October 2, 2006

 

The Writing Show (WS): This is Paula B. You’d think that writing about sex would be easy. After all, what’s more compelling than lust? But, says this week’s guest, there’s a lot more to thrilling the reader than just stringing sex scenes together.

Welcome to the Writing Show, where writing is always the story. I’m your host, Paula B, here with my guest today, Cher Gorman. Cher Gorman is a prolific award-winning author. Her first published novel, Wolf Island, was a 2006 Eppie Award finalist. Eppie is given for e-books. Her second book, Seductive Reasoning, was released in June, and her third, a collaborative non-fiction project, Ten Steps to Creating Memorable Characters, comes out in November. As if that weren’t enough for one year, three more books will debut between November 2006 and February 2007. Cher’s voice, style, and ability to create deep characters and clever plot twists have earned her glowing reviews.

WS: Welcome to the Writing Show, Cher. I’m so glad you’re able to join us today.

Cher Gorman (CG): Thank you for inviting me. I’m really happy to be here.

WS: We have as our topic something I think a few people might just be interested in, and that is writing erotic scenes and erotic literature. I know you’re doing a presentation on this topic at the Colorado Gold Writer’s Conference.

CG: Yes. We’re doing that Sunday morning.

WS: Right. Well, this is lieu of a live presentation, because obviously not everybody can attend, but I hope we can cover some of the things that you’re going to talk about and maybe a bit more.

WS: I’d like to start with how you use sexual tension in your writing. I know you’ve said when you first started writing that you did some things wrong, and I’m just wondering if you could tell us what those things were and what you should do instead?

CG: Yes. Creating wonderful sexual tension between my characters was one of the most difficult things I had to learn as a writer because at first, I forced it between my characters. I would randomly add passages of intense attraction between my hero and heroine in scenes where it really wasn’t appropriate to the flow of the story or my characters and their conflicts. But I was thinking this is what romance readers wanted to read. They wanted characters who are hot for each other. They wanted characters that have incredible chemistry. They wanted characters whose pheromones mingle and catch fire, but the answer to that is “Yes and no.” We all love to read those books where the hero and heroine practically leap from the pages, and then as we read, we can feel the intense attraction between them, the push and pull and the resistance to what they are feeling.

I have a story that is actually being published in February of 2007, The Secret Truth at Dare Ranch. My hero and heroine have a secret baby together, plus they have some intense conflict from their past, which I won’t go into here, but in the first draft of this book, all my hero and heroine thought about or talked about was basically this: “I’m sexually attracted to this person.” Most of the scenes in the book were devoted to that, until finally toward the very end of the book, I decided now was the time to tell the readers some important stuff about their past and their conflicts. Well, duh!

So looking back, I’m really glad I made that monumental mistake,because I finally learned how to create sexual tension without making it forced or inappropriate. I learned that the primary focus of my scenes needed to be on my characters’ internal goal motivations and conflicts, and I re-wrote the book with some wonderful results. In fact, it won the Outreach Award of Excellence.

But the key to sexual attraction is that it should be a natural. It should grow from your story and the conflicts between your characters. It’s a delicate mix of “want to but can’t,” the physical contact, and each character’s emotional stakes or emotional contact so they each touch emotions deep inside the other that they don’t want to be touched.

WS: So are you saying when you did your first draft, there wasn’t a “want to but can’t” aspect?

CG: Yeah, it was “want to but can’t” through the entire book, and I didn’t touch on the actual goals and conflicts of my characters. It was just about “I’m really attracted to this person.” That was it. So it’s a delicate line. You have to bring in the sexual tension, but it grows from the characters and their internal conflicts. And that was really hard for me to learn. But I finally learned it.

WS: Can you give us an of what you mean by “sexual tension growing from internal conflicts?” The obvious one is if there is some moral issue. Either someone’s attracted to someone who’s unavailable or they have some strict moral code that says I’m not supposed to do this, but I suppose there are a lot of others, right?

CG: I can read you something from my first published novel, Wolf Island and give you a snippet of what I mean. This is a scene with just my hero, and it occurs right after my heroine has come to the door of his castle on Wolf Island, an island off the coast of Maine. She is looking for her missing sister who disappeared while hunting ghosts, and she has asked him some specific questions about her sister, and he has pretty much closed his door in her face. When he did answer the door, he had a towel wrapped around him because he had just gotten out of the shower. This is a little scene that gives you a little bit about his internal conflict in regard to meeting this woman:

[Reads.]

WS: Ah. Okay. So he has a conflict about getting involved because he’s afraid.

CG: Right. He has a very deep-seated fear that is brought out later on in the book. He fears that he has inherited his father’s violent triggers.

