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I’d like to add here that even more things came into my life that tried very hard to keep me from writing, but I refused to let that happen. I wrote through my father’s death from cancer, my sister’s death from cancer, my own brain surgery, (non-malignant, thank you) – through another surgery for yet another tumor near my heart – again non-malignant). I wrote through two broken wrists (at the same time) – my other son’s two divorces (he is now happily married to his third wife) – the birth of grandchildren and of course spending lots of time with my three grandsons through their growing up years.
Now I’m going through the trial of an aging mother who was recently admitted to a nursing home. It is these life experiences that help us write with emotion, with reality and with – yes – passion. The more you have “lived” life, the better you will write.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes on American Idol the criticism often given to the youngest singers who sing about broken hearts and broken trust and aching love is that they didn’t show enough emotion in the song? …That the judges could tell they didn’t really understand the depth of the feelings that should have come out of the song? That’s because they haven’t lived those emotions. Some are so young they have never even truly been in love. It takes a lot of living and experiencing the many aspects of life itself to bring even more reality to your books.
I am a firm believer that you can’t “learn” to write a good story. That good story is inside of you. You can larn spelling and vocabulary and structure - but you are either born to write, or you’re born to do something else. No one who writes good books decided to be a writer because it sounded cool or because they figured it would be easy and they would get rich. We write because we can’t “not” write, and we do it because it is as natural to us as breathing.
You are drawn to that little inner voice that won’t leave you alone – those characters who still yearn to come to life in your stories – they all keep after you. That passion I had in the beginning has waned somewhat – but it is still there, deep in my heart – and my love for my subject has never changed. No matter what genre was popular at different times in these 30 years, I stuck to American History, Native Americans and the American West because that is the source of my passion for writing. And because I stayed within my genre, I built a name known for Western Romance – and now my new publisher, Sourcebooks, bought me because I had a name in a genre they want to start building back into popularity. They needed a name associated with the genre, so sticking to what I love to write paid off.
You are all here because of your own passion for writing a story and getting it published … your own passion for your subject matter … your own passion for your characters. Let that passion be your driving force. Don’t write just because you want to see a book on the shelf with your name on it. Don’t write a certain genre just because it’s popular.
Write from the heart. Don’t write for the money because for the most part you’ll be disappointed. Write for the satisfaction of telling a story you’ve always wanted to tell and for the satisfaction of actually finishing a book. In my case, I wanted to teach my readers real American History in an entertaining way – and I wanted to teach the truth about what happened between Whites / the government / and Native Americans as the Indians suffered true culture shock when the West was settled so quickly and they learned that practically every word spoken to them by soldiers and the government were lies.
I have apparently succeeded in my quest, because over the years I have received many, many letters from readers who were shocked by some of the things they learned – historical facts they were never taught in school. And today it’s worse than ever. Far too little history is taught any more in our schools. I have also heard from many Native Americans who appreciate my getting the truth out about what really happened to them and why they reacted in the ways that they did.
Stick to your guns no matter what outside factors try to stop you. Some people say anybody can write a book and get it published because people can self-publish. Maybe so – but not just anybody can write a truly good story – one that becomes a best seller – one that is well researched and full of memorable characters. Internet or not, the truly good writers and truly good books will still shine through and rise above all the garbage that gets thrown out there. Readers still appreciate a well told, well researched story written from the heart, so don’t let the fact that thousands of wanna-be’s are out there trying to compete with you and kill your dreams.
Just rememer that there is no competion, because nobody writes like you write – so if people are buying your books and if you are doing well because you have a style, or a voice that people love, you will build faithful readers who will never leave you no matter what other newer writer come into the market, and no matter how many established writers are selling like hotcakes. If you worry about competition, then you are dealing with self defeat. Just be you. Write your way, and don’t let anything – or anyone – get in the way of your passion for writing, your passion for your subject and your passion for your characters. Put everything else aside and sit down and write. Get rid of all negative thoughts and let the story pour out of you, and ultimately you will get published and you will get noticed and you will feel the satisfaction of knowing you realized your dream. When life gets tough, let writing be your catharsis. You will feel fulfilled, and even if you don’t sell that first book, you will know you at least tried.
You know the story – don’t be afraid to submit your work. What’s the difference if you submit it and get rejected, or if you don’t submit it at all? The difference is huge! You’ll never know if you might have sold that book. You’ll never know if you could have realized your dream. You’ll never know if there are others out there who might really enjoy your story and learn from it – and you’ll never become a published author if you never submit your work. Failure is not a result of sending in your work and getting it rejected. Failure is never submitting your work at all. You have failed a lot of prospective readers, and you have failed yourself.
Good luck to all of you. I’ve been there – done that – and I know what it takes! It takes the four “p’s” – Practice, Perseverence, Persistence … and “Passion.” Now – sit down and start writing!
