Sarah Richmond
This month I would like to introduce to you Sarah Richmond. Sarah is currently a long distance member of the San Diego Romance Writers. She lived in Poway for several years while learning her craft. I actually attended class’s with her taught by Marian Jones, the mentor of many published authors from the Romance Writers. Alas, Sarah left us to move on to Bristol England, and now resides in Connecticut, but still calls San Diego home.
Sarah
graduated from the University of Michigan and holds a Master's degree
in marketing. She spent her junior year in Paris, France at the
Sorbonne, an experience that she will always be
grateful for.
Sarah has a new book coming out November 15th “ROSE ADAGIO,” from Cerridan Press.
Rose Adagio is a Cinderella story set in the Gilded Age of Edwardian England. If you like Josh Groban and Merchant/Ivory films, you may like my style of writing. My next project is a Western set in Churchhill County, Nevada in the 1850's.
Sarah’s web site is www.SarahRichmond.com
Her email is SarahRichmondhistoricals@gmail.com
By Kathy Carpenter
TEN WAYS TO ADD SPARKLE TO A MANUSCRIPT
By Sarah Richmond
1) Not a hook but a corkscrew:
Find an emotionally devastating, gut-wrenching, life changing moment for your character that your reader can identify or sympathize with and start the book there.
1) “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”
Gloria Swanson plays dramatic actress Norma Desmond in the movie “Sunset Blvd.” who knows the importance of detail. Readers want to be transported to another time and place by details. Detail is especially important in Historical novels where readers are looking for period authenticity. Detail can be things but also language. Compare: ‘You needn’t have bothered’ (Jane Austen) with ‘For getta ‘bout it’ (Al Pacino) or “You ought to have finished what you started’ (Philippa Gregory) with ‘Get ‘er done’ (Larry the Cable Guy).
3) Avoid clichés like the Plague.
We all use them. Over and over. Editors hate them. Readers skip over them. Find new ways to interject descriptions that are wildly inventive. Homer’s ‘rosy fingers of dawn’ made my 12th grade English teacher , Miss Pagle, swoon. Creating new ways of describing a character or a setting can add sparkle. Raymond Chandler created some laugh out loud moments for his hard-boiled detectives with his similes and metaphors.
4) Drama adds Sparkle; Conflict is the Essence of Drama
I personally think it’s sad that the wedding my friends remember and still talk about is the one where there was a knock-down, drag-out fist fight. What I don’t like in life I look for in a good book. In fiction, a reader keeps turning the pages to find out what happens next.
5) Not So Much a Character Worthy of Love as A Character Worthy of a Reader’s Love
I hated Scarlet O’Hara from the very first page of “Gone With the Wind” when she pined for a man who wasn’t available. She continued to behave badly. I kept turning the pages. Scarlet wanted to save Tara. I didn’t care for Tara as much as I wanted Scarlet to get her head on straight. Didn’t she understand what she really needed was the love of a good man? She seemed almost there when she married Rhett Butler. Come on, he’s the man for you. How many women know that kind of love in their lives? She had a mind of her own. She was unpredictable. She sparkled like the crown jewels.
I’ve never met a woman who didn’t know who I was talking about when I mention Scarlet O’Hara. Maybe not love, but we have an emotional connection to her.
6) The Total Screw-up
Why do we listen to gossip? I like to find out about somebody ELSE who’s totally screwed up. Novels are fraught with screw-ups. I think Cinderella screwed up when she didn’t tell the prince who she was. People claim they read Shakespeare and Cormac McCarthy for the brilliant language and lofty ideas. Maybe so, but the literature endures because readers like reading about screw-ups.
7) The Setting
Sean Penn, talking about his movie: “Into the Wild” said that Mother Nature doesn’t take care of us. It’s a reminder that we don’t have a lot of control over the environment. A natural disaster can bring out the best and worst in us. Put a control freak in the woods. Fireworks.
The right setting in your story can enhance the flaws in your character. He or she rises to the occasion or he/she falls on his/her face. We keep turning the pages.
Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro” is about a man who’s afraid of losing his potency as a man so he goes big game hunting. The theme is about as subtle as a brick through a window, but it worked and his readers loved it.
8) Go easy on the conditional tenses.
Anyone raising teenagers knows conditional tenses invite weird interpretations and often confusion. Sometimes even ambivalence.. Say: ‘would you be so kind to turn out the light’ instead of ‘turn out the light’. The conditional tense adds unnecessary weight to your prose. The exception is the Historical Novel, where conditional tenses are part of the system of class and manners.
9) Eliminate adjectives used as substitutes for nouns.
We, the readers, need more precision: take out words like: that, this, it, some, a few, many, more, another, then, all
10) There’s always room for improvement
Writing is a learning process. Take your writing to the next level by:
Joining a Critique Group
Taking a class
Join a writing organization: May I suggest RWA; Sisters in Crime
Enter a contest where judges are editors or agents.
Read, read, read the genre you wish to write
I love to get mail. I hope your readers will feel free to ask questions about my book, Rose Adagio. I've sold a second book set in the 1850's Nevada territory called Brides of Serendipity. It will be available in the spring of 2008.
Also, if anyone has questions about Ellora's Cave or Cerridwen Press, I will try and give them the benefit of my experience.