WS: Okay.

CG: Yeah, but that comes out much later in the book.

WS: So it’s not just somebody’s worried about the morality of something. I just brought that up as an obvious example, but you’re talking about real psychological issues.

CG: Yeah. He has a real issue with getting involved because of his past, and his past cast a very dark shadow on him that he hasn’t been able to get past. But my heroine helps him to do that in the end.

WS: So that contributes to the tension because it’s not only a “want to but can’t,” but it’s sort of a “want to, but if I do it, something horrible will happen.”

CG: Exactly. He’s afraid that he may become violent like his father, so he doesn’t feel he’s worthy of having a woman love him.

WS: I’m going to ask you kind of a weird question coming out of that, but is there a difference when you finally do get to the sex scenes in a situation like that, do you write them differently from the way that you would write them if there weren’t such conflict within one of the characters?

CG:The way I write it is I do inject my scenes with a lot of emotion, and especially when Dev and Abby first have sex, it’s a very emotional scene, particularly for him because he’s afraid he might lose control in the middle of it and harm her in some way. And that’s the driving fear that’s bringing that out very vividly in their first scene together because he is really afraid he might harm her. It all goes back to his father because he’s afraid that he isn’t worthy and that he has inherited his violent triggers from his father.

WS: So in a way, it sounds like the actual sex in this story is very, very integral to the whole plot and characterization and not just there for titillation.

CG: No, it definitely isn’t. It is definitely part of the story. Again, this is a good example of growing out from the characters and their conflicts, because he is very afraid of getting intimate with Abby because he is afraid he could lose control and he might harm her. That is a big, big issue for him.

WS: This brings up another question, and that is the difference between writing for men or for women or from the male point of view or from the female point of view. I realize it’s not quite as clear-cut as that, but that’s sort of the general idea. When you write erotic scenes, do you write from the point of view of both characters?

CG: Well, normally I am a POV purist, and I don’t like to change POVs within a scene, and I like to choose. In Wolf Island, I stuck with my hero’s point of view in that first love scene because he had the most to lose there. He really had to overcome something there, and I didn’t want to switch over to Abby because it was really his scene.

However, I guess it really depends on the story. With a serious conflict like my hero had in Wolf Island, I didn’t change POVs in any of the love scenes, but I have done it in other books. It depends on the story really. If it feels right, I will show both their POVs in the love scene, and it’s not just about body parts, part A in slot B, but about the characters’ emotional journey during the sex as well. But I don’t head-hop. I will divide the scene in half and in each half reflect the viewpoint of one of my characters if it’s appropriate. If it isn’t, then it’s sort of a gut instinct. If it feels right, I’ll do it. If it doesn’t, I just stick with one POV.

WS: What is the difference for you in writing either from the point of view of a man versus a woman or for male versus female audiences/readers?

CG: Writing is a challenge, period, no matter who you’re writing for. It could be women, men, children, young adults, whatever, but I think the most important thing a writer should keep in mind when they’re writing is to remember who their audience is, and in the case of erotica or erotic romance, their audience is definitely not their mother or their maiden aunt or their grandmother or their priest or their minister or their rabbi. You have to remember who your audience is, and you have to feel comfortable writing love scenes, writing sex. The erotica market is very hot right now, and a lot of publishers are jumping on the bandwagon, but if you are not comfortable doing it, then you shouldn’t do it. If you’re so worried about “What’s my mother going to think of this,” or “What if my grandmother reads this, what’s she going to think?” If that’s in the back of your mind, then you shouldn’t do it.

WS: That’s interesting. That’s something I hadn’t even thought about. Is there a difference in writing a sex scene to be read by men versus one to be read by women?

CG: Well, in the context of homosexual sex--I don’t write homosexual sex, but I do have friends who do. My opinion is simply that love is universal and knows no boundaries, and when you’re writing any kind of a love scene, whether it’s between a man and a woman, two men, two women, two men and one woman, or two women and one man, or even another species, like in sci-fi or fantasy stories, you need to write the characters’ relationship and their sexual encounters in an honest and very true way, because remember that even though fiction is basically a big lie, the truth lies at its core in regard to the building of characters and portraying them on the page.

WS: I guess one of my next questions would be what’s the difference between erotic literature and pornography?

