The Long and Short of Writing Novellas(And Book Giveaway)

Margaret Brownley

by Margaret Brownley

 

My husband is a bottom line kind of guy. Whenever my daughter came home from a date he would ask if she had a good time.  That's it. That's all he wanted to know.  Not me. I wanted all the juicy details.  Everything.

So writing long historical novels was right up my alley. Eighty-five thousand words?  No problem.  A twenty-thousand word novella?  Now that was a horse of a different color.

So how does a long-winded writer learn to write short?  I'm embarrassed to admit this, but when I wrote my first novella I actually wrote something like fifty thousand words and then cut like crazy.  Now I know better, but novellas still pose a challenge.  Skimp on story or characterization and readers will feel cheated.

 

Why Short is the New Long

 

There are many advantages to writing short. E-publishing has made novellas popular again and many publishers are getting on the bandwagon. Readers like them because they can finish a story at one sitting. Some recent print collections including A Log Cabin Christmas even made the N.Y. Times bestselling list.  

 

Writing novellas helps to keep your name out there between books.  Writing short also makes you concentrate on writing strengths and weaknesses.

 

Of course if you're the type of writer whose strengths include writing long narratives and intricate descriptions this might not work for you.  There simply is no room in a novella to go into great detail.  Every word has to count and then some. Lucky you if writing strengths include action scenes and dialogue—the crux of a well-paced novella.

 

I also found that the sooner the narrative question can be worked into the story the better. This creates tension and keeps the reader interested.

 

Margaret's novella
Courting Trouble
contained in
Four Weddings and a Kiss
now available as
a single novella

For COURTING TROUBLE, my story in Four Weddings and a Kiss, I got started on the wrong track.  I opened the scene in the heroine's point of view and wasted valuable verbiage describing her arrest for the murder of her husband.  My friend solved the problem. "Dump the first chapter," she said.

 

Taking her advice I started the story with the second chapter.  Not only did this save nine hundred words, it pulled the reader in quicker and we immediately understand the hero's dilemma.  The woman on trial for murder has the worst possible reputation.  He has no desire to defend her, but how can he say no to her young son's plea for help? And what if fails to win the case? Putting these emotional and narrative questions up front quickly grabs a reader's attention and that's what it's all about.

Wait. There's more:

Keep Character Goals Clear and the Time Period Short

My heroine's goal was simple.  She wanted the jury to find her innocent. This is something that can happen (or not) in a few short days.  Goals that take years to accomplish don't generally work in a novella.  The challenge I had was keeping the time short—and the romance long, if you know what I mean.  I didn't want the relationship to feel rushed.  

 

Don't Skimp on Characterization

Readers want to know what makes your characters tick and why they do the things they do.  Goals and motivations must be clear.

 

Keep the Story Moving

Save the introspection and flashbacks for your novels.

Forget the Crowds

The fewer characters in a novella, the better.  Everyone has to pull his or her weight and then some.   

 

Limit Subplots and Viewpoints

Stick to the main story as much as possible. Subplots should be short and easily resolved. Some people say you should tell your story from a single viewpoint, but I write romance and like to go back and forth between the hero and heroine.  Two viewpoints are probably the most you can get away with.

Finally:

 Remember, big ideas don't need a lot of words—they just need the right words.  And that's the long and the short of it.

Now it's your turn:  Do you read novellas? If so name your favorite.  If you don't read them, tell us why. Leave a comment to get your name in a drawing for a copy of Four Weddings and a Kiss.

NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR MARGARET BROWNLEY has penned more than thirty historical and contemporary novels. Her books have won numerous awards, including Readers' Choice and Award of Excellence. She's a former Romance Writers of American RITA^® finalist and has written for a TV soap.  She is currently working on a new series.  Not bad for someone who flunked eighth grade.  Just don't ask her to diagram a sentence. 

 

Find Margaret:

Website: http://www.margaret-brownley.com 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MargaretBrownleyAuthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/margaretbrownly

Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/brownley1/

 

Please welcome our guest Margaret Brownley

Margaret Brownley

Let’s Get Emotional

Margaret Brownley

Think back to your earliest childhood memory. You were probably three, four or perhaps even five at the time.  Now think about how you felt. You might have been scared or hurt. Perhaps you felt giddy with joy or maybe even lonely and confused.  Whatever the emotion, it was strong enough to make a deep and lasting impression or the memory wouldn’t have stayed with you all these years.

