I “met” Harlequin Intrigue author Elle James in the normal way…I read one of her books, ALASKAN FANTASY, was blown away by it, so decided to write to her and tell her how much I love, love, loved her book. We emailed back and forth and she’s truly a generous and interesting woman…and a fantastic writer. Me and the Plotmonkeys are THRILLED to have her here today. Thanks so much, Elle, for sharing your knowledge with us!
At home in Northwest Arkansas, Elle is busy writing tales of murder and suspense for Harlequin Intrigue. Her first Harlequin, BENEATH THE TEXAS MOON, was released in March 2006 and was a Romantic Times Top Pick for the month! She had three Intrigues out in 2006 and 2007 and she has three more lined up for 2008. Stay tuned for more from Elle James!
Please give her a warm jungle welcome and check out her dead-on (and very funny) advice!
Ten Things I’d Wished I’d Known When I started Writing
When you’re a beginning writer you have soooo much to learn about the writing, markets, agents, editors and…well, the list goes on. If I had to choose from my top ten I wished I’d known when I started, I’m going to go with the list below. Granted, if you’d asked me two years ago, or ask me two years from now, I’d probably come up with a different list altogether. You’re a victim…er…product of your current circumstances.
Deep breath…breathe in…breathe out. Here goes (jumps in, holding her breath).
1. That is a four-letter word! If I had a dollar for every that in my beginning manuscripts, I’d have made more money than I did from my first advance! No, make it from my first book! Yes, Virginia, that killed Santa Claus and that had to die! You mean if I eliminated 99% of my that’s the meaning of the sentence is still clear? Let’s try it…
Myla knew that the car wouldn’t start, but she had to try anyway.
Myla knew the car wouldn’t start, but she had to try anyway.
Saints preserve us! It’s true! If only I’d known that I didn’t have to use all those thats in my sentences, I might have scored better on my contests, I might have appeared more intelligent to the editors to whom I’d submitted. Egads! How embarrassing, like having your skirt tucked up in your panties as you exit the ladies room!
2. POV does not mean personally owned vehicle. Although, by the time I got the hang of point of view, I could have driven my personally owned vehicle over a cliff (with me inside) and been quite happy with the results! If only I’d known Point of View is like being the movie camera in a particular character’s head. Only the things the character can see, feel, touch, smell, hear, and think can be recorded on the movie camera. The character cannot read another character’s mind, or know what the other character is doing if he has his back to him. If only I’d known!!!
3. Wabop is not the latest dance craze. It’s a catchy word and could be the next Electric Slide, but that’s (there’s that word again. Oops and again!) not how my contest critiques defined it. Who knew Wabop meant wandering body parts? I sure didn’t. One of my favorites is:
His eyes dropped to her shoes.
OMG! If a man’s eyes dropped to my shoes, I’d scream and run for a telephone to call an ambulance. Can they reattach eyes? Can you say ewww?
4. -ing leaves a bad ring when you’re making your characters do things that are physically impossible. Yeah, like that was clear as mud. Maybe the example will make it better:
Running through the streets, she stopped to peer into the store window.
(Is it possible to run and stop at the same time?)
She ran through the streets and then stopped to peer into the store window.
(Notice how this is more sequential. She has to stop one action to perform the next, thus not performing them simultaneously.)
5. -ly gets irritating like a rash that spreads throughout your manuscript. If I’d only known that -ly was a symptom of the deadly boring verb. The adverb is trying to resuscitate the verb! God golly, give the sentence a better verb! Can you see the muscles bulging in the verb used in the second sentence?
wimpy verb: Jack quickly ran to his car.
MIGHTY VERB: Jack raced to his car.
6. Start writing your book at chapter three. Huh? WTF! (What the fool, for those who would think I used the F-bomb. I didn’t) Start a book in chapter three? What about all that great backstory in chapter’s one and two that you have to know before you understand why Jill decided to go for the gold? Doesn’t everyone want to read through pages of history about your characters? I like to think of the backstory dumps as the cure for insomnia. I read them to go to sleep at night, don’t you?
7. Torture is good. I wanted my characters to fall in love at first sight. I wanted them to be happy. Face it, I’m a mediator, I want everyone to get along. Isn’t that how life is? Everyone should get along and everyone will be happy, right? Wrong! If your characters aren’t suffering, we’re back to the insomnia cure. If everything is hunky-dory, why read the rest? If your hero and heroine aren’t finding reasons to hate each other, they’ll get together at the beginning and you won’t have a book. If you can solve the murder in the first chapter, why read to the end? If someone isn’t jumping out and trying to kill your main characters while they struggle to find the answers, while fighting their attraction to each other, you might as well go to bed and sleep! It’s hard, but someone has to be the bad guy. Let it be the writer, churning out pages of conflicts for her characters to overcome. Get tough! Get mean! Play dirty!
8. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Okay, so this one can hurt. I thought that if I wrote a book, I’d submit, and some insightful editor would love it as much as I did. It’s my baby after all, and isn’t my baby beautiful? Not everyone is going to love your baby as much as you do. Don’t take it personally, just take it and move on. What one editor might hate, another will fall in love with. Think of all the editors who turned down J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter? Don’t you know they’re kicking themselves now?
9. Right place, right time is just as important as a good book! So my first book didn’t sell. I wrote another. Did it sell? Uh…no. Book three? Nope. Gulp. Book Four? Uh-uh. Not until book seven! Holy smokes! If you’d told me I had to write seven books before I’d sell, okay, maybe that’s something I’m glad I didn’t know when I started writing. I know authors who’ve written a lot more than seven books and still haven’t sold. It doesn’t stop them! They love each and every one of their babies. And just because they didn’t sell, doesn’t mean they’re bad. They may be well-written works of art. Luck has a lot to do with selling. Your book has to hit the editor’s desk when she is looking for a book just like yours. She might love your, but she also might have just bought one similar yesterday and doesn’t have room for it in her list. Love your babies, submit them and when you’ve exhausted the possibilities, stick it under your bed and wait. Some day you might land that contract with another book and the editor might ask you “what else do you have?” Don’t toss the baby out with the dishwater!