CG: That’s a very good question. This is my opinion. I think some other writers would probably share this with me, some might disagree, but this is just my opinion. Pornography incites lust in an obscene or offensive manner, such as in magazines or books that basically exploit women. It’s stroke fiction, to put it bluntly. It’s used by men to go into the bathroom, close the door, look at the pictures or read the text, and jack off, and that’s basically it. Erotica is sexually explicit, and sex does drive the story, but romance and a monogamous relationship are not the focus of these kinds of stories. However, there are emotions involved, and there are no emotions involved in pornography. It’s just simply about lust. Erotica isn’t just about sex, though, but about the protagonist and their journey and the conflicts they face along that journey, and this journey is usually sexual in nature. For example, fulfilling a fantasy by having sex with strangers or having sex in a public place or learning that they enjoy domination and bondage or that they like being spanked, but emotions are involved, and they can be light, or they can be heavy, like involving shame, embarrassment, anger. They generally, however, don’t end in that “happily ever after,” although they can. An example of a wonderful erotica story is Lucinda Story’s latest release through Loose Id called A Refugee, and it’s intensely erotic, but it’s suffused with heavy emotions, and it actually does have a “happily ever after” ending.

WS: That is a really interesting answer. I don’t think I ever really quite understood it that way before, but I think that’s really great.

CG: Okay, great.

WS: That is really great, because it can be just as erotic and not be pornography.

CG: Right, and you can go a step further and classify a difference between erotica and erotic romance, because erotic romance is about the romance first and not about the sex, but the sexual tension is high, and the love scenes are quite explicit and sensual, and the bedroom door is never closed but left wide open, and the reader is invited in. The love scenes are designed around the characters’ growing relationship, not around “Where can we have sex next?” Most of my stories do have an erotic tone with explicit love scenes. However, my books being released in February with Wings e-Press have no love scenes whatsoever, but there is a high degree of sexual tension between my hero and heroine even though there is no sex in the book. The story didn’t call for a love scene, and if I put one in, it would have felt like I just stuck it in there and it didn’t belong there.

WS: Now that’s another interesting idea. I know we’ve all seen shows particularly on TV or in movies and also read in books where you have this long-running sort of sexual tension between a couple of the characters, and what keeps you coming back to the show is that they just never get together.

CG: Exactly.

WS: And it sounds like that’s what you did with this book. Is that right?

CG: Right. There was also a child involved, a secret baby, and I never felt comfortable with… The scenes in the story just didn’t lead to them being alone together to consummate their relationship, because their child was there, and I guess it goes back to my upbringing. I just felt kind of strange. Why would my heroine and hero have sex while their daughter--they are not living together--as she is asleep in the next room? It just felt kind of strange to me, so it didn’t fit for me to put a love scene in that book.

WS: It actually sounds like what you’re saying is obstacles are a great way of building sexual tension.

CG: Absolutely. I mean, you’ve got to have those conflicts there. It goes back to the “want to but can’t because.”

WS: Let’s talk a little bit about the language of sex and eroticism. We’ve all read passages that actually made us laugh because they were so ridiculous, and we’ve also read really steamy stuff that really worked, so I’m wondering what sort of language do you think works, and what language doesn’t work?

CG: I think, again, this comes back to a comfort level for the writer. If you are writing erotica, the language in erotica is very blatant, particularly words for body parts are slang. That’s used a lot. It’s very coarse. It’s in your face, and in fact, a lot of reviewers who review only erotica, even though the book can be very explicit and very steamy, if they don’t use those particular words for, slang words for body parts in the story, it won’t be reviewed. They don’t consider it erotica.

WS: I’m sorry. What?

CG: Yeah, that’s true. Some of them, if you don’t use that slang for particular body parts, a lot of them don’t really consider it erotica, and they don’t want to review it.

WS: Which reviewers are you talking about?

CG: JERR is one. They are an online review site, and you have to use that very strong language in the story, or it’s really not considered erotica. I don’t really understand that, but that’s the way it is.

WS: That’s just really weird.

CG: Yeah. You have to be. It comes down to comfort level. That’s probably one of the reasons why I don’t write erotica. I don’t feel comfortable using that very strong language, so my stories, even though they are quite explicit in my love scenes and very sensual, they have an erotic tone, they aren’t strictly erotica partly for that reason. In erotica, it’s almost anything goes. The more “out there” the love scenes are and the coarser the language…and again, it’s the market. You are writing to the market, and writers who write erotica are thinking about their audience when they write that. That’s what you have to do no matter what genre you’re writing in. You have to keep your audience in mind, who’s going to be reading it.

WS: Who do you think is the audience for what you’re calling erotica?

