here, that setting changes is a is a trigger for us. So I really want to emphasize, again, this idea that we are using our readers mirror neurons to sort of create response to our text and having a shift in settings from, say, small town, you know, everything's kind of cozy and pastel colored to the big city, we are evoking those sensations inside of our reader. Here's a little Christian gray plug for everyone. We also want our settings to reflect character, right? So I like, I like this example, because when you walk in Jamie Dornan office or whatever, and he's in a suit, and you trip over the rug, you're not just looking at Jamie Dornan. You're also looking at this whole skyscraper with these wall to wall windows, and it's all informing how we see him, the character, using setting to do your character work for you. I also am like, are really guilty of using pathetic fallacy, where I'm like, it was moody, and all of a sudden there's a boy in a peacoat that tells you all you need to know the like rainy weather and a boy in a peacoat. I shouldn't need to tell you anything more about this guy. So our settings will give us more insight into the character, and also, when you are kind of making that connection, I think it's useful to think of like inverse questions. So a really obvious question for setting and character is, who do I expect in this place? But I think an equally important question is, who isn't expected? Who do I not expect in this place? I'm on an alien spaceship. I don't expect a scared human woman, right? And so that contrast is going to set up some friction, some conflict, some momentum in the story. All right, character, I'm sorry. I just want to listen to her talk. I feel like I always like race through this because I'm I like, I'm never sure we're gonna have enough time. I know. I know, okay, but please jump in if you have anything. So your
characters are products of your setting, right? And I think that this is very important for creating
textured characters, that we are incorporating things
like intersectionality and context into how we form these characters, and then moving into things like motivation, stakes, personality and voice. I have a very like globular, like amorphous process for character creation. But there are several ways that people use, several tools that people use to develop character, like, what's it called? Goal, motivation, conflict, yeah, whatever. Or, like, a primal wound, or something like that. These are all, I think, very useful in conjunction of setting. I'm not much help here, because I'm like, I find it too prescriptive. I'm like, you don't get to tell me what to do. I just, I just want to stress to that. And without characters we care about the sex is just mechanics, and that can be sexy too, but not very romantic. Because, I mean, I've opened a book with a sex scene, and it's hot, but it's not as hot as sex scenes that come later in the
book, because, you know those characters?
Yes, I absolutely agree. And this is not to say that you can't have a sex scene in like chapter two, like I've done this as well, but the valence of the of the consequences, why this matters, what the stakes are that is seated inside of the character, and that is sort of the difference
between an erotic novel and maybe like a lit erotica short online, is that you are invested in what happens. You're invested in their desire, and their desire is now becoming your desire. So I think it's important that we create characters whose journeys require sex and intimacy in order to complete and so it might be that intimacy is a way for them to heal a wound or to learn how to be vulnerable again. It might also give them the courage to change something necessary in their lives. But when you're creating a character, you really want to make sure that, just like with the setting, we are implying that an erotic outcome is necessary to get a full story. So stakes. What do they want? What happens if they don't get it? What happens if they do get it, but it's not what they want, and how can a sexual relationship help or hinder their vulnerabilities. Where are they vulnerable? Who are they vulnerable? With? Do they need to hide those vulnerabilities in anyone? And what might this look like in a sexual dimension and then growth? What needs growing in this character? How can both the need and the eventual growth reveal themselves through intimacy, through intimate moments, backstory is also very important. So I actually, because I'm very high in context, I find this process very natural for me to develop backstory. But I also think that this is a way that we can, like, trip ourselves up a little bit where we've ended up writing an entire biography for a character, and we don't necessarily need it. So I wouldn't say that, like, please everyone write five pages of notes of backstory. But I do think when we're talking about intimacy, it's important to know where, what foundation this character is starting from. So what is their experience with sex? How has that changed? Maybe over their over their lifetime, and what's something they haven't experienced yet, and then, oh, sorry, go, as I say. And you can dive, you know, obviously, as deep as you want into that, you know, about, how do they feel about being, um, naked, you know? And how many partners have they have? You know, you can go down as far as you want. And obviously, none of that's going to show, maybe, on the page, but it's still, it's still,
it's like that Iceberg Theory. Do you know what I'm talking about, where it's like the tip? It's like the tip of the iceberg. Your reader only sees the tip of the iceberg, but you have everything underneath the water. You have all that in your mouth just really fleshes out your characters more. And then finally, I would say voice. And by voice, I just sort of mean like, what is this character's like vibe? Are they used to being the comic relief for everyone? Are they used to being a loner? How do they come across on the page? What do they sound and feel like to the reader? That is also going to inform how they interact
with the intimacy in the plot?
