To Marry A Matchmaker and creativity

My editor emailed yesterday to say that they have titled Henri & Robert -- TO MARRY A MATCHMAKER.  It brilliantly reflects the story so I'm very pleased with the title.

She also let me know that they want to offer me another four book contract. So I am pleased about that. It will be a small matter of hitting of deadlines!  But I should be able to do that. I am the one who set them and have no one to blame but myself.

I learnt a lot from rewriting TO MARRY A MATCHMAKER. One of the big lessons was never ever to take my process for granted and that  certain things can become rusty. Even if you think you know what you are doing, it doesn't hurt to go make to the beginning and revisit. In my case, it was revisiting Writing A Romance Novel for Dummies by Leslie Wanger and realising where I'd gone wrong. There is a lot of basic info in there. Info I once knew and then forgot. For example, you might know about the sexual tension between the characters but unless it is obviously on the page, the reader can't. Equally, she gave a few ideas on how to identify a sagging middle. One big red light beacon for me was the sudden focus on secondary characters. I had done that and it had to be resolved. Here I'd always considered that I was good at pacing.
Twyla Tharp in her book The Creative Habit gives the image of polish a clock face. It is about how dancers work on skills. It is a good analogy. However, you have to know which clock to polish!

The Creative Habit is another of those books that bears re-reading, particularly if you feel like you are in a creative rut.
For example she quotes the novelist John Gregory Dunne -- Because one has written other books does not mean the next becomes any easier. Each book in fact is a tabula rasa; from book to book I seem to forget how to get characters in and out of rooms -- a far more difficult task than non writers might think.
And further on in the same chapter -- The great ones never take the fundamentals for granted.

So fingers crossed that this next one goes easier and that I remember the focus and the main purpose of the story is the ROMANCE.
And it is a good reason why I'm pleased both books live on my bookshelves and I'm able to go back and re-read them.

Genius v grinds

One of my problem with the movie Amadeus is the notion of the grind v the absolute effortlessness of Mozart. It belittles Mozart. Mozart may have had the ability but that ability was honed and polished by his father. From about the age of five, all Mozart did was play music. He grew up in a household where music was played and encouraged and that helped him.
The music flowed from his fingertips because he practised. He practised and played music because it pleased his father and because he had an aptitude for it. If Saliari had practised as much as Mozart and had grown up in the same environment, it is more than probable that he would have achieved the same level... In other words, Mozart worked hard, harder than most people realise and he did not just pick up a violin one day and compose music.
I can remember reading the autobiography of John Denver where he attributed his success at music to the hard work he put it. He spent hour upon hour during high school playing his guitar. He then toured and toured. This is not unique. Time after time when you really look at someone who has been a great success, you see that they may have had the predisposition towards something, but they were also willing to put the hard hours in.
Malcom Gladwell has recently written a book called Outliers: Is there such a thing as pure genius? You can read an extract of it here. But basically, he concludes that once you have the desire much of success stems from determination, dedication and discipline.
Twyla Tharp in her book, The Creative Habit also touches on this. The prima ballerinas always are the ones who are the first to the barre and who constantly practice and practice. They do not take their success for granted. It is a question of clock face polishing and striving to improve.
So what about romance writers? If you speak to any successful romance writer, they will tell you how hard it is. All the romance writers I know write because they love writing and reading. They have put the hard hours in. Some of it includes reading the genre and understanding the demands of the genre.
It is what gets me so cross about programmes about writing. Or having a go at writing a M&B. Do those presenters realise how long and hard the top talent have worked at it? Or how hard they do work at it? One of the reasons for M&B's success is that they have very hard working authors who are working to tell stories to the best of their ability. It is all about putting the hours in and honing your writing.
Over the long term, there are diminishingly few grinds.

