Plot Monkeys

I am so excited to have Sherry Thomas here at Plotmonkeys today. Her book, PRIVATE ARRANGEMENTS, was one of my favorites for the year. It’s amazing on so many levels…great plot, amazing characterization, unusual and unique storytelling technique, underused time period, super sexy…I can’t say enough good things about the book. And for me, it all started with a book trailer.

I saw this and figured an author with that great of a sense of humor was someone I wanted to read. So I did and I wasn’t disappointed! Now, her new book, DELICIOUS, is on my TBR pile (having just arrived from Amazon!) and I can’t wait to dig in!

I also couldn’t wait to share my love for this new and amazing author with the readers of Plotmonkeys. So many of us cut our reader teeth on historical romances, it’s fabulous to have such a fresh voice in the genre with us today! Without further ado…

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Beyond Boobs and Buttocks

First I would like to thank Julie Leto for her lovely invitation to guest blog here at Plot Monkeys. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that she told me it is a craft topic—I get bored talking about myself and I don’t know enough about publishing to give anyone a whole column of advice. But writing? Bring it on.

For the longest time, the topic I had in mind was Chemistry. It is one of the most important ingredients in a successful romance, and one that is seldom addressed. And then I realized, of course, why it doesn’t come up very often in craft topics, because trying to teach romantic chemistry is like trying to teach someone how to live a rich, fulfilling life: the topic is so vast and cmplex that I either have to devote my entire life to it or I’m reduced to meaningless slogans like “Beyond Boobs and Buttocks!”

So I decided to whittle down the scope of my post to physical desirability, or rather, the successful portrayal of it. In a romance, the lead characters are generally reasonably attractive people. Therefore, their physical desirability has less to do with their looks—most heroes are handsome and fit—than what else they bring to the table. For example, Brad Pitt is often cited as the western male ideal. Is Brad Pitt really that beautiful? I think there are other actors in Hollywood who are equally if not more gorgeous. But very few exude the kind of charm and sexual charisma that buttress Brad’s physical allure.

How does a writer make her hero or heroine stand out in a sea of dazzling good looks?

Here’s an example from Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Match Me If You Can on a hero whose nickname is The Python:

The Python’s office was the color of money: lacquered jade walls, thick moss carpet, and furniture upholstered in varying shades of green accented with bloodred pillows.

Color of money? It was at that point that I knew the book was going to be awesome. Now I couldn’t wait to meet him.

The Python turned slowly in his chair, and Annabelle felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach.

He was square-jawed and tough, everything about him proclaiming a brash, self-made man—a roughneck who’d flunked charm school the first couple of times around but had finally gotten it right on the third pass. His hair was thick and crisp, its rich color a cross between a leather portfolio and a bottle of Bud. He had a straight, confident nose and bold dark brows, one of which was bisected near the end with a thin pale scar. The firm set of his well-molded mouth proclaimed a low tolerance for fools, a passion for hard work that bordered on obsession, and possbily—although this might be her imagination—a determination to own a small chalet near St. Tropez before he was fifty. If it weren’t for a vague irregularity to his features, he would have been unbearably gorgeous. Instead, he was merely drop-dead good-looking. What did a man like this need with a matchmaker?

As he spoke into the phone, he turned his eyes on her. They were the exact green of a hundred-dollar bill singed at the edges with displeasure.

Gorgeous? Sure. But much more than that was the alpha-ness of this man, his worldly success, his ruthlessness and still-unappeased ambition. I’m convinced that the Python is one of the most vivid characters Susan Elizabeth Phillips ever created, in a body of work that is densely populated with extraordinarily vivid characters.

My personal reaction? I am torn between a pressing need to run away screaming from the Python and an equally great urge to be devoured whole by him.

Because SEP is such a master—I really should rush to Chicago to abase myself at her strappy-sandaled feet—our next example also comes from her, from Breathing Room, her Tuscany-set romance between a very good girl and an exceptionally bad boy.

…so she studied the statues on the other side of the piazza, copies of The Rape of the Sabines, Cellini’s Perseus, Michaelangelo’s David. Then her eyes settled on the most amazing man she’d ever seen….

He sat three tables away, a portrait of Italian decadence in a rumpled black silk shirt with dark stubble on his jaw, long hair and La Dolce Vita eyes. Two elegantly tapered fingers curled around the stem of the wineglass that dangled indolently from his hand. He looked rich, spoiled, bored—Marcello Mastroianni stripped of his clown face and chiseled into perfect male beauty for an avaricious new millennium.

In three sentences, SEP has given us a man who emanates sex, sin, and danger from every pore. This time I don’t even have the sense to want to run away. I go at him in a kamikaze craze, whimper “Corrupt me. God, please corrupt me” as I rip into that rumpled black silk shirt.

Now from 21st century to the 14th century. Here’s a little physical description from Laura Kinsale’s For My Lady’s Heart,

She felt herself strangely daunted by him, overpowered by his greater size, the black line of his legs, the heavy square links of the belt that hung at his hips. He wore it as if it had no weight at all, though each joint, ornate and thick, studded with the silvery sable of marcasite crystals, would have balanced a cobblestone on the measuring scale. But in his velvet he moved effortlessly.

This passage does not come at the beginning of the book, but quite late in it. The hero has been established as a thoroughly good, trustworthy, wonderful knight. But until this point, I don’t really think of him as sexy. The belt, however, clinches it for me, that heavy, square, masculine belt. (It is the details, always the details that do the trick, particularly if it is an unexpected detail.) Can you imagine the magnificent physique it takes to wear such a tremendous belt? I can and someone please pour a bucket of cold water on me.