I am willing to bet that many of you were passionate blithering idiots when you first started writing. Some of you are right now. By that I mean that writing was all that mattered. Attention to husband and kids sometimes took a back seat.
Housework? Forget it! The hungry dog? Open a bag of dog food and just set it on the floor and let the family pet have at it. Hungry kids? Have them throw some TV dinners in the oven or open a package of lunch meat and a loaf of bread. It’s Christmas? Oh, yeah, guess I’ll throw some tinsel on a fake tree when I take a break between chapters.
I like to joke that I’ve written 57 books and have thus had 57 affairs! I have fallen passionately in love with every hero I’ve ever written about – and about four of them have stayed with me, in my thoughts, in my heart, even in my bed for years! But thank god I have an understanding husband who knows it’s just the stories inside of me. He understands how attached I get to my characters. He’s always been a big supporter of my writing, and caring about each other’s dreams is the basic reason we’ve been together for nearly 47 years.
When I write my stories, I become the heroine, and most of the things she does and the decisions she makes are based on what I would do in that particular situation. So as a side thought, apart from my theme of passion here, remember that a primary ingredient of writing believable characters is to be those characters. Write from the inside-out – not from the outside looking in.
You have all heard that one primary rule for writing a good story is - show, don’t tell. Writing from the inside will help you do that. I could teach an entire workshop on that subject, but I’ll save that for next time. Let’s get back to passion and how it can help your writing.
In my early days of writing – wow. I was a complete maniac. I was 34 years old and I’d read a book called The Proud Breed by Celeste De Blasis, a fabulous love story set in early California. I had always read historicals, most of them about pioneers and Indians, and for some reason that particular book finally put a burr in my butt and made me sit down and write a similar story. The actual desire to write a book about pioneers probably really started at the age of around 14, when I read A Lantern In Her Hand by Bess Streeter Aldrich. What an impressive, touching, memorable story that was. But I was young and didn’t believe I could really write a book, and I had a lot of living to do – got married at 20 – worked full time and had two babies by 25, two boys just one year apart. “life” took over, but I still read … and dreamed.
By the time I was 34 the boys were old enough to not need constant watching, and as I said – something about The Proud Breed finally stirred that passion in me to write, and off I went! We had purchased 29 acres of wooded property that needed a tremendous amount of work, and I was working full time on top of that, drove close to a half hour each way to work and back (I was an administrative secretary to the manager of a nuclear power plant) – had a son who needed to go to the doctor every week for an allergy shot and with whom I spent many nights sleeping sitting up in a chair holding him because if he laid down he couldn’t breathe – and well, here’s how my day usually went:
Up at 5:00 a.m. – pack lunches (back then my husband carried a lunch to work and my sons ate sack lunches at school) – got my husband up and off to work – got myself ready for work – got the boys up and ready for school – made them breakfast - drove them to school – drove to work – put in an 8 hour day – drove home – did grocery shopping – one afternoon a week took the son for his allergy shot – made supper – did dishes – did whatever cleaning needed done – did laundry one or two days a week – helped my husband stack logs and pull brush on the property we were clearing – painted and helped maintain two rental cottages on the property – did a lot of the mowing and helped with a 40-acre asparagus farm – yet I almost always did some writing in the evening in a very small living room where the boys would be playing and wrestling and the husband would be watching TV five feet away. I would often write whole chapters in one sitting late into the night, sometimes until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, and then fall asleep with my head on the typewriter while everybody else slept – then up at 5:00 am to do it all over again. Even at work I often read or wrote on my lunch hour. I sure didn’t sleep much back then!
I don’t know how I did it – I just did it. I was incredibly passionate about my stories, my subject and my characters. Amid all of this I managed to read probably hundreds of research books about the American West. I have a huge personal library of research books, and I’ve read them all.
Today we have the internet, but not back then. I took notes – volumes and volumes of notes. I still have a four-drawer file full of hand-written notes and magazine articles I saved to use for story ideas. In those files are hundreds of manilla folders labeled “cities” “rivers” “buffalo” “civil war” “ranching” “western women” “Denver’s history” “stagecoaches” “the pony express” “forts” “Custer” “Cheyenne” “Sioux” “Comanche” “mountain men” - on and on and on. You name the subject from the 1800’s old west, and I have a folder full of notes on it as well as several research books. When I first started writing, the internet was a distant dream. I had to hunt down my information through books.
Most of my research books came from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Nebraska – great libraries filled with books you can order that cover everything you would ever want to know about the American West, Native Americans, the Civil War – whatever you want to know about America’s history and Native Americans, and you can order books from them on-line. And to this day one of my most-used resources are the 26 volume Time-Life books about the Old West that were published about 30 years ago. Time Life also has a set of books about the Civil War and also about pirate ships and the history of shipping in general.