Influences and seed for The Roman's Virgin Mistress

Twyla Tharp in her wonderful book The Creative Habit speaks about seeds or influences. Basically she makes the point there are no new ideas under the sun. Get over it and think about the combination of ideas to make something your very own. Ideas and seeds for books never come from just one place. Tharp also makes the point that if one keeps going back to the same source, the well rapidly runs dry and creativity ceases.
So what are the influences that I know about for The Roman's Virgin Mistress.
Tom Holland's book Rubicon, in particular his chapter on Baiae and its contribution to the fall of the Republic first made me want to write about this city. I wanted to write about it since I wrote GH. Regular readers will know that I wrote two other books between GH and TRVM. These books have yet to appear in the North American Market.
I was particularly intrigued by the role of the Queens of Baiae, the society hostesses who controlled the access to power. Unlike Rome, women were far more in the ascendancy here. Baiae had this very loose reputation. More divorces had happened on the sands of Baiae than anywhere else for example.
Catullus's poems to his Mistress also provided some inspiration. But I did not think and still not think I could write a jaded woman without any morals. ( I may to try sometime as a challenge) I wanted something else.
Then I happened to read again about Anna Nicole Smith and her fight against her late husband's son for her inheritance. This made me wonder what if -- my heroine was more sinned against than sinning and simply notorious for having married. I had a heroine that I could work with. And yes, I know the virgin widow is a stock character, but I like to think that I made Silvana a bit different. It is also a sordid fact of life that many women have been married to old men. Catherine Howard and Henry VIII is another example. Was that marriage actually consummated? By the time Henry VIII married Katharine Parr, Katharine is simply a nurse.
The book The World of Lady Jane Grey also I suppose was an influence as it shows quite clearly the sort of precarious world Katharine Parr lived in.There is no guarantee that had he lived, Katharine Parr would have been Henry III's last wife.
Also was an unconsummated marriage a real marriage and would the wife have right to inherit? What if she needed to inherit? What complications would being a virgin then cause? So I had my heroine or at least an idea of how I could make her. And I know some people groan at the thought but the character really intrigued me. What would it be like to have everyone think you are a whore and to know that you are not, but because of other considerations, you did not dare say.
But what about my hero and my premise.
Why would any one want to get involved with Silvana? And how could it be made worse?
Baiae was the sort of place that made men and destroyed them. I wanted my hero to be of the establishment and someone for whom being involved with Silvana would be fraught with peril.
I knew also that I wanted Baiae to resemble the Regency. There are far more obvious similarities with the Regency time period than say with the Medieval time period, or even the Celtic period. There are plenty of parallels with our own period. I happened to be rereading Faro's Daughter when things fell into place. Excellent book by the way. Read it if you haven't.
What if I used a senator who had to disentangle his young nephew from the clutches of this Society presumed whore? It is an excellent stock in trade premise and one that Roman themselves used ad nauseum -- upright and often uptight man being charged with getting rid of undesirable woman discovers she is actually not as she seems and falls in love to the dismay of his family. These sort of stories were notorious for deus ex machina by the way. The normal situation was for a god or goddess to appear and revel that the woman in question had been mixed up at birth or to hand her a large fortune or whatever.
As an aside: a fun thing to do sometimes is to see if you can up with the basic premise for a story and see what fable/fairy tale/myth/saga it relates back to. There are no new premises under the sun, just twists on old ones. A good working knowledge of folklore and myth is a useful thing. Ovid's Metamorpheses is a good place to start.
There are other seeds as well, I know Fortis's reaching out of his hand at the very start was inspired by the movie of Howl's Moving Castle. I loved Christain Bale's voice in that movie and he helped to inspire Fortis. I wanted someone who had been through the mill and had a reason to protect his reputation, but who also knew the score, knew how Baiae operated.
And if I think I am sure there were other seeds. But hopefully will give you some idea of the main influences. The ideas really come from everywhere but it is the combo that makes them your own.

Failure leads to success

I have been reading Tharp's The Creative Habit and have found much to like. I loved her chapter on disasters. How people do their best work often after failure. Nobody succeeds all the time. Failures humble. The best failures are the ones you make alone in your room with no one watching as you strive to perfect your material.

