Writing a Romance Novel For Dummies by Leslie Wainger

Author:Leslie Wainger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley Publishing, Inc.

That friend who can’t tell a story because she can’t stop digressing? She doesn’t know what to leave out. A good storyteller picks and chooses what to tell, and she chooses everything she does because it serves the story and because it moves the story forward. Including any one of the following items is a problem, and many novice writers indulge in two or even all three, which makes getting published impossible:

Factual digressions: Whether a piece of information you want to include is really interesting or not, if the story doesn’t need it, cut it. Be ruthless. Yes, the farming practices of 16th-century France and the state of 21st-century genetics are fascinating (well, to some people), but if information you turn up in your research doesn’t move the story forward, it goes (see Chapter 13 for the complete scoop on avoiding information overload).

Every thought and feeling: Unedited, stream-of-consciousness writing doesn’t belong in a romance novel. Real people’s thoughts go all over the map. They’re momentarily distracted by sounds or smells, and they go off on long mental digressions about childhood and favorite meals. To make their characters seem real, many aspiring authors include all those digressions in their books, stopping the action dead and making the reader lose interest. The reader puts the book down, and suddenly pacing is a dead issue. (I detail the dangers of wandering minds in Chapter 9.)

Too much description: You absolutely need some description. Description sets the scene and helps the reader enter the world of the story. But too much description — passages that go on too long or descriptions of every single outfit, room, or minor character — slows the book down. The reader stops wondering what’s going to happen next because, from her point of view, nothing ever happens at all. (See Chapter 8 for more on the dangers of description.)

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