And then finally, this is maybe the most important thing, because it's the thing that you need to know kind of near the beginning of the story, which is, what is the thing that draws our character to another character? This can be a physical characteristic, right? So, like, he's, you know, got like an interesting scar, or his voice is so sexy, or he's a spider alien. But whatever that thing is, it needs to be something that that character just can't help but notice that character is just now hyper fixated on it's this initial spark of interest writing or Id really comes into play. Because I think that for a lot of us, this ends up being something that is also a thing for us, right? And so I think it's very important to allow yourself to be indulgent here, especially for those of us who've been writing for a while, we kind of train ourselves out of being indulgent. We kind of stop giving ourselves permission to do something that might feel like it's tropey or it's too cliche. Everyone wants us to subvert this thing, so we should start subverting and we should stop just doing the thing that makes us happy. And I think that it's really important, especially in erotic romance, to get back in touch with the indulgent part of you, the part of you that when you were 18, gave every heroine a grumpy cat, and she always had a tweed coffee shop that she worked at around the corner, like those things that now, if you wrote them, you'd be like, Oh, they're gonna tear me apart on Goodreads for for having yet another Grumpy Cat for a heroine. But I think that that indulgence is a source of pleasure for us. Keep going in this job, just a source of pleasure for readers. Like, how many of us have read a friends to lovers that we really loved? We're like, well, I can't read any more friends to lovers, because it didn't, it didn't subvert it enough for me. So I think I'm done with this, you know, until people start subverting it. No, like, we read a friends to lovers, and then we're like, All right, we're gonna read another friends to lovers, because I really love that trope. Romance readers love indulgence. They love tropes. They love things that are considered cliche. So really give yourself permission to do what you want here, be in that holodeck and write exactly what you want. Yeah, and I think your first book often has a lot more magic in it than later books, because you're not worried about that. You're just writing what you love. You're not worried so much about the cliches or subverting or any of that stuff. So it's just interesting when you go back, when you get to book five, six or seven or whatever, and go back and go back
and you read that first book, and you might be like, cringing, because like, Oh, I've grown so much as an author, but there's still magic in that first book. Yeah, stop talking yourself out of stuff. That's what I would say, like, like, told what to do. And this includes by past versions of me that have been like, I'm gonna figure out goal, motivation, conflict. And then I look at the like class I download, and I'm like, No Pass, Sierra, you can't tell me what to
do. So I'm going to show you one of my ways that I like to develop character, which is that I like to have one and maybe a second, like two data points, maybe a third of this character, and one of them is expected and one of them is unexpected. And between these two data points, that is where I find the like meat and heart of the character. So if we go to the next slide, so I wrote a book called center a while ago, and there's this, like, adorable scumbag in it named Sean Bell. And I didn't know that I was going to write this book when I wrote the first book he pops up in. And so in the first book he pops up in, he's just like the scumbag millionaire who likes strippers. So that's the only thing I knew about him. And then I was like, I'm gonna write a book about him. He sounds like a hero to me. The second thing I decided about him was that he actually likes reading books out loud to his mommy while she's getting her chemo infusions, but these are two very different things about the same person, like, how can these two things be true of the same person? And that algebra equation, figuring out how one person can present these two very different traits is how I figure out my character. That is my invitation to explore what his makeup is, and I think that keeps me from making choices that might be too expected or might be too easy. I would say that we should resist easy choices. We should resist making characters that feel very safe to us, and we should kind of dive for the more complicated option. Okay, this is my least favorite part, but fine, but, and we should also to note, there is a ton more in the handout, because we just didn't. We knew we needed to keep moving. So there's a lot more in the handout, and we'll be around later if you want to flag us down for questions. Okay, so like we did with the setting and the characters, we want a
plot that leads naturally to set to sex. If we can set up a plot that just sort of makes it inevitable that sex is going to
happen, we don't have to work as hard. I
love that I only take 20 milligrams of five amps a day. So I can only work so hard. So if I can create a premise that is going to engender sex later on, that's what I want to do. So in my book center, right? That's sort of like a sex lessons kind of book, I have a character who says, you know, teach me to love and and so therefore, the spine of the plot is is going to necessitate sex, because there's sex lessons that said, I think there's a couple different ways to go about this. So the first is that you can have a story where the premise is explicitly erotic, right? So the from start to finish, sex has to order for the story to move along. Look, Nikki, you're up there. Everyone should read that book. It's so hot, okay, but then we can have a different way of approaching things, which is that it's the characters who make the plot sexy. So we just have a normal story of friends to lovers or a second chance romance. But the characters are such horn dogs that the only way this can end is, is by banging it out. And so that is another way to approach it. I don't want anyone to be like, Well, I don't want to write sex lessons. I don't like I never liked school. You can write whatever you want. You just want to make sure that your characters are bringing the necessity of the erotic to the table. So when we're talking plot, we have, I have a couple different ways I like to think about it. So the first is, when you're starting a book, ask yourself, why now? Why today? Why do we start the Cinderella story, like where we started? Because today is the day we get the invitation. Why does Lord of the Rings start when it does? Because this is when Gandalf has figured out that that little trinket Bilbo has is actually really dangerous and he needs to get out of dodge. So the asking yourself, why now? Will save yourself a lot of trouble later on, because you can make sure you're starting your book in exactly the right place. In romance, this typically looks like our main characters meeting each other within the first couple of chapters. I think it doesn't always have to be that way, but I think that's a very easy answer for romance. The other thing I would say is there's an old theater book called backwards forwards, by David ball, and it is meant for directors of plays, which we are not except Julie Soto, I think is in here, she does plays. She knows theater. So the idea in backwards forwards is that this director was staging Hamlet, and he decided that every choice he made creatively when it comes to the set, when it comes to lighting, when it comes to blocking, is going to be informed ends. Everyone dies if you haven't, if you haven't read Hamlin, I'm sorry. Spoil and spoil that for you. So using that ending informed all of the choices that he made going backwards into the story. So when we are writing a romance, we have a very easy answer, Happily Ever After is always the ending, right? So that's like half the problem solved. So we're going to work backwards from that happily ever after to see. How do these characters get to a happily ever after? How does their happily ever after look like in such a way that, like I have to make certain things happen before that hea to make it valid, both emotionally and intellectually. The other thing I would say is that it's very tempting to when we're writing, because we are lingering in our draft for so long, it is very tempting to sort of slip towards stability, to make our characters more comfortable, to make our reading experience, experience more comfortable. And I don't want to comfort as kind of a bad word for this, because I don't want you to feel like, oh, I have to write angsty books that make readers unhappy while they're reading it. I don't mean that, but I do mean that while you're writing, the instability of the plot is what drives it forward, the fact that this character does not have certainty or clarity, yet in the ways that they need it, that is what keeps us turning the pages to search for that clarity, to search for that certainty with our characters. So I would resist the urge to give them that clarity or certainty, and say, act one right like we want. We want to make sure that they are kind of earning that on their own. And another exercise to help resist your stability is to you know how you have a problem that you need to solve, and so you write down how you're going to solve that problem. Now come up with another way to solve that problem. Don't go with the first answer, because that's usually going to be one of the easier
answers. It's better to reach for something. Yeah, and then the last thing I will say about the plot for a book is that I have this idea that we have an h e a, but then we also have a j, e, a, and that's our justice ever after. And our justice my my friend over
there is like, Yes, Justice ever after. She helped me coin the term.