It is the old Thomas Edison theory about finding 9,999 ways that a light bulb didn't work. In order to get to the 10kth time, he had to try the other ways first. As Tharp points out -- contrary to the assertion in Amadeus, Mozart work hard to perfect his musical skill. The striving towards perfection means you are going to fail. It is better that you make mistakes at the start so you can develop the skills later on. One of the worst failures in Tharp's opinion is denial. You know something is weak but you are hoping against hope that no one else notices. This is also where a good editor and good critique partners or as Tharp calls them the validation squad. I trust them with my crudest and clumsiest work and they reward me with honest criticism. I put a lot of faith in them and their eye. I trust their talent. I know they have hammered my work in the past and therefore no afraid to be critical and above they want what I want -- the strongest story possible. By working with them and learning also to examine my work critically,

Revision is the biggest test in the creative process. It is the admitting that something does not work as well as you hoped/feared and then putting it right. She has a great mantra -- first put right those things you know you can fix. It is also something that I believe.
Anyway, I hope to avoid the public humiliation of a total disaster. by going through the validation process and working with my editor and critique partners. From my point of view, it was lovely to see someone else provide a clear and concise reason why it works.

I am not a master Romance novelist yet. Perhaps I never will be. But I can strive towards making my work better. There is always something to work on. I also liked her idea about polishing skills being a clock face. You polish up one, and then go on to the next until you have come full circle and the first one needs polishing again. She spoke of how dancers spend time perfecting the basics, and how the best dancers are the ones who are constantly going back and relearning their basic moves.

Anne McAllister went on and on about this book, and now I am as well. It is excellent.

I shall be drawing the winners of the Sold and Seduced contest soon. I was very pleased at the response.

The Anne McAllister Commission

Anne McAllister's blog should come with a warning: You will discover interesting and intriguing books that will cause you to visit Amazon. Her latest discovery is Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit.

Twyla Tharp, in case anyone is unfamiliar with her work, is one of America's great choreographers. She is exacting, demanding and above highly creative in her medium. She has choreographed ballets, Emmy winning television shows and Tony winning musicals.

I thought the book sounded interesting when Anne described the rituals, and the thinking out of the box. I knew I needed to read the book when Anne mentioned ruts.

It arrived yesterday and is well worth reading. And yes, okay, I am creative. I like making connections. I do like the act of creation. I like change.

There is a lot to absorb. Little throw away sentences that suddenly open up new vistas. She writes of the discipline needed for creativity. Of scratching around for ideas -- scratching in terms of looking everywhere, like one scratches off lottery cards in the hopes of finding something. She also speaks about not mining too deeply in one place, and the combination of ideas. She also speaks of skill. Her stories about Mozart and DaVinci are not new, but they are in one place. ...the better you know the nuts and bolts of your craft, the fully you can express your talent. Build on solid foundations. Skill enables you to execute your vision.

I love her quote from John Gregory Dunne explaining the difficulties of writing novels and each new novel is a tabula rasa, and he has to remember how to get characters in and out of rooms.

She also speaks of casting, and getting the right person for a part. Justifying that.

I knew that I did not have the right person in mind for my hero. I have known about him for a while. but I couldn't think who I would cast as my hero. Which actor would I chose to play him? What quality does that actor capture? My usual cast of suspects was not working. I asked Anne for some ideas. Anne is very good with ideas btw. She came up with two. One I had already rejected. The other -- I had not even thought about. I did not recognise the name -- Mads Mikkleson.

He played Le Chiffre in Casino Royal. The minute I realized -- I knew that he had the quality of movement that I was looking for. Things fell into place. Horizons opened. I will have to change some of the things I have already written but it is going to be a better book.

It is a magnificent book. Full of sound advice. Or maybe because it tallys with my thinking, I find comfort in the reaffirmation.

Twyla Tharp is another one of those -- desire, dedication, determination and discipline ladies.

All I can say is get the book, read it and absorb it. I know I will be returning to it time and again.