Our topic this week is what do we find ourselves doing over
and over in our writing, like the way events unfolded repeatedly in the movie “Groundhog
Day.”
First, I have to take a minute to say how much I LOVE that
movie and also the commercial Bill Murray did for this year’s Superbowl wherein
he revisited the adventure! Great stuff.
The movie “Edge of Tomorrow” with Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt
is another terrific science fiction movie with the “repeat the day” trope and
deadly stakes, by the way.
Moving on to my own writing, as others have said this week,
I have a list of words I overuse in the first drafts of my books, which starts
with the word “that’. That is my single most overused assembly of vowels and
consonants, usually with over 200 occurrences in a manuscript. Another word on
my list is “moment”, which ironically was suggested to me by my editor at Carina
Press in my first book and I got so overenthusiastic about using it, my current
editor now has forbidden me to use it at all. (The word does sneak in a few times each book though.) I don’t self-edit when I’m
writing the first draft because I’ve found if I do, my creativity is stifled
and grinds to a halt. First draft for me
is all about letting the story spill from my mind onto the page (computer) and
not the time to stop and exorcise the ‘bad’ words.
I budget three solid days for the editing pass in which I do
go through and clean out and replace ‘that’ and all his or her repetitious companions
on my list. It’s kind of grueling but yields so many more interesting word
choices and turns of phrase so the effort is definitely worth it. I know there
are programs which are supposed to assist an author in finding and changing out
these types of words but I prefer to do it by hand, at ground level, myself.
Sometimes during this part of the process, I find some other word I’ve formed a
temporary attachment to and then I work on revising there as well. I don’t try
to eliminate every instance of these words – they’re English, they appear
naturally in life and in conversation. I just try to prune so there aren’t say
three ‘moments’ in one paragraph.
I have a very successful, award winning scifi romance series
going, the Badari Warriors, and I have a different challenge there, not to
basically re-tell the same story in each book.
Here’s the high level series premise: Genetically engineered soldiers of the far
future, the Badari were created by alien enemies to fight humans. But then the
scientists kidnapped an entire human colony from the Sectors to use as subjects
in twisted experiments…the Badari and the humans made common cause, rebelled
and escaped the labs. Now they live side by side in a sanctuary valley
protected by a powerful Artificial Intelligence, and wage unceasing war on the
aliens.
I
have read series in the past where the author basically changes the names from
book to book but everything else is the same, like old TV shows which followed
a pretty strict formula. (Dare I say ‘cookie cutter’???) I want to avoid that at all costs – I never
want to bore the reader!
Just last week I had a really nice note from a reader who
finished my newest book in the series, LANDON, and she in fact complimented me
on the fact that I’ve managed to change up the circumstances in each book and
provide new challenges for each couple, while remaining within the series world
building.
Here’s what I said at one time about what I did to make the
second book MATEER different from the first book AYDARR: With MATEER, I wanted to keep the series arc moving forward, advancing
the overall plot, but I wasn’t done with the idea of a Badari warrior trapped
in a lab and the human woman who helps him. There’s such a huge story potential
inherent in the situation, which seems hopeless at first glance, but the hero
and heroine will find a way out (this is romance – happy endings!). I pondered how Megan, a doctor, would react
to being awakened and finding herself a prisoner under threat of really
despicable alien experiments – she’d naturally want to use her medical skills
to help her fellow humans survive, but not get drawn into offering the enemy
even the slightest assistance. And then there’s Mateer, the chief enforcer from
the Badari pack, who’s been recaptured, much to the glee of the scientist
running the lab. He has plans for Mateer and Megan together.
So while the two are
mutually attracted to each other, they feel they have to resist the scientist’s
plot designed specifically for them…and then something happens to Megan to
totally change up the situation.
I think my biggest
challenge for this book in the series was to make Mateer his own man,
differentiated from Aydarr, the Alpha in book one. I had to sit and ponder how
growing up in the same harsh circumstances as every other Badari would result
in his being a unique person, with his own take on life. I also had a bit of
fun in the beginning as Mateer envies the Alpha and his mate (from AYDARR’s
events), and has confusion about how the whole concept of finding and being a
mate works. Not, mind you, the physical
aspects, but how to know he’s met the one woman for him and how to impress on
her that he’s the one man for her.
With Megan, who is the
sister of book one’s heroine, but very different – younger, a doctor rather
than a soldier as Jill was - I felt her medical training and knowledge would
make her much more cautious about trusting her feelings in the high pressure
environment of the Khagrish lab/prison.
I’ve played with many wrinkles and scenarios since the first
two books, had a lot of fun, built the readership for the series and there’s no
end to the stories I have in mind to tell going forward. So I guess this is my
anti-groundhog day effort. I take it as a fun challenge and it’s also allowed
me to explore a number of different SFR tropes within the series.
DARIK is probably the one where I had the most SF fun,
giving a nod to the movies ‘Alien’, ‘Andromeda Strain’ and ‘Puppet Masters’
(the Heinlein classic, not the horror film franchise) in the course of the book.
I’ve had hurricanes, avalanches, hidden Alphas, aliens hunting the hero and
hero across the plains… (The hunt is a trope that has been used successfully in
movies like 2010’s ‘Predators’, one of my favorites, and also in a classic TV
movie about a big game hunter turning on his guide while they were out in the
desert, and hunting him. I think that one’s been remade two or three times!)….a
pregnancy, kidnapping, a heroine who says no to her fated mate (temporarily –
hey, this is romance after all and she had a good reason!) and many, many more
plot twists and turns over the twelve books so far.
Before I slide into repeating myself here, time to end the Groundhog Day and get back to work on my next
book in the series which, yes, will have some new and different plot twists!
Happy reading!