So this means that in order for our characters, I think, to have a truly like, emotionally and spiritually valid happily ever after, there needs to be parody and power. There needs to be a recognition of any harms done between the characters along the way, apologies made. And I also think this is not just true between the characters, but I like to see this in a more expansive way as well. So if we have a romantic suspense where we have a character who's on the run, we wouldn't end our book with them still on the run from like a violent criminal, right? Like we want to make sure that we are ending in a place of safety and stability for our characters backwards, forwards. This is a really wonderful lighthouse for seeing what kinds of story choices you need to start making in act two and act three to make sure that these characters are going to get to a place where they are level with each other in the sense of emotions and hurts and sins, all right, chemistry. So this is something that we wanted to address, because I think it's very indelible to an erotic romance. Is that we want our characters to have chemistry. I think that the chemistry is it should be distinct. I think that it should be memorable how these characters react to each other as they're meeting. This doesn't always have to be a positive reaction, right? Like oftentimes it's a negative reaction, but we want it to imply that there is something between these people that must be fulfilled, that is going to be fulfilled, and I'm going to dive down deep and say that one way you can build chemistry, particularly through like, non sexual touch. So like, a handshake is a little bit intimate, but it's not as intimate of like, putting your hand in somebody's arm and then, if I were to, like, touch their cheek,
that's super intimate, right? And it's because you're getting closer to their mind and closer to connecting with them. So that's a great way to infuse chemistry between your characters. So there are so many ways to show this. You can have just blatant arousal. You can have the sort of like, oh, I have a response to this hot barista, and I'm mad about it, like I wasn't planning on finding a hot barista today that just happened to me wasn't in the
schedule. Or you can have like, Oh, hot barista, and then you go off into a reverie where she's making you coffee in Italy somewhere, or just noticing that there's something different about this person, right? Like that, they're like, Wow. Like, I wasn't I wasn't expecting you.
Chemistry is related to
that. We talk about like the promise of the premise chemistry and connection. Chemistry is sort of the promise of the erotic premise. And so with plot, we ask why? Now with connection, we want to know why them. Why these people? Why are they clicking together dimensions of connection? It doesn't just have to be physical. So I want to emphasize, I think it's just as valid for your erotic romance to start with an emotional or intellectual or even spiritual connection. I think that that's just a valid way to start creating chemistry. And then I will also mention this thing a critique partner taught me. This is another theater technique, where, during rehearsals, her theater director would have characters tie, physically tie a string between them and something else they wanted, the thing they wanted most, whether it was another character or something on the stage, the idea being that it would change the way that you orient the age. It would change the way you moved around the stage, the distance that you put between yourself and things. And I love this idea between characters and erotic romance, where no matter what, even if they're not together, they still feel that string between the other in my handout, I mentioned the dancing scene in Pride and Prejudice, where Darcy and Lizzie are in a ballroom, and then the camera spins and everyone else is gone. It's just the two of them looking at each other, and that is showing us the string between these two. It doesn't matter that there are other people around them. The only thing that they can feel is the other's presence, and then later on, they feel each other's absence in the same way. I also I said this earlier, but deprivation can be just as erotic as indulgence, so use this judiciously. You don't want your book to be just like chapters of your characters apart, but when they are a part they should feel that lack, the lack of each other, whether it's their character or, I don't know, the cameras spinning around you in a chair while it flashes the months up on the screen, like in Twilight New Moon, there is a way that you are showing us the lack and how powerful that is all right,
anything to add?