The same type of emotional response that fuels our memory banks is also what makes characters memorable. Think back to all your favorite movie and book scenes.  Characters that make us laugh, cry or tremble with fear stay with us long after we turn the last page or walk out of a theater. I was only ten when I read Little Women but I still remember feeling sad when Beth died.   

Readers choose genres for emotional reasons.  They read romances to experience the joy of falling in love. They expect thrillers to excite; horror to shock; mysteries to surprise. If a book disappoints, it’s generally because it fails to meet a reader’s emotional expectations.  Readers don’t want to read a story, they want to feel it.

Here are some tips for giving your story an emotional lift.

Make Us Care

There are many ways to reach a reader’s emotional core, but first of all you must make readers care about the character. Melvin in As Good as it Gets was one of the most flawed and unlikeable characters you’d ever hope to meet. Melvin’s gruff exterior wouldn’t have worked without the lonely and vulnerable man inside who made us care.  

Make Us Bond

Another way to reach readers emotionally is to make them bond with the character through recognition and familiarity.  I’ve never lived in the ocean depths, but I’ve known loss and I know how it feels to be a concerned parent. That’s what made me identify with and care about an overprotective clownfish named Marlin in Finding Nemo.  Write about werewolves if you want, set your story on Planet X, but it’s the humanity of your characters that will keep readers turning those pages.

Make Us Feel

Readers are also affected emotionally through theme. Theme is the emotional base beneath the story. We are told to write what we know.  Better advice would be to write what we’re passionate about. What’s important to you?  What are your passions? Is it love, freedom, salvation or injustice?  The passion of your theme will strike a chord in readers.

Be Specific 

Don’t just state an emotion, show it.  I don’t want to know that Paul is angry.  I want to see him tighten his lips and pull down his eyebrows. The seven basic emotions are anger, contempt, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness and surprise.  These basic emotions have been proven to produce certain facial expressions.  Learn them and use them.

Show Motivation

A four-year-old I know was on a quest to find a spider.  When asked why, he replied “I want it to bite my grandmother.”  He then went on to explain that Spider Man got his super human powers from a spider bite. Since his grandmother was having trouble with her eyes, he figured that a spider bite would help her see again.  The driving force behind that little boy’s actions was his love and concern for his grandmother and his desire to help her.  His motivation was simple, yet compelling, and I admit it made me teary eyed.  That’s the kind of response we want from readers.

Write the Truth

Emotions spring from truth; Loss is sad, war is tough, love is grand. Write about truth and your readers can’t help but respond with emotion.

www.margaretbrownley.com

Leave a comment to get your name in the drawing for Waiting for Morning

Waiting for Morning (The Brides of Last Chance Ranch)

If Molly Hatfield’s purple attire doesn’t blind you, her dazzling smile will. She doesn’t just sing to the cattle, she puts on a whole show. If only she wasn’t so stubborn about her brother’s care. Or so distrustful of a certain handsome doctor...

A Bride for All Seasons is in bookstores now!

Novella Collection with Margaret Brownley, Robin Lee Hatcher, Debra Clopton and Mary Connealy.

A Bride for All Seasons blurb

It All Started with an Ad in a Mail Order Bride Catalogue…

Melvin Hitchcock of the Hitching Post Mail Order Bride Catalogue isn’t dishonest—not exactly. If he tweaks his clients’ applications a bit, it’s because he’s looking out for their best interests.

This charming bouquet of novellas introduces four Hitching Post prospects in the year 1870, each one eager for second chances . . . and hungry for happiness. Year in, year out, they’ll learn that love often comes in unexpected packages.
After Tom's brother is murdered, Mary-Jo shows up claiming she's his brother's fiance. Could Matt be desperate enough to accept Bible-thumping Ellie? Luvena is a singing sensation, and Clay owns an abandoned theater---a perfect match? And when Megan responds to David's ad, she doesn't realize he's a dying man!

About Margaret:

Thrills, mystery, suspense, romance: Margaret penned it all. Nothing wrong with this—except she happened to be writing for the church newsletter. After making the church picnic read like a Grisham novel, her former pastor took her aside and said, "Maybe God's calling you to write fiction."