CG: Oh boy, the range of people who read romance or erotica can probably range from professionals, doctors, lawyers, down to homemakers, soccer moms, the stay-at-home moms, students, college students. I hope that high school students aren’t reading it. They shouldn’t be, but yeah, I think the range is varied, from professional to the homemaker, and it doesn’t reflect who they are as people, and they don’t have to participate in anything that they read, it’s just they read it for enjoyment, and they read it maybe to fulfill a fantasy, to fulfill their own fantasies vicariously. If they read a story where someone is having sex in a public place, maybe that’s one of their fantasies, to have sex in a public place, but that is something they could never bring themselves to do, so it’s fun to read about it, so they can do it vicariously through these characters. That’s what I think.

WS: Do you feel that there is any particular type of language that is ineffective in sex scenes? I know that’s a very subjective question.

CG: I think your language depends really on what you’re writing. If you’re writing pure erotica, then you need to use some strong language. You will be using a lot of slang for body parts, and your love scenes could contain just about anything, from spankings to bondage, domination, you could have whips and handcuffs and all sorts of things in erotica. The door is wide open for that. I do think that a writer needs to be very aware of their word choice in whatever they’re writing to make it as strong and as powerful for the reader as they can.

WS: What would make a sex scene boring? What sort of language or what sort of approach would be just boring to you?

CG: I can give you an example from my book, Wolf Island. It’s not a sex scene per se, but it is a sensual scene, and it’s loaded with a lot of sexual tension. I can read you how it would be written with very ineffective language and then how it was actually written, using effective language.

WS: Ooh, that sounds wonderful.

CG: All right. The first example is ineffective language. It goes like this: “He heard music coming from the kitchen. Devlin smiled. He opened the door and saw Abby dancing. She had taken off her shoes. She wore slacks and a shirt. He remembered her breasts and the time they’d spent up in her bedroom. She pulled her hair up. Devlin walked inside the kitchen, closed the door behind him, crossed his arms over his chest, and watched her.” Now, that’s about as dry as you can get. Now this is how the scene was actually written:

[Reads.]

CG: Big difference, huh?

WS: Oh, my goodness. It couldn’t be more. That is fantastic.

CG: Thank you.

WS: I think I know what you’re doing, but if you could just tell our listeners what you were doing there.

CG: Well, I tried to use the setting, the sound of the music, and put in as much of the five senses as I could. In this case, I think the [most] for Dev was the sound of the music and actually watching Abby dancing there with her eyes closed like a little belly dancer, and then he had this little fantasy about her dressed up like “I Dream of Jeannie.”

But you need to make your scenes as rich as you can. Bring in as much of the setting [as you can]. I like to try to connect my characters’ emotions with the setting and what’s happening instead of just telling the reader what’s happening. You need to try to show them. You’ve probably heard that expression, “Show, don’t tell.” Well, I think this is a good example of showing. The first, the ineffective language, I just told you everything. I told the reader what was happening in a very dry, monotone kind of way, but the way it was actually written, I brought color into it, and it was very vivid for the reader. I think they could really visualize this whole scene in their head.

WS: That was fantastic. Just exquisite.

CG: Oh, thank you.

WS: I’d like to read a little passage from Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence and get your reaction to this. This is a scene with just one person in it. His name is Berkin. I’ll just start in the middle.

[Reads.]

WS: Now, that to me, is very, very sensual.

CG: I agree. It’s wonderful. It’s very erotic, and it doesn’t involve sex at all.

WS: No. What’s he doing there?

CG: He’s almost making love, in a way, to his surroundings or letting it make love to him. It’s very vivid, and it’s just very sensual. Thank you for reading it. It’s wonderful.

WS: He’s wonderful with language and with making you feel very tingly and everything.

CG: Absolutely. I’m a little different when it comes to what I think of as erotic, anyway. I don’t really equate it with sex or heavy petting. I think it can be dialogue and the way a character moves, a casual touch, a smile, a facial expression, a scent or a smell, even food, and in this case, the setting can be a very erotic tool in a scene, and he did that beautifully in the setting. One of my favorite books that I think is erotic and very, very passionate--and it has absolutely no sex in it--is Jane Eyre. That book is filled with passion, and a lot of the scenes with Jane and Edward Rochester are very erotic, and there’s no sex involved at all. It’s all done through dialogue, facial expressions and smiles and so forth.

WS: That’s a lot of “want to but can’t,” though too, isn’t it?

CG: Absolutely. There’s a lot of push and pull in that book. There is a wonderful passage in the book. It’s right before he’s building up to ask Jane to marry him. Of course, she doesn’t know about the wife in the attic yet, but it’s quite wonderful. I’d like to read a couple of paragraphs, if that’s okay?

WS: Sure.

[Reads.]

CG: I think that is just wonderful, and I can just feel the emotion between those two.

WS: Talk a little bit more about what--is it Charlotte or Emily…

CG: Charlotte.