And the best source for Eastern history about the Eastern Indians, the revolution, the French and Indian War, the War of 1812 and all the amazing history of how this country was born and grew can be found in books by Alan Eckert, stories like That Dark and Bloody River. No one tells it better – real history written like a novel, with real characters and dialogue. When you are finished with an Alan Eckert book, you are left in awe of the courage and stamina our pioneers showed in the early growth of this country.
Through all the things I mentioned I also did my own advertising, I attended numerous conferences, conducted workshops and gave speeches at clubs and other organizations, anything to publicize my writing. At first I mailed out manuscripts like a mad man, doing multiple submissions with the hope that if book “x” didn’t sell there, maybe the next publishing house would pick it up, and maybe that first publisher would buy book “y.” I made sure publishers knew I was here to stay and that I was capable of writing more than one or two books. I went through nearly 100 rejections and wrote nine books before I finally sold that ninth book in 1982 to Kensington Publishing – Sweet Prairie Passion – the first book of what turned out to be a 7-book series called Savage Destiny.
To this day Savage Destiny remains popular. To this day I still get letters and e-mails about those books. And soon Amazon will reissue all the Savage Destiny books as e-books for Kindle … after almost 30 years. What does that tell you about those stories – and me? I was passionate.
Those books and many of my other stories – many of which won awards and which are to this day being reissued – remain popular because of the passion that went into writing them – the passion that made me sit down to a manual typewriter and type my first books using carbon paper and using white-out to correct mistakes. The passion that through all the “business” of life made me write, write, write – three to five books a year – and not short stories these were 400 to 600 page books. Back then big fat books were acceptable. I wish they still were today because the fatter the book, the more tempted I am to read it because I know that most likely the writer was able to truly flesh out his or her characters and delve into a truly multi-dimensional story with multi-dimensional characters.
Watch this blog for Part III of my workshop, The Power of Passion.
The following is the first segment of a workshop I conducted at the Romantic Times conference in Chicago in April 2012 …
Passion … the word is used in so many ways by romance writers and the industry as a whole – in our titles, our blurbs, our dialogue, our love scenes, our plots … and it is the basis of our dream to write – a passion for the art of writing, for our particular genre, and for our characters.
The word Passion holds power. And the power of passion can lead to terrible things … or to good things. Passion is the basic driving force in our lives…a passion for mommy and daddy and playfulness when we are little … a passion for certain hobbies and friends and teachers and school and sports as we grow … perhaps a passion for a high school crush in our teen years or for a rock star or movie star … for dancing and dreaming.
Often in our younger years we hold a passion for changing the world and finding ways to make a difference or be important and recognized. Sometimes later on that passion becomes directed at whomever we choose to marry, followed by a passion to become a mother, or instead perhaps a passion for a certain career. Later in life we feel passionate love for our grandchildren. However we turn out, passion in all its various forms usually plays a role in all our decisions. It is something to remember when plotting your stories, because passion is vital to the reason for decisions your characters make.
Though we are romance writers, passion is not all about romance and sex. It covers all aspects of life, and is the food for plot after plot. Passion can be the source of hatred and crime, crimes as devastating as assault and murder, even the murder of a loved one - or maybe for a loved one.
Passion can be the source of greed and again – the crimes that springs from greed – like theft, embezzlement, break-ins, and of course – and again – assault and murder, lies and betrayal.
Passion often leads to jealousy, gossip, and deliberate slander and misunderstandings, to cheating and adultery. Passion can also lead to loyalty and undying love, sometimes for people who don’t love us back. It can give us drive and energy, a purpose to life itself.
Passion has led to phenomenal historical events, like the American civil war, brought on by men and women who were passionate about a cause and their political beliefs. Just think of the kind of passionate devotion to a political cause it would take to fight against and alienate your own brother or father, or your closest friend. Along with that, it is easy to understand then that passion also leads to courageous decisions that can change our lives forever.
The physical passion between Anthony and Cleopatra left behind a story told and re-told for centuries. It was passion that brought about a revolution in this country in which people risked life and limb to be free from tyranny and ended up founding the most successful and richest country in the world.
Man’s passion to constantly go beyond the limits of the known world led to world exploration and eventually to numerous trips to the moon. The passion to help end diseases and find ways to lead longer lives led to the polio vaccine and thousands of other miracles in the world of medicine
The passion to make man’s life better in general led to untold inventions that continue to change the world and our personal lives in phenomenal ways.
There are people with a passion for war, just because they believe the whole world should live as they do, worship as they do, be under their control. And thank god there are people with a passion for peace, people who will go to the extent of risking their lives to help others far less fortunate, to help end wars, to do what they can to make others understand that it’s all right to share and accept our diverse cultures and religions.
Passion can be the source of endless story plots because of all the dramatic results of its power.
Passion can help our careers – the passion we all share for writing can bolster us when our careers begin to sag; it can bring new perspective to our work and our purpose; and it can carry us through dark times and keep us at the computer when writing is sometimes the last thing we want to do.
Watch this blog for Section II of my workshop, The Power of Passion.