Margaret doubted this was true, but she wasn’t about to take chances. She’s now a New York Times bestselling author with more than 30 novels to her credit. Her latest story can be found in A Bride for All Seasons: a mail order bride collection written with Mary Connealy, Robin Lee Hatcher and Debra Clopton.  Gunpowder Tea will be the next book in her Brides of Last Chance Ranch series and is scheduled for October. Not bad for someone who flunked 8^th grade English.  Just don’t ask her to diagram a sentence.

Please Welcome our Guest Margaret Brownley

RESOLUTIONS FOR WRITERS

by

Margaret Brownley

Since this is the start of another year it seems like the perfect time to set new writing goals. To help you get started here are few that should be on every writer’s resolution list:

Make a Solid, Attainable Goal

If you have a specific goal in mind, you’ll be less likely to get sidetracked. An attainable goal is one that can be reached through your efforts, not someone else’s. Writing a book, sending out proposals, attending workshops, entering contests, increasing readership or contacting agents are all manageable goals; winning a Pulitzer is not. Everything you do from blogging to attending conferences should move you closer to your goal. If not, don’t waste your time.

Stop Rationalizing

All that time spent on blogging and Facebook will not advance a writing career, no matter what you might have heard. You’d be amazed at how many N.Y. Times bestselling authors do not have a FB page. If you want to blog, Twitter or post on Facebook, fine; just don’t call it writing time.

Prioritize

If you don’t take your writing seriously, no one else will, including your family. I suspect this is more of a problem with women than men. When I taught creative writing, I noticed that whenever my class fell on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the women all stayed home to prepare for the holiday, but my male students attended class as usual. Writing sometimes has to play second fiddle to families, jobs and other responsibilities, but if it isn’t on your priority list (or can’t even compete with a turkey) you might not be ready for a writing career.

Go for Your BA degree. That’s BA for Be Alert.

Things are changing so rapidly in the publishing world, it’s hard to keep track. There are many resources that track industry changes, but I found the following two resources helpful to my writing:

1. The non-fiction bestseller lists: what people are reading in nonfiction often gives a clue as to what they will be looking for in fiction a year or two from now.
2. The British: they trend six months ahead of us in fashion, music, TV and books.

Motivate Yourself Daily by Celebrating

My first sale was to a local magazine for which I received five dollars. My husband took out me to dinner to celebrate. Shortly after I sold another article for five dollars and again we painted the town red. By the third such sale my husband said, “Honey, we can’t afford all this success.” He had a point, but those little celebrations kept me going even as I piled up rejections for my books.

So celebrate every success no matter how small. Add a coin to a jar every time you finish a chapter, enter a contest, receive a rejection (hey, that meant you sent something out!), query or read a how-to-write book. When the jar’s full, treat yourself or use it as conference money. (To be on the safe side, I always keep a bottle of sparkly in the ‘fridge because you never know when something wonderful will happen.)

Laugh

Click to buy on Christianbook.com

Hey, it’s a crazy business. I once knew someone who wrote a children’s non-fiction book about coffee. The publisher told her they would like to publish it but they needed one little revision; could she please change the coffee to tea? Every published writer can tell you similar stories. Learn to accept this craziness and laugh. You’ll live longer

Write the book!

This might seem basic, but conferences are filled with aspiring writers clamoring to meet editors and agents before having completed a single book. Remember, as little as a page a day will produce a book by year’s end. So write the book, the whole book and nothing but the book.

Leave a comment to get your name in the drawing for a copy of Waiting for Morning. Tell me what your New Years Resolution as a WRITER is and may you all have a safe, creative and productive New Year!

Margaret Brownley is the author of more than 25 novels and is a N.Y. Times bestselling author and Romance Writers of American RITA finalist. Her latest book “Waiting for Morning” has just been released and is part of her Brides of Last Chance Ranch series. The next book in the series “Gunpowder Tea” is scheduled for a fall release. Also, look for her story in the Brides for All Seasons collection in June (with Mary Connealy, Robin Lee Hatcher and Debra Clapton).

www.margaretbrownley.com

Meet Margaret Brownley

Sandra here with a special guest. We are very privileged to have author Margaret Brownley with us today.

Margaret Brownley has published more than 20 books writing for Harlequin, St.Martin’s Press and Penguin. Her books have been published in 15 languages. She also co-wrote a storyline for a daytime soap. She’s currently writing “love and laughter” in the old west for Thomas Nelson. A LADY LIKE SARAH will be in bookstores 12/29.

Please join me in welcoming this renowned author to Seekerville.