Heroes can be simply presented in their glory, and when done well, readers of romance, largely female, largely heterosexual, will respond. With heroines it is slightly different. At least for me it is different. I need to see the heroine from the hero’s eyes, to see why this one particular woman is so special, to a vastly desirable man who is often jaded, and who has sometimes slept with legions of beautiful women without ever committing himself. In other words, I need an emotional response, something from deep inside him, from places that he himself does not care to frequent, for whatever reasons.

Our next example come from one of the most celebrated romances of our time, Loretta Chases Lord of Scoundrels. What makes LOS so wonderful is the continual destablization of our black-hearted hero by every encounter with the heroine, starting from the very beginning.

She looked up.

And a swift, fierce heat swept Lord Dain from the crown of his head to the toes in his champagne-buffed boots. The heat was immediately succeeded by a cold sweat.

“My lord,” she said with a curt nod.

“Miss Trent,” he said. Then he could not for the life of him produce another syllable.

…

For one deranged instant, while he contemplated licking her from the top of her alabaster brow to the tips of her dainty toes, he wondered what her price was.

But out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed his reflection in the glass.

His dark face was harsh and hard, the face of Beelzebub himself. In Dain’s case, the book could be judged accurately by the cover, for he was dark and hard inside as well. His was a Dartmoor soul, where the wind blew fierce and the rain beat down upon grim, gry rocks, and where the pretty green patches of ground turned out to be mires that could suck down an ox.

What’s in the ellipses? Three paragraph of more or less what she looked like. Why did I not put it in? Because I could care less–her hair could be another color, her eyes and nose and mouth shaped differently altogether. What interests me is his reaction, that his thoughts immediately turned to his own beastliness. He is alarmed, uncomfortable, and, in a way, enraged. Now we are talking.

Because I’m a major Laura Kinsale fangirl, she too supplies a second example of a deep emotional response on the hero’s part to the heroine’s physical desirability.

Already he walked the public streets in a mist, halfway between reality and fantasies of her. He was aroused by nothing more than the neat, straight line of her back, from her demure collar down to the curve of her hip. Knowning the real contour beneath the gathered abundance of fabric and padding stimulated him; a trace of shared scent or the sight of the tiny, tender wisps of hair at the nape of her neck when she bent her head over some glass-topped counter were electrifying.

And the sleep, heavy and dreamless, that overcame him after he had her; it scared him. In its own way, it carried more power and attraction than the act itself. To hold her close and drift into limbo while she talked in that gently animated voice of what they’d bought and seen that day—talked, for God’s sake; when the lethargy took hold of him like a blanket of dusky cotton unrolling, and he could not answer, nor help himself; utterly lax, wholly vulnerable and happy—he felt it must be someone else who lay there. It could not be himself.

Sigh. Sigh again. I just melt when a man loves a woman so madly, so much that it scares him. Do I believe he finds her to be the most beautiful creature alive? You bet I do.

I wanted to round out this post with an example from the great Judith Ivory’s Beast, one of the most ravishing books I’ve ever read. But alas, as I looked around my bookshelves, I realized that I’d loaned my copy to a friend.

So with a good deal of trepidation, because I’m not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as these other authors, I offer up an example from my own book,
Delicious. It is, in its way, a curious example, because it takes my point—that one does not need to give into elaborate description of the heroine’s looks to convey her desirability to the hero–to something of an extreme.

Chocolate. He’d never had chocolate before he came to live at Fairleigh Park, but
when he was seven someone had given him a shred of paper that had once been wrapped
around a piece of imported chocolate. He’d pressed the wrapper to his nose and inhaled
as deeply as his lungs allowed, dreaming of chocolate enough to bury him.

Her custard smelled like that, a good smell made mythical by fervid imagination
and true hunger. Suddenly he was famished again. He wolfed down the whole content
of the ramekin in seconds, barely tasting anything as he ate.

Only as he slumped back into his chair did the residual flavors ambush his senses.
For a moment the inside of his mouth tingled and luxuriated, a burst of glory. But the
sensation faded just as quickly, leaving in its wake only the same obstinate, inexplicable
craving.

A craving that was not limited to chocolate custard. He saw himself invading
Mme. Durant’s kitchen and trapping her in a dark corner of her domain. He imagined her
wordless consent, the urgency of her ungentle grip on his arms.

She would be thin and frail, with the heartbreaking strength of those too long
accustomed to hard work. He’d cup her face between his hands and kiss her. She’d taste
of whiskey freshly consumed, hot and pure. And all about them would billow the scent
of high summer, strawberries ripened to the seduction of juicy red lips—

He came out of his chair. He was thinking of her again, when he’d already
decided, most firmly, not to think of her anymore. A man could not set his life by the
eclipses of the sun.

At least, try as he had, he could not.

That her is a young woman the hero had met briefly years ago and loved ever since. Little does he know that she and the notorious cook he’d just inherited are one and the same. But he is going to be—oh, is he ever going to be—thinking rather obsessively of the cook from this point on.

Craft posts are dangerous. Because they are very much one person’s definition of good writing and how to achieve good writing. You the writer should feel absolutely free to discard any and all advice, no matter how well-meaning, that does not suit you and your story. And there is no need for you to ever read authors you don’t enjoy just to see if you could learn from their writing—you won’t.

That said, I think the books I’ve quoted here today (with the exception of mine, bien sur) are shining examples of everything a romance can be—terrific prose, beautiful characterization, killer emotional intensity—and I highly encourage everyone to study them at length.

Thank you again to Julie for inviting me and thank you everyone for taking time out on your weekend to read this @#$%ing long post!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Julie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.