Just so you know, I’m writing this as a reader and a writer. Both halves, stuck together to make a whole. Not that that happens very often. It’s hard to keep the two parts separate when you read so much, hard to not let what you read bleed into what you write. I try to do it by reading in a different subgenre, reading contemporary when I’m writing historical, that kind of thing. But it doesn’t always work.
So what happens when it doesn’t work? I just read a book that reminded me of this, a book where both of the main characters were perfectly nice, perfectly well behaved, and on the page it said they loved each other—so why didn’t I believe it?
It could have been the mood I was in, not quite ready to read this one, or it could have been because the characters weren’t ready—or weren’t suited to each other, despite the author bending over backwards to make it work. That sometimes happens when you’re on a strict deadline, you have to do a little mind control, try to make your characters work, despite the niggling feeling that this isn’t the right person to be with this one.
Have I done it? Hell, yeah. And worked hard to make it work, to make the chemistry blend. Sometimes with results, sometimes not. I have to refer to my own writing here, because I don’t know how other people do it, or even if they go through the same struggles, so please forgive me. I’ll refer to a couple of books that aren’t available, for one reason or another.
When I came to write “A Griffin’s Treasure,” I had it slotted into a timetable. I had a deadline, the book was accepted and contracted on proposal. I’d worked out the skeleton of the story, and it looked good. I couldn’t wait to start. But when I brought Josh and Chana together—nothing. I introduced a scene where another, female character with far more in common with my hero interacted with him, and I got sparks. But she’d already sparked with someone else and I really wanted to write that story, so I moved her out. Josh was a shape-shifter, Chana a female ex cop, but she had secrets even she didn’t know about.
So when that not-working feeling persisted, I stopped. My editor was understanding enough to accept a delay. I’d just miss my publishing slot, that was all. I went through every scene I’d written so far and used some analytical tools to tear it apart. Who wanted what, who needed what. And I realized that the reason they weren’t getting it together properly was that Chana had a secret, one even she wasn’t aware of. And when she became aware, it blasted the door open.
Wow. It worked so well. I went back and rewrote that sucker, knowing what I knew but the hero and heroine didn’t, writing that knowledge into their characters.
I won a major award for that book.
Second example? Corin’s story. Corin was one of the three brothers in the Triple Countess series of historical romances that happen in the 1750’s. All through the series I’d planned for him to have Alethea, the girl that Daniel and Miranda rescued in “Last Chance, My Love.” But when I put them together, they got on, sure, but there was no spark. Half way in, I stopped. I knew it wasn’t working. I did the analysis that I’d worked through in “A Griffin’s Treasure” but it didn’t work. I couldn’t see why they couldn’t get together. Corin was easy going and Alethea had problems that would make him step up to the mark, and he did it willingly enough. But I couldn’t get the spark going.
So I gave that book up. Recently I went back and tried him with a character I didn’t have a home for, one that had sprung into my head. I saw her incongruously dressed in a riding habit, wearing a mask, playing cards. Corin enjoyed playing cards. Bingo. I put him with Sapphira and the words flew off the page. I had to stop to re-plot, find out where they were going, but that was it. They went off together, sparking all over the place. “A Betting Chance” is coming out this April.
Sometimes it just 
happens, and the book works right from the start. “Chemistry of Evil,” the first paranormal I ever wrote was one of those, “Red Alert” did it too, and so did “Yorkshire,” the first Richard and Rose book. Actually, that is a prime example. I planned Richard to be a plain, ordinary hero, like Georgette Heyer’s “Mr. Dash of Nowhere in Particular” but he didn’t turn out that way. I found myself writing a peacock, a man in the full panoply of mid-Georgian gorgeousness and then I stopped and thought, “Where the hell did he come from?” I wanted a story about an ordinary seeming pair who blended into the background and solved mysteries, I wanted to give the hero a just-enough title, enough to get him into the privileged houses but not enough to make him stand out. I ended up with a flamboyant bad boy, a rebel who’d taken society and shoved it back in its teeth, one with huge emotional personal problems, who never paused if violence was needed, whose intelligence drove him to despair sometimes. An incredibly lonely man who recognized the other half of himself the minute he saw her. I didn’t believe in love at first sight before I wrote about Richard and Rose. They made me believe it.
Writers live for those moments.
I still don’t know why Josh and Chana worked and Corin and Alethea didn’t, not really, and reading that other book today reminded me of it, the one where the hero was okay, the heroine was okay, but they didn’t work together. I’d love to have read about them with different partners, but perhaps the writer didn’t have the time I had, or perhaps she thought differently to me, and thought her characters worked. For that reason, I’m not naming it. There was nothing wrong with the book, so maybe it was just me.
Who knows?