No, yeah, we're gonna race to the rest. So we can take some questions. So intimacy should unfold easily from connection. And all that means is that when you are crafting connection, do it with the mindset that this is going to sort of necessitate touch later on. And I think a sex scene should do more than sex. I think that it should accomplish plot and character work. And there's an old adage about dialog, I'm sure most of us have heard this, that dialog needs to do four things. It needs to be the text, it needs to be the subtext, it needs to show characterization and it needs to move the plot forward. I try to take the same attitude to my want them to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in all of those arenas. All right, so how often are you going to have spicy scenes in your book that all the time, all the time, all the time, non stop, or one at 95% you only you will know the answer to this, and it's going to vary from book to book, because your characters are going to be different from book to book. So there's no right way to do this, but I would look at backwards. That backwards, forwards. Idea to think, Who are these characters, where are they going to end up? That is going to tell you how they should start, and then also the promise of the premise, right? So if I have a sex lessons story, I'm probably not going to wait until 70% of the way through to have my first spicy scene, right? Like the premise is going to sort of dictate when the intimacy starts. Okay, if you're stuck, go back to the beginning. Go by you to write this in the first place. Go back to the dream of a spider, alien boy that you had in your heart, and that will kind of, I think, reignite why you sat down to write this story to begin with. My other tip is, do you know which French writer it was? There's a French writer who used to stir himself physically, yes, and to to the, it's in the handout, to the to the brink of Cataclysm. And then he would write furiously for like 20 minutes. And he said this was the best way that he could get writing done. This is like, in the 1800s he didn't have like, you know, Pornhub or anything. So I would say, go back to like, books, spicy books that you've read that have really lit you up. Go back to ideas that you've had, notes you've taken videos on internet.com that you've watched this I think is really useful for ideas, especially for things like positions, locations, for intimate scenes as well. And what I'll even do is I use a website called bdsmlr.com It was like, it's sort of like the old Tumblr used to be. And so they'll just have beautiful erotic art, or they'll have clips from pornographic films and just like little
snippets. And I'll just watch that and get inspired. And sometimes I'll even think, like books have been born from just looking at a picture and going, Who are these characters? How did they get to this point? And that can really, really inspire me, especially right before I sit down to write a sex scene. Who is this pizza man? What's his story? Oh, no, this is all you. This never happened to me. I'm like, they're not horny enough. So I don't know if anybody else has experienced this, but you have plots that you need to write, and your characters just
want to bang, and it's like, I don't have time for this. This sex scene is not going to advance the plot, so, like, police stop touching each other. So this is what I do.
If my characters get too handsy, I'll change the scene so they're out in public. They're less likely to get handsy, not always, but less. You can also make it so they don't have time, or you could just have them get interrupted. No so consent. I think this is really quick that we'll touch on this, because I think most of us are really familiar with this concept. I think that the conversation around this has really evolved and flowered over the last few years, but I just want to note here, it requires the character's agency
in order to give it. So you need to make sure that your character is able to give consent in a way that is meaningful. And from an agency perspective, there's a few acronyms for consent that can be kind of useful frameworks. My favorite one is freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic and specific. Fries is the acronym. And I also want to say that, like, No, I don't think anyone in this room would be have this particular fuss, but sometimes I'll see people say I'm worried it'll slow down the story. I'm worried that it'll kind of unsexify the moment. And I don't think that's true. I think that there are ways you can do it that make it very fun. So you can, when I say hang a Lange lampshade on it, what I mean is just call it out directly into the text. Just write it directly. Can I touch you here? Is this? Okay? I want to do this to you. I actually think that most of us really like a verbal person in these scenes, and so this is an opportunity to kind of hybridize that verbality with consent, and then also under the questions and invitations that can also be questions about protection. Yeah, yeah. You can write consent well before an encounter. You can do it just before, or you can do it in the moment of I think one of the excerpts I have in here from Angelina Lopez
there is, like, it's sort of in media res consent, right? Like, I want to do this, is this okay while they're in, while they're in
the moment? But of course, you can also do, like a negotiation before, and then you can do tacit consent. So this is like something I would be just judicious about how you do it, just make sure that you're using the right tools with tacit consent. So unspoken consent, you can have existing consent from previous scenes in a relationship where that sort of safety is, you know, the reader feels that safety for characters, it can be evident in body language. I think this works really well if you're already in that POV characters head, so that you can tell that that character is like into it. And then also, I would just say, remember the R and fry is that consent is reversible, right? So you can have a character in the moment actually say, You know what? This isn't working for me. Can we? Can we take a break? Oh, yeah, just real fast about content warnings. You know, we have a duty to protect our readers from harm, so if you are going to have something that you know is going to harm a reader, you need to make sure that you make them aware. You can put a note at the beginning, or you can direct them to your website. Do not put it on your sales
page, or, yeah, just you can direct them to your website. Um, I am not a huge fan of content warnings, but like, if it's, if it's something that I think is going to actively harm the reader, I'm absolutely going to include that. Where you draw the line is up to you. You know, some people are like, oh, I want to know if it has cheating. I want to know if it has all these things. Again, that's up to you. I err on just the really bad stuff I'm gonna give a warning about, but it's your it's your choice. All right, so really quick, I'll try to race through this stuff, because maybe it's only interesting to me. But words, the words you use, what word are you gonna use for wiener? So if we talk about sexy words and sexy language, I think it's really important to be mindful of when we use Latinate language and when we use English