And yes, this evening, we will have drawings for copies of Margaret's latest release, A LADY LIKE SARAH. Margaret will be giving away a copy and our Tina, who is one of Margaret's biggest fans will also give away a copy.

So Margaret, We have some questions for you.

1. I read you got started writing fiction because of your Grisholm
style newsletters. Can you give us more details

You mean you want to hear about vanishing picnic baskets, stone cold cuts and killer ants?

Seriously, I’ve written fiction all my life. It was kind of a secret vice. I wrote my first book in fifth grade (a mystery which I didn’t know how to end) and entered every short story contest I could find during my teens. My angst-driven stories didn’t even garner an honorable mention. That and the fact that I failed eighth grade English didn’t do a whole lot for my self-esteem. Diagram a sentence? Are you kidding me? I can fix any sentence but don’t ask me how I do it. I’m like the musician who can’t read music. I probably would still be a closet writer had my pastor not suggested that maybe God was calling me to write fiction. Hey, who am I to argue with the Big Man?

2. Tell us about your journey to get published.

It was a long and difficult journey. I wrote four books before I published my first one including the world’s worse romance novel. Trust me, sometimes it’s a good thing that our early attempts don’t get published. After selling my first book, things got even more difficult. It seemed like every time I sold a book, the publisher or line went belly-up. I probably own the record for having the most sold books that never got printed. Things got so bad that when I finally landed a contract with Harlequin, my writer friends begged me not to sign it for fear I would close its doors, too.
3. Your December release A LADY LIKE SARAH sounds fun. Can you tell
us about how you came up with the idea?

Each book in my Rocky Creek series is based on historical events. A Lady Like Sarah was inspired by the escapades of Pearl Hart. Desperate to help her seriously-ill mother, she stopped a stage and, with the help of a loaded pistol, convinced its passengers to help pay her poor mama’s medical bills. (Bet you didn’t know that health care was highway robbery even back in the Old West.) The question that kept running though my mind was, how desperate would a person have to be to rob a stage? Suddenly a character named Sarah popped up on the page and demanded in no uncertain terms that I tell her story.

I got the idea for the next book in the series, A Suitor for Jenny (September 2010) after seeing a meeting notice in an old Kansas newspaper for an organization called The Society for the Protection and Preservation of Male Independence. What fun the heroine has breaking through that society!

4. I notice you have Internet presence through your website, Youtube, Facebook, etc. How helpful/necessary do you think this is for the modern author?

To be honest, I don’t really know. I’m not sure anyone has the answer to that question. I‘ve heard that publishers expect even unpublished writers to have a web presence these days, but I do think you have to be careful. I see writers posting rejections, bad reviews and personal information, and I don’t think that’s the kind of web presence publishers are looking for. If you were going on a job interview, would you want a prospective employer to know that you’d been turned down by x number of companies? I don’t think so.

It also takes an enormous amount of time and effort to create a web presence which might be better spent writing the book. Some writers blog every day and I don’t know how they do it.

5. What advice would you give all of us on our unpubbed islands?

Go and see the movie Julia and Julie and pretend it’s about writers instead of cooks. Julia Child enjoyed the process of cooking, even the failures. Julie didn’t enjoy the process, which led to constant meltdowns and relationship problems. The lesson here is that you have to love the process. If you’re just getting started, stay focused on learning the craft and discovering your inner writer. Don’t worry about the publishing end. That’s down the road. Celebrate every little success. Enjoy the ride. And write, write, write. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule to success. Before I was published I put in my 10,000 hours by writing four books. At least two of them (okay, three) were pretty crappy but I learned.

Finally, show up—or at least make sure your manuscript does. Woody Allen said that 80% of success is just showing up and this is SO true. I heard a disturbing statistic at a recent writing conference: only 10% of the writers asked to submit chapters or proposal to an agent or editor actually bother to do so. Write and submit. Write and submit. Babe Ruth said it best, “You can’t beat persistence.”

Thank you so much Margaret.

So chime in folks and take advantage of the wisdom this author has to offer. She will be here to join us during the day.

If you're interested in a copy of A LADY LIKE SARAH, be sure and leave your email addie. We will announce the winners in the weekend edition.

In case you're hungry, we a sideboard loaded with coffee, creamers, teas and hot chocolate. Then you can move on to the table loaded with Danish pastries, Krispy Creme donuts, cinnamon crumb coffee cake and a platter with pears, grapes and bananas.