WS: Charlotte is doing there, Charlotte Bronte.

CG: I think she is showing the passion and the emotion and the love between these two people with words, with dialogue. He does draw her to him, but they aren’t having sex. There’s no heavy petting or anything like that. It’s all strictly emotion, and it’s from their hearts. She really lays it out there for the reader. I mean, it just makes me tingle when I read that. To me, that is intensely erotic, and she did it completely through dialogue.

WS: Because of the intensity of the emotion, right?

CG: Exactly. It’s very, very emotional there, and she inserts a little bit about the setting, but when the wind dies, it’s almost like a prelude sort of before the storm. The wind dies, and then there’s this burst of emotion between Jane and Edward Rochester when he asked her to marry him.

WS: Those favorite lines of yours, what was it, “unearthly thing?” Was that the language?

CG: Yes.

WS: Unearthly.

[Reads.]

WS: What is it about that language that gets us so much?

CG: I think it’s he can’t believe that this woman has come into his life and that he is so in love with her and so drawn to her, and she has education, but she doesn’t have anything else to represent her. She has no money, and she’s plain. She’s not pretty at all. She’s a plain woman, and yet he is just fascinated with her, and it’s almost like, “How can I be so fascinated with this plain ordinary woman,” and yet she isn’t ordinary at all.

WS: Do you think there is sort of a vicarious feeling there that we want to be appreciated, even if we feel that we’re plain and we want someone to feel that passionate about us?

CG: Oh, gosh, absolutely. What a wonderful thing if you have no looks at all and then you have this person who thinks you’re the most wonderful thing on the earth, and in his case, an unearthly thing. It’s like you’re not even of this earth. You’re even more special than that. I think that’s definitely, it touches a chord inside of us, this passion that he feels for Jane and her for him. I think that’s what romance is all about. It’s about the emotions and the passion. It’s not about what happens in the bedroom.

WS: And also some sort of living vicariously, I think.

CG: Oh, sure. It’s fun to put yourself in the characters’ shoes and just enjoy being there and live that moment through them. I think that’s part of the reason why we read, not just romance but anything, because we can just escape into that world and have someone like him love us or save the world from destruction or fly off to another galaxy and encounter aliens. We can do that through the pages of a book. What can be more wonderful than that? We don’t have to go anywhere to do it.

WS: You said something about a calm before a storm, I believe it was, in that passage symbolizing their emotions, and that brings up a really interesting concept, which is the use of symbolism in not just erotic and sensual literature but obviously fiction in general. I noticed also in the D. H. Lawrence that he used a lot of terminology that you could use in a sex scene. He was talking about the soft, sharp boughs beating upon him and “keen pangs” and “beat his loins” and things like that. What about double meanings in fiction and the use of symbolism to imply another feeling on another level?

CG: He did it beautifully there, and I think that Charlotte Bronte did it beautifully here when she put in just a little bit of the setting and the atmosphere before this intense dialogue between Rochester and Jane. It makes me wonder at the time she wrote this, did she really intentionally consciously do that? Because sometimes as writers, we have happy accidents. When you go back and read what you’ve written and you start to edit, you think, “Oh, gee, I can really use this to tie in and build more of my characters’ emotions, make them a little bit more vivid instead of just describing a setting. I can really use it to my advantage.” I don’t know that all writers, that we consciously… I know that a lot of times I don’t, it’s just I have happy accidents when I go back and then you read what you’ve written, and you go, “I can really use this to my advantage.”

Now, with D. H. Lawrence and that whole scene, it makes me think he probably did consciously do that before he wrote it. He was thinking in terms of making it very sensual. He used that setting in the primroses and then the boughs beating him on the thighs. He made it a very sensual thing, and he probably consciously did that. I know I don’t. When I am writing a first draft, I don’t always do that. I get it down as quickly as I can when I’m writing, and then when I go back to edit, that’s when the fun starts, when you can really take those scenes and enrich them more, but that comes in the editing. So it’s hard to say. I don’t know if he consciously did that. That’s what I got out of it. Now, he may have gotten something else out of it, and another reader may get again something else totally different out of it. Each reader will respond in a different way.

WS: Now that we’re talking about how the sex scenes and the sensual scenes not even involving sex grow out of the characters and their conflicts and their psychology and their settings and all that, I’m thinking that maybe I was talking more about pornography than I was about fiction, I don’t know. But what can you tell us about the pacing of erotic scenes both within a scene and within the book as a whole? I don’t know, is that still a valid question?