origin words. And that's because Latinate language tends to be more cerebral, and it tends to create a little bit of emotional distance where our old English words, these are the good ones, the four letter ones, most of them are English. These are very impactful, but they can be a little polarizing. So I would say use a mix of both. When you're in the heat of a moment, you might not. So I think I have the example in the handout that if there's a fire, you're not going to go conflagration, conflagration. You're going to yell fire. Right? When you need help, you yell help. You don't yell aid, aid. So I think that this is similar, where when you're in the moment, you might move a little bit more towards those blunter, more immediate words, but again, they are polarizing, which I don't care about, but Nikki does, all right. So Sloan versus Simone, right? So when I'm writing a sex scene. If the like, I don't love the word cunt. I like it in certain certain settings, but if the word pussy is going to work just as well as cunt, I'm going to choose
pussy 100% of the time, because I know it's less likely to turn off the readers. I always aim for broad appeal, yeah. And I'm like, grow up. So there is a variety of ways that you can approach this. You're gonna have your own individual profile on how okay you are using words that work for you, that you might see readers on Tiktok be like, Oh, the minute I see this word,
I stopped reading the book. I'm like, well, that's a you problem. Me. I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep on with my, I don't know, velvet wrap, steel or whatever. And it's also genre specific. So if you are in romanticy, you might have more petals and folds and whatnot, and same thing in historical than you would in contemporary and so sometimes there are genre expectations as well. The solution for this is just to be pretty well read in the genre you're writing in, so that you kind of understand that if you're going to subvert that and you're going to use words that aren't super common in your genre, that you're doing it on purpose. Okay? And so really fast when we're writing a sex scene. I had a creative writing teacher who would tell me that it's very difficult for writer or for readers to carry an entire character in their head, for example, right? So when we think of Long John Silver, we don't always think of like the entire character with an entire face and body and clothes and everything. We think of his parrot and his eye patch, right? And then so we have this sort of silhouette with a parrot moving across the page, moving across our mind. I think it's the same thing with intimate scenes. I would find your parrot. So if your parrot is the fact that she's wearing a corset while they're still doing things and she can barely catch her breath, that's the thing you're going to sort of highlight in the scene, if they're in, if they're in a moving carriage, and they can feel the carriage moving, right? That's going to become the carriage scene. I think that we all see things come across book talk, right, where people will sort of be like, Oh my God. And the cello scene in Julie Soto's latest right? The cello scene, it's that the cello is the parrot, right? It's just shorthand for the whole thing, and it doesn't make the whole thing any less glorious, but it becomes a way that make it memorable. All right? Pacing and momentum, I would just say, please be intentional with the way that you are using white space on your page, and you are using blocks of text. So if you really want a reader to slow down and notice a beat, start putting in white space. Start putting in short sentences. Paragraph, break, paragraph break, to really draw attention to it. If you want readers to speed up, get those long paragraphs run on sentences, semi colons. I love abusing a semi colon and really have these sort of creative, grammatically creative ways to speed a reader through something if you want them to feel that momentum, I would also say, make sure that you're not going to have battle fatigue within a sex scene. So you want to make sure there are multiple emotional peaks within a sex scene. You have sort of hills and valleys, right? That we're not constantly on the edge of ecstasy, or we're not constantly in sort of a warm up phase, that we are having variability in our pacing. And a way to do this is you can have your sex scene mirror the character and the plot and where they are in that moment. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, no. So with again, with varying your action, your dialog, your exposition, building that white space on your page. If anybody here has ever done any screenwriting, that's so great, because you see, you want as much white space on the page, because it makes people read really, really fast, and it really can,
it can really set the rhythm. Yeah, and I would also say between action and dialog. I also try to vary if I'm going internal and external. So that's like almost a sex pun. But the idea between your we're going to vary between these sort of character realization moments, these kind of navel
gazing moments, where we're really getting the interiority of the character with what's immediately happening. So if you go too far with one or the other, I think our sex scene loses calibration. If we're only focused on tab a, slot B, et cetera, we don't really get that impact. But if we're only having sort of an emotional climax, it's not, in fact, the same. Okay? And then the last thing I'll say is I had an artist friend, and they told me one time that the first thing they learned in drawing class when they were drawn the first thing they drew was a chair. Was not to draw the chair, because as soon as you started drawing a chair, as you sat down, you're like, I'm going to draw a chair. You're kind of drawing the idea of a chair. You're drawing something that has chair Enos to you. You're drawing something that is a composite of the idea of a chair that you have accumulated over your lifetime. You're not actually drawing the lines in front of you, the perspective in front of you, the shading in front of you. I think it's the same thing with sex scenes. When we sit down to write intimacy and we're like, I'm going to write a sex scene today, it's so easy to default into what we think a sex scene should be and what it should do, rather than what the character and the story need in that moment. So don't write a sex scene. Write all the little moments that make up a sex scene, all the touches, all the glances, all the feelings that is what is going to come together to create a really memorable sex scene. And then our last tip, write as if your characters are blindfolded. That way, you're not just focusing on choreography, you're thinking about what they're feeling, what they're hearing, what they're tasting, all of those senses. And it just gives you a much deeper POV.
So do we have? Do you know how much time I have. I think we're out. We're out of time. Yeah, okay. So, okay, Oh, thanks, guys. Okay, so I will take some questions in here, but then Nikki and I are gonna go out into the hallway, and so if anyone
wants to ask us questions after Feel free. You can also you can find my email address on my website. It's the sierrasmone@gmail.org Or sorry, gmail.com you can email me any questions you have as well. Okay, questions in here?
No, we just delivered some knowledge, yeah.
Adeep, a little
bit about family. About,
do you have immediate thoughts on this? Because my my thought is like, Fuck them, but
so is the question was, how
challenging? How do you balance challenging your reader? Yeah, with with like, delivering like a fantasy or, yeah, yeah.
I don't think well on my feet.