10. Never give up! Never surrender! I wish I’d known from the start that getting published never gets easier. Just because you sell your first book doesn’t mean you’ll sell the next one or the next one. If you get a bad cover the buyer for the book distributors hates, she won’t buy your book for all the chain stores. That’s disaster for your sell-through. Editors look at your sell through. If your book tanks, it’s not because it had a bad cover, it’s obviously because people hated your book. Never mind, it never made it to a major portion of the market. You might find yourself in a worse situation than never having sold in the first place, having a bad sales record. So, what do you do? In the words of the fabulous moving Galaxy Quest, Never give up! Never surrender! Park your butt in the chair and start your next book and repeat the writer’s mantra until it sticks:
WRITE, REVISE, SUBMIT
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Thanks, Elle, for that wonderful advice! I wish I’d had it before I started writing. And I still struggle with that. It’s one of those words I simply have to cut, cut, cut during revision.
Plotmonkey readers: check out Elle’s latest Intrigue release, UNDER SUSPICION, WITH CHILD by clicking this link to Amazon! And new copies of ALASKAN FANTASY are still available!
Carly Phillips would like to take 100% credit for all her stories but the truth is, Carly’s strength is writing family, emotion, funky elderly people and animals. She couldn’t plot her way out of a paper bag, which is why she smartly found her plotmonkey pals early on in her writing career. Thanks to their support, Carly is now a NYT Bestselling author of 23 plus novels. Because writing doesn’t keep her busy enough, Carly is also a wife, a mother of one preteen and one teenage daughter, the primary care giver of her soft coated Wheaten terrier and an expert carpool mom.
Destiny
Dirty Little Secrets
Once Upon A Valentine
Through The Night
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Thanks Elle I love reading advice from published authors I have so much to learn. That I look forward to Saturdays to see who is in the jungle to share their expertise then I go back and read what I’ve written and want to change everything I guess that is why I can’t get it done lol :monkee2:
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What a wonderful list!!!!! I’m in the middle of revising my first novella right now and I was so proud that I had known “that” was a bad word and cut them out before I submitted. Didn’t matter….my editor has her own list of dirty words and “that” isn’t one of them. “So” and “just” are on her list and I had 87 “so”s in my 30,000 word story!
It seemed like every line of dialogue for my heroine started with “so.” 
And WABOP…I knew that too. Didn’t matter…I still had eyes dropping.
I know I’ll never learn it all. But some days it seems like there’s more being added to the list of things to learn, than I’m marking off!
Thank you so much for being here and sharing this information with us! I’m off to post the link to my critique group and on my RWA Online chapters forum so others can come over and check it out too.
Hope it’s a great Sat. for everyone!!
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Thanks for dropping by today, Elle. What terrific advice! The bane of my existence is passive verbs.
First draft: “He had to try very hard to ignore the fact that only a cotton robe separated her bare skin from his touch.” *cringe* (And I used the ubiquitous “that”, too!) I always feel like such a
after the first draft.
Many drafts later: “Only a cotton robe separated her bare skin from his touch. He ignored that fact. Almost.” Yes. I used “that” again, but I would argue the sentence needed the extra emphasis.
Thanks for dropping by, Elle. I’ve added your books to my TBR list.
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8O I am still imagining eyes dropping.
Great list.
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Welcome to the jungle, Ms. James! Thank you for stopping by and for the great writing advice. I wish I had known about this “list” when I started writing 21 years ago. Egad! I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and heartache not to mention the brutal learning curve I had to traverse because in the beginning I didn’t even know that RWA existed. I didn’t know any other writers either. I thought I was alone in my pursuits. Some days it was like trying to push jello up a vertical, rocky cliff with my pinkie!
Have a terrific day all,
Cher
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Welcome to the jungle, Elle! You gave me a couple of good chuckles this morning — I love your sense of humor!
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Welcome, Elle! I hope you like it here in the jungle!
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Great post! I love your sense of humor.
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Welcome Elle. I really needed this post today. My critique partner highlights my “that”s for me and I usually laugh my butt off at the glow from my screen.
Thanks for the advise and I have the words “Write, Revise, Submit” posted on my desk. If I only sat at it more often I would be in business. LOL
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Thanks for having me here at Plot Monkeys. When I started writing, I didn’t have the luxury of a place to come for advice. I learned through the school of hard knocks and a stint on the contest circuit! It’s a brutal world out there. LOL. But I love writing and I’m glad I’m still around doing it! Hope my words helped someone avoid some pitfalls. Thanks to the lovely hostess Julie and for her kind words about Alaskan Fantasy. Makes me feel warm all over!
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Hi everyone…I just wanted to pipe and say how much enjoyed today’s blog…it is very helpful for all genres of writing…something to definitely think about…this one is a keeper for me…
Elle, thank you for swinging by and sharing your wisdom with us here in the jungle…your blog was very entertaining while informative…I also have difficulty using “that” all the time…and thank you so much for explaining WABOP…I never would have figured that one out…
I hope that everyone is having a wonderful Saturday evening…it is Sunday morning now, and I have to think of some things to do since I am free…sleep well everyone, and I will see you on my next romp in the jungle…
Peace and love,
Paula R.
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Thanks for visiting the Jungle today, Elle, and sharing good information
with us.
My thanks to the Plotmonkeys for the birthday ecard. I loved it!
Pat Cochran