CG: I think so. In erotica, even though it’s mostly sex that drives the story, I think that the key to great pacing no matter what the genre that you’re writing, if it’s not pornography, there’s going to be some level of emotion, even in erotica or erotic romance or mysteries or thrillers or sci-fi or whatever the genre is. I think the key to the right pacing is the emotional component. In romance, you’re building the sexual tension until it’s almost to the breaking point, and then you put in a love scene, but even after the love scene, the sexual tension between the characters begins to build up all over again because they have an even more heightened awareness of each other. Every kiss and caress they’ve shared, every moment of their love-making is a brilliant memory in their minds, so any scene or scenes within a book, no matter what it is, I think moves faster if there is something emotionally important to the characters that’s happening in the scene.

And again, I think this is true for any genre. You can read a romance by Nora Roberts, and then you can turn around and read something by Nelson DeMille, or you could read a Stephen King or a John Grisham. You can read a Dean Koontz. And even there, his books--Dean Koontz’s--he has a new one out called The Husband. There is a definite emotional component all through that book, and the pacing is rapid. It goes very, very fast because he has taken what’s happening to these characters and put an emotional component in there in all of the scenes, so it really flies, and I think that’s the key. No matter what the genre you’re writing in, you have to put the emotional component in the scene to make it fly. That picks up your pacing. It’s not about racing through and having lots of action, action, action. It’s about putting the emotions in with whatever’s happening to make those scenes move.

WS: Do you think that contemporary literature moves faster than, say, early 20th century or previous? Are our attention spans getting shorter?

CG: Oh, I definitely think so. The pacing is much faster. Even in the classic books that are just… they are still wonderful, like Jane Eyre here, anything by Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, Emma, the pacing is slow in that they had a tendency to put in a lot of back story in those books, and in today’s market, it doesn’t work. You have to begin a book in medias res, which is Latin for “in the middle of.” You jump into the middle of what’s happening to begin your story, and then as you go through, even though your back story of the characters is important, you have to drizzle that in a little bit at a time. I think that’s where a lot of the emotional component comes from because you can build your scenes and put in hints about their back story in these scenes and build the emotions with what’s happening.

WS: And yet, even though we’re faster paced in a way, some of the books that are coming out now are still very long.

CG: I agree. Diana Gabaldon is a good example. Her books are what, a thousand pages or something? They are huge. She puts really two or three books in one book. You’re getting three stories for the price of one. Her books are heavy with back story, they’re heavy with description, and yet they still sell, and it’s hard to say why. It’s just I think that her ability to build characters and to tell a great story are why she sells.

But with a new writer starting out, you really have to look at pacing. Maybe after you’ve had a few books out, if you want to do something different and slow down or add more back story, maybe the publisher will let you do that, but as a rule, you really can’t when you’re first starting out. So it’s hard to say. Maybe some of it does have to do with the genre that you are writing in. That may dictate a little bit of what the pacing is going to be for your story. You certainly can’t have slow pacing if you’re writing a thriller or suspense. You have to have things happening. It has to be intense from the get-go. All the way through, you want to hook that reader and yank them to the end, but if you’re writing a historical [novel], something that doesn’t have suspense, you might be able to get away with some of that, but it takes a delicate hand, and you have to really be well-read and to see how other writers have handled it and then just take your chances and see what your response will be from a publisher. It all depends on getting your work on the right editor’s desk at the right time. So much of this business is just luck and timing. And really what it boils down to, an editor said to me once, Paula Eickelhoff at Harlequin, she said, “No matter what, a good story is a good story is a good story is a good story.” That’s really what it boils down to. Are you telling a good story? If you are, they don’t care how you’ve told it. If it’s good, if they can’t put it down, they’re not going to care if maybe your pacing is a little slow in the beginning. If it’s a good story, who cares? That’s my opinion.

WS: That’s interesting, but I think what you said before about beginning writers versus more established writers, I find that really an interesting thought.

CG: It’s very, very, very difficult to get published. It’s hard to get an editor to look at you. Their slush piles are so high. It’s hard to get an agent to look at you, to be interested in you. It’s a tough, tough market. Maybe twenty-five years ago, I think it was a bit softer. It was easier to get published, but now, there are so many writers, and publishers have so much work coming over the transom and coming from agents that your work really, really has to shine and to be exactly what they’re looking for at that moment for you to be able to get in there.