Yeah. I guess I just, I honestly, I think
that this is personal to your authorial voice. I think that this is something that everyone has a sort of
different, differently calibrated profile towards
and but I do
think it's worth asking yourself, if you start out with a budget of, like, 100 pennies or whatever writing a
book, what you're gonna spend your pennies on? Right? And so if I'm going to challenge my reader with like, a very unlikely setting, like we're on a spider alien planet, then I might not be like, and she just had a stillbirth. I might not do that, because that is already going to take a lot of page time, a lot of energy to devote the story to, while I'm also really trying to take the reader into like, a very unusual setting, I think that this is also a question that we have to ask ourselves in the context of publishing an identity. So am I writing a character with an identity that I think might challenge my readers? I think for most of us, the answer is yes, I'm going to move forward in telling the story that's honest to me and honest to my characters. And I think that there's I just can't imagine what the payoff for compromise would be that most of us would be willing to take. So I think that that's like, but I also think that's what builds up your erotic brand over time. So that's how I know that I'm going to be able to go to a deebs books for amazing queer romance that is also going to give me the feeling of drinking wine on a summer evening. That is, that is going to be a deeps brand, right? And so I think that it's essential to building up who we are as storytellers, to answer the call to to challenging them. And I think if you really commit to something that you know, challenge your reader, if you really develop the character and everything that the reader's gonna buy into it, right? Like, dirty, bad, wrong? By Jade West, there's a golden shower scene in it, and I'm not that's
not my kink, but I read the book and I was like, wow, I get it. Like, it's not for me, but I totally get why it's right for this character. Yeah, yeah. I think I saw another hand over there, yes, But I don't
think that I can erotic voice. So I think that keeping your reader engaged in a sensory level is really key here, so that even if you know people are arguing in a throne room, for example, the reader is still feeling the, you know, the oppressive
gloom of the stone throne room, or the light coming in through the stained glass, or whatever it is, so that their body is like still lighting up with things. They are feeling things. They are tasting things. They're smelling. So that when you move into a spicy scene, they're already sort of physically like in a mirror neuron sense, engaged. But I also think that even in the scenes that aren't erotic necessarily, we can still have an erotic charge between our characters. So like Twilight, I think is a really good example, in the sense that there's no sex in the first book, but it launched 1000 fanfics because the sensuality is so charged throughout it that all of us were like, well, like, I know that man has to fork up a bite of pizza every time he tries to eat pizza, but like, I really want to see like him break a headboard later, so the non sex can be sexy too, but it's all In how much indulgence you layer on describing the moments, the connections between the character in terms of touching hands or wishing they could touch hands, or things like that, I think we're out of time. We'll be out in the hallway. If anyone has any other questions, feel free to email me. I can't volunteer in a deeper that. Thank you. I just wanted to make a quick announcement. If you didn't make an appointment for headshots, that's totally fine. They're running a lot faster. So you can pop in on the other side of this whenever you want for your author. Headshot is free. Just saying you
Sorry, we had Some room switching so
I'm sorry, My reading,
and then just 350
right Now I'm
gonna try to get that into the same time. Thank you.
I'm super in the mic. You.
Alrighty, hello everyone, so that we can get started a little bit. Alright, settle down.
Awesome. Okay, good time.
So I am introducing this workshop, hi Francesca, with these two beautiful authors,
Lauren hillings,
and go for it. Okay, I'm going to start, I'm just going to introduce, kind of us again and
workshop and kind of talk about
what we're going to do today.
I'm really excited. I'm nervous, first off,
but I'm also really excited. This is a subject
that is near and dear to my heart and also
to Lauren's heart. So hopefully this can be fun. We want to do something as a little interactive, so you guys will get to kind of workshop, some pitches. So if you want to make sure you have, like, a piece of paper, just something to write on, or your computers if you have that, and hopefully we're going to have some fun today. This is a really fun topic. Just to remind us of my slides. Okay, so just introduce ourselves, really. This is a slide for me, because I'm a baby, year old baby. My picture, my book, is next to my face,
so my name is Regina, black.
My debut came out last year. It's called the artist scandal. And hopefully I would never
go for y'all next year in my day job, I am a recovering lawyer, and I am currently dean of students at a law school, and I live in Little Rock Arkansas. My name is Lauren, but everybody calls me low. You guys know, call me though I am one half of the Christina Lauren writing duo.
We recently had our 31st book come out,
tangled up in you.
And before I was a full time writer, I did some research my doctors and specifically, and specifically neurodegeneration, and so yeah, then I left to write romance full time, and I feel like I'm touching a lot more lives now. Fairway, I have CPAs, and my spin is also the bonus. So he's a big romantic fan as well. I'm just going to do a quick overview of what's going to happen today. First we're going to define a high concept and where we'll be taking the lead on that discussion. And then after she's done, I'm going to walk you through some brainstorming techniques that you can use to brainstorm
high concepts. After
that, we're going to talk about, okay, you've done the brainstorming. How do you make that a pitch? So we're going to talk about how to do, like, a single line pitch. And then if any of you would like to take what you generated during this workshop and workshop it with this, everybody can see that process. We're going to do that as well. And then we'll and during the workshop, we'll kind of pause periodically to make sure, to see if anyone has questions as we're talking Yes, let's do it. Take it one. I Okay. So we all sort of know a high concept when we hear it, but sometimes it's really hard to
use a high concept sketch to describe our own books. And a lot of that is because sometimes when you get to the end of draft and you're like, Okay, now I need to tell you what it's about that book is still so big and complicated in your head that it's really hard to distill it down to a single idea. So a high concept book is basically a book that has its premise. So it's premise driven that can be described in an intention grabbing easy to understand way. So usually it's clear and succinct. It's usually like, one or two sentences. And these are all pitches that we have seen before. Think about like a movie poster a lot of times. The idea of high concept is associated like film and TV, because you have, you know, just a couple seconds in front of the fire, and we need to pitch your idea really fast, right? So it needs to catch a recognizable and, I do want to say on the outside, and I'll come back to this in a second. But high concept is not necessarily the low concept. It just means that it's sort of an easy to pitch commercial idea. High concept tends to be progress driven, whereas a little concept book, which sounds bad, tends to be a character driven or theme. So think about how your book might be marketed. When you're asked when you've written your book and you're you've gone out to publisher, or you're self publishing this book in one market, think about how that you're going to take that into a room. How are you going to describe this idea? Easily. How are you going to get people to pick it up, whether it's a reader or an editor or a buyer or a retailer? So I'm going to go over a few different types of high concept pitches, and then you guys, as you're listening to this, think about either your idea or your free manuscript or a published book that you have, and think about whether you can use these to describe your book. So as I'm going to try and take your plot and put it in place. So one thing that we've all seen before is using a recognizable idea as a concept as a pitch. So, for example, Hunger Games in a dystopian society, kids fight to the death. And we all know dystopian society in theory. I think it's something that dystopian video exactly what we're talking about. We all have our own individuals that looks like and so this is a really clear idea. Even though there's a whole lot of all the things going on. There's a lot of triangle there's, you know, the family dynamics,
there's all of that. But remember what Sarah
said, if you guys were in her conflicts seminar, which is amazing by the way, that you know the pitch is the pitch. We all know there's so much more going on in the book than just the pitch, but this is the way that you put them here into reading it. So another one Lord of the Flies, but with girls, right? So we all were made to be Lord of the Flies, probably in middle school or high school. I'm very old, so I don't remember which it was, but we get the idea that this is a group of girls who spend somewhere a week of society and all health in the power, which is also a TV show now, the world changes dramatically, like younger girls Discover the power to deliver electric shocks. Okay, so immediately we all know patriarchy is getting screwed, right? Like that tells us right away exactly what we're getting from that, because it's a recognizable concept that girls having a different kind of power is subversive in this world. And then we have Outlander How can we
marry World War Two nerds?
So how we married is transported to the 18th century, and must marry a fox warrior to survive. So time travel is another very recognizable here, and everybody kind of knows this is time time travel with your basics of fish out of water. So you're going to take into a setting that is easy. Thank you. Another way to titch is the what if game, and this is one of my favorites. So everybody in this room can do this is one of your books, or your ideas in Tinder? What if there's a rubble
assignment? That's a very simple question, and that is interesting. As soon as you ask that question
somebody, they're like, Oh, I'm gonna be back. What if the US Lost World command High Castle, that was like an amazing story. And you can immediately think, Oh, that's a world that disparities within the multi 11. What if you could find your schoolmate using DNA, this Nobel Prize winning novel,
and then one of my favorite romances of all time, it had my view by Susan Elizabeth Phillips, is perhaps one of the best examples of a woman who knows nothing about sports
inherits professional football team. That is such a clear idea, because you need to speak that you know exactly
what that book is about, and that's gonna be fun, right?
Okay, there's also attention grabbing premise.
This is one that's been done in a number of questions. I read it every time I recall Millie in better left UNC by Leah Lewis, Millie inadvertently reveals every single one of her secrets with her emails interact before there's a book that came out recently called, I hope this might be, well, that book is shit. I love it so much. It's so good. And this is a all the way to the idea that like something, finding out our secrets or our email drafts or finding our diary or love lovers,
right? Premise we can all relate to.
Our works are clever. A vampire leader helps a beautiful orphan to have human navigate a dark, blue world. So in the attention grabbing premise, sometimes what you're seeing too is the sort of delicious little muscle of the story. Obviously, this world is a lot more complicated than just this one sentence. But what you're giving your reader is a little like, this is my expected, delicious, seductive role, and I have given here. And then Sarah also talked about this book, which is the last phase of violin, which is such a great high concept romanticism. I really recommend it to you guys. And oh, as a side, Regina and I have put together a list of resources. We have our favorite craft books and then some of our favorite high concept romances. I didn't know how many before the
year, I did want to present. I will have
them send it out to people that registered for broken cigars. So a woman's name to which is life and receives five unlisted information, including initial dye medicine
and then seven days in June by Tia Williams, two former lovers
who secretly been writing to each other in their books for years run into each other at a literary context. So the next way that you guys have probably seen a lot of high concept pitches, because this is very widely in pitch wars, it's used very commonly filmed in books is the x, y formula. At
the outset, I want to say because I don't forget
if I don't say it right now, when you use this one, there's two really important things you have to remember. One, they have to be recognizable to somebody. You can't use a super obscure comp, but like only giving your best friend and friends, and friends, right? And the other is that they actually need to be different enough to be interesting. So people wouldn't be like, you know, this is like, if you want to have something like, when you put them together, the person sharing, it shows, oh, that would be kind of fun. I want to see those things together. So here we have
count of mine. Crisco meets
Arabian Nights. And that is the rap on the dawn right. Gail meets The Good Wife, which is the artist coronavirus as well. This is a great X meet y, and I asked Adriana hers. I was like, give me your excellent slide, and it's Richardson, which is so perfect, because it's like you get both historical advice and also autism. And so that's a really good example of putting two things together that are unexpected. Jenny Han meets Dana virgin. That's an excellent Why were you giving an authorial voice and audience along with a beloved property too? James, my daughter, favorite show.