It took me eighteen years to get in there. I started writing in 1987, and I was actually considering hanging up my keyboard before someone encouraged me to contact an electronic publisher, and I did, and I’m very glad I did. It was one of the best moves I ever made, but it’s hard, and it’s definitely not for sissies. If you want it, you have to be persistent, you have to have what Nora Roberts calls the three D’s. You have to have drive, determination, and desire, and if you have those three things, you can keep going, but it’s just a really tough market, and I think things are also cyclical in publishing, so what they may not want now, a few years, a couple of years later, they may want it then. Things just cycle back. It’s just like fashion. People are wearing bell bottoms again, for God’s sake. That’s just frightening to me. Bell bottoms? Please. That’s scary. So you just have to keep trying, and if you’ve written a great story, they are going to publish it. No matter how you’ve written it, they’re going to publish it if it’s a great story.

WS: I’m very intrigued by your saying it took you eighteen years. What happened? Did you submit a lot during that time, or were you just writing, or….?

CG: When I first started, I had no idea that RWA existed. I had no idea that there were other writers out there, members of organizations for writers. I had no idea those existed. I had no contact with any other writers at all. I knew nobody who wrote anything, so everything I learned for those first several years, I had to do it on my own. I had my daughter at that time, and I was raising her and trying to learn how to write at the same time, so it was very difficult, and then suddenly, I can’t remember how I found out, but I discovered that there was a Colorado Romance Writers, and I discovered that Romance Writers of America existed, which I didn’t know up until that point, and then the Internet became very hot, and everybody was online, and so I got online, and then this whole world opened up. You could take online classes. I went to workshops. I attended conferences, and I wrote, and I entered contests, and I tried to get feedback. In the beginning, I didn’t know any other writers, and that was the only way I could get feedback. I went and entered these contests, and I was able to get feedback that way. I didn’t know anything about critique groups. I knew nothing about writing when I sat down and wrote that first book, and most of what I learned, I learned it on my own, and that learning curve was brutal. Most days, it was like trying to push Jell-O up a vertical drop with my pinkie. It was brutal. I had no mentor. I had no one to show me, to explain to me what I was doing wrong, so it took me a while, and it takes me doing something at least three times or reading something three times before I actually get it, and with writing, it was even worse. I just had to keep doing it over and over and over again.

The final push, though, came when I just spent an entire year doing nothing but taking classes on building characters, and I took one class after the other, and I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I just had to keep doing it over and over and over again until I finally got it right, and it’s hard. It’s a tough business. It’s a really hard thing, and if you want to sell your work, and if you’re writing commercial fiction, it’s difficult. It’s really, really, really hard, and like I said, I’m almost embarrassed to say it took me eighteen years, because for most people, that’s a career. They’re getting their lifetime achievement award or whatever at RWA for writing and publishing for twenty years. Well, it took me eighteen to even get there. I don’t know really what kept me going except that I love to write, and I can’t stand to quit at anything. I will keep doing it if it kills me. I’m going to keep doing it until I’ve done it. I just hate to quit, so I couldn’t stand it, and I think that’s why I finally…I resisted submitting to e-publishers because I wanted to be in print right off the bat, but it didn’t work out that way for me. A writer friend of mine told me once that every writer has a different journey, and that is true. Some people can write for a couple of years and get published. Some people can write one book and put it out there and get it published--that’s pretty rare. Other people it takes longer, and I was just one of those that it took a long time. But when you’re learning something on your own and raising a family and everything at the same time, it took longer for me.

WS: By the way, RWA is the Romance Writers of America. You’ve got several books coming out now at the same time.

CG: Right. I have my new romantic suspense with a paranormal touch. It’s called The Dove. It’s being released in November from Loose Id. My heroine is an assistant district attorney, and my hero is a police detective. It involves an ancient amulet that has a curse on it, and death has followed this amulet through the centuries. My hero and heroine’s mission is they have to get this amulet, which has been stolen, and they have to return it to its resting place at a monastery in Scotland. I took an idea from a saint, St. Columba. There was a legend about him using a white healing stone to cure a Pictish king of a terrible illness, and I took that idea and came up with the story. I found some information about him on the Internet, and as it turned out, another happy accident was that he was known as the Dove, and I had already titled my book, and then I thought, “Gosh, I have to use that,” I mean, that he was known as the Dove, and the name of my book is The Dove. How happy could that be? If you’d like me to read a little bit, I could read you a little pre-unedited scene from the book.

WS: Yes, I would love that.

CG: My hero and heroine have just had dinner, and he has a green thumb. He has a greenhouse in his back yard, and he is taking her out there to show her the greenhouse.

[Reads.]

WS: Wow. You have got so much going on in there. Not only have you drawn us in with the emotion and the sensuality of it, but you’ve got so much about the characters and so much about what’s going to happen or foreshadowing about their quests they’re on and set up the obstacles. That’s just wonderful.

CG: Thank you. This was a fun book to write.

WS: I’ll bet. You didn’t say that was unedited, did you?

CG: It is unedited.

WS: That’s unedited. I thought this was the one that was coming out in February.

CG: Well, it’s coming out in November, and we are supposed to start edits on it this week, and I haven’t received them yet from my editor, but it will be out in November.

WS: For the sake of our listeners, we’re recording this in early September, and you’re saying the book’s going to be out in two months, two and a half months, and you haven’t done your edits yet.

CG: It’ll be out in November, and we should start edits this week. I am very, very quick with edits. I do my edits really well, and I do them fast, so I’m not at all worried about the edits. We generally do the broad ones first and then the little ones later, and I do those really fast, so I have September, October, almost to the end of November, because it’ll be out right before Thanksgiving or the week of Thanksgiving.

WS: Oh, did you say this was an e-book?

CG: Yes.

WS: Oh, no wonder. Okay. I’m sorry. I was thinking it takes six weeks to print and has to get in the stores and…

CG: Oh, I’m sorry. No, this is through Loose Id, an electronic publisher, so it’s not a problem doing edits on those. If this were a print book and we were just starting edits now, the print date, the release date probably wouldn’t be until, I don’t know, next year sometime, because it takes a lot longer. Yes.

WS: But that’s just fabulous, Cher.

CG: Oh, thank you.

WS: Very compelling.

CG: I actually have two heroes and heroines in this book, so it was kind of interesting trying to balance that throughout the story, because her brother has, there is a love interest for him as well. I kept worrying about how am I going to balance these two couples throughout this book, and then all of a sudden I found myself at the end, and I was like, “Oh, okay. I guess I did it right.”

WS: That’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s an A plot and a B plot, but it’s interesting. If you focus on several characters and you want to get some sensual feelings going there, then you have even more possibilities.

CG: Yes, I had a lot of possibilities with both these couples, and I used some very interesting settings for love scenes. One of them was in the botanical gardens here in Denver between Hope and Nick. They had their first love scene in the botanical gardens at night in the top of a model of a banyan tree, and I did fulfill a fantasy, I guess, for some readers in that they had sex in a public place, just a few feet away from a whole crowd of people. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I had two couples, and it’s interesting. Even though both couples may be having sex, how two different couples make love and their whole emotional responses in the scenes are different because you’ve got four different people there. So it was interesting to make that work.

WS: Is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you’d like to talk about?

CG: Just one thing I want to add to all of this, and that is that there’s really no right way or wrong way for anyone to write no matter what the genre is. It’s just simply your way of writing, using your unique voice depending on the market, what you’re targeting, but really, all the mystery writers have different voices, all the romance writers have different voices and different styles, even though they are writing under a particular genre. Everybody’s voice is unique, and your voice is all that you have. You can work on style, you can work on your craft, you can mold that, but when it comes down to voice, that’s something very unique, and we all have to, you just have to remember to protect that, and you don’t want to try to change your voice, because that’s really all that a writer has that’s their own.

WS: That’s good advice. I know sometimes when I write, I get frustrated that I don’t sound like this writer or that writer or another writer. I sound like me again.

CG: Yeah, you have to sound like you, and we all have a different, unique voice, and it just comes from who we are, and you just have to nurture that and protect it as much as you can, and don’t ever let anybody try to change it.

WS: You have a Web site, which has some very interesting things on it that I want to ask you about in another show.

CG: Okay.

WS: Well, some of which I want to ask you about in another show having to do with building character, and that is….

CG: www.chergorman.com. My character book, Ten Steps to Creating Memorable Characters, will be published in November. I don’t have an exact date yet. The Dove, the excerpt which I just read, will be out in November, I believe the week of Thanksgiving. Then I have an erotic Christmas story called Sheriff in Her Stocking, which is sort of a Doc Hollywood meets the Andy Griffith Show, which will be released by Loose Id, e-publisher, in December, and the only thing I have slated at the moment for 2007 is my book with Wings e-Press called The Secret Truth at Dare Ranch, which will be released in February.

WS: My goodness. That sounds like a lot to me.

CG: It is a lot, and I feel like I’ve been a slacker because I don’t have anything but one book for next year, so I’m hoping to get at least one more book written before the end of the year, so I’ll have something else for 2007.

WS: Well, you don’t sound like a slacker to me.

CG: I’m always pushing myself, I guess, trying to just push myself a little bit harder and see how far I can go and exactly what I can do. But it’s been great being on the show, and thank you very, very much for having me. It’s been wonderful.

WS: Oh, thank you so much for being with us today, Cher. It has just been fascinating, and I just know our listeners are going to have a lot of things to say.

© Paula Hollywood, Inc. 2008