She watches it for your favorite day and then breakfast,
like putting two things together to make it
the pitches, in the execution. This is one where you have a specific writing style that you're going to try to try and do the craft differently. This might be a good way to change your book. So in this case, it is about how the book is constructed. So DAISY Jones in the sixth is basically written by the transcript of a documentary. So it's a novel written as a transcribed oral
history of one of the biggest bands in the 1970s
Attachments by Rainbow Brown and office romance blue blossoms one email at a time. So it's largely sold in email format. Sadie is one of my favorite YA novels that you guys have at NFL. I wonder if it's really good, and it's a thriller. It's written as a true prime podcast transcript, and it's very cool, really creative. And then this one's here by Charlotte Stein and Carol McKenna. His texts were never meant to be read, and they've found their way to her. It's told largely any text messages. And so it's a fun way to sort of pitch your book, if your format and your practice system, okay? So I do have a high concept versus low concept, just because I want to make it really clear that if you don't have, like, a super big commercial idea, that's okay, you can still have a fantastic book, and in many pieces, what you see in a series?
It says that first book or first couple books in a series, are considered kind of more high
concept. But once you get into the sequels, where you're focusing in on the
characters and their lives,
those might feel lower concepts. So here's my example, using the YA romance to all the ones that well before. So in the first book, a girl's love letters accidentally get mailed out. In the second book, can a girl be in love with two boys at the same time? Both of those are very high contrast, easy to pitch ideas, but in the third I did exercise myself. Laura, Jane has some great messages to make, including where you're going to college and what that means the relationships with you. Okay, so that's obviously, these books are incredibly successful, and the stories are wonderful characters, but there's not, you can see there's not a same punch
with that. Okay, does anyone have any questions before I move to the next part?
Are you guys eating with sleeves and
other projects and like,
start planning? Yeah, okay,
that's your hand
on this side. No. Okay, all right, okay,
so now I'm going to talk about brainstorming
high concepts before I really dig into what they want to say, I want to talk a little bit about process.
Like Lauren was saying, low concept isn't bad, high
concept isn't good. But I assume most of you are here
because you know high concepts tend to grab our attention, grabbing for readers, agents, editors, everyone involved, they're more likely to maybe get TV options, that sort of thing. And so I just assume everybody in here is interested in trying to write a high concept of romance. So I do not write. I can describe the missing incidents. That is the first thing I do. I do not start I don't start character. I don't start reply. I'm sorry. Anything else idea as a one line pitch, and when we go over the components of this, you'll see what that's actually a great writing tool, in addition to being a tool to kind of ensure that you're writing something that's going to accomplish your goal of writing a high concept romance. Okay, so when I start brainstorming a new book, I usually start with something familiar that I enjoy, and notice I said something, yes, it needs to be universal. A lot of people love it. It's got something I like, okay? Because, I mean, I've heard the sessions and all these workshops today about different movies and things like that. And I have to say, there's so many that, like everybody. So like, start with something not really. Like, start with something you're passionate about. It we love you truly understand. Like, my favorite fairy your favorite fairy tale. What's your favorite deal? You need a base, okay, all right. I love babies. I noticed a good starting place. A lot of people love that. So start with something familiar, then add some sort of new, unexpected twists. You do it okay, and then add external conflicts. This is essential, okay, for it, for it, because what this external conflict does is it kind of previews your story question and your romance. And the story question and romance that you pose to the reader is the halfway ever after, right? If it was a genre romance, it would be, are they going to end up together? But because of the genre romance, we know they're going to end up together. So what do you think questions?
Okay, how do you pose that
your external conflict does that, and you try to create an external conflict, conflict that prompts the question, How in the world that leads to people going to end up together. Okay, so this is my starting point. Say something I love. Try to twist it and try to really make a messy, yeah, like, made it feel impossible. That's one of my favorite things again, like I was reading, I know how you're going to pull that off. Now, you guys, okay, so, alright, elements of the high process pitch when you're trying to remix it, as I call it, these are the places that you can mix. Also this is kind of shows you why this is a
helpful writing tool. Because if you can answer all these questions, actually
start drafting or working on right. So places usually remix. But I thought I think of it as, who, what, why? Why not? So, what? Okay, so the first thing is, who you can who is your book about it? So one aspect that could make your concept stand out from like the truth all the
Hades and persecutions reselling is
the type of characters you're putting in that position. So maybe you're you're writing about queer romance, or maybe you're writing a black romance, or maybe you're writing about people that are lower class instead of bunch of rich people. Okay, think about who am I writing about? Am I writing about the same characters you typically see? That's not going to stand out as much, okay? So think about who your characters are, and that can elevate your concept to a higher concept, external what's happening? Okay, what do they want?
Give them a goal that is unexpected
or feels a little like unattainable to the average person.
External reasons. Notice,
all of these things are external, because we're talking about commercial fidgets. Right. We're not really talking about internal right now. So, external motivations, why do they want this.
