True Confession--What Writers Do

         I have a confession to make.

         I’ve been lying for the last few months as I’ve been blogging across the internet promoting my book Wild Point Island.

         Not intentionally, of course.  But I haven’t been telling the whole truth when I’ve been asked the question--what inspired you to write this story?

         It seemed like such a simple question, and I thought I knew the answer.

         But . . . it hit me like a brick a few weeks ago--when I went back with my sisters to visit my hometown--something I hadn’t done in years--that the story I’d written and recently gotten published--had been inspired by a lot of things, and the anwer to that question that people kept asking me was more complicated than I thought. 

         It all started when I published my first book a few months ago and as part of the usual promo, I did a blog tour which meant that I was expected to either write a blog or in some cases submit to an interview.

         Now imagine the poor interviewer, ie. a person who runs the blog.  They are trying their best to promote a book they probably haven’t even had the chance to read.  So the most likely question to ask the author is . . . What inspired your story? 

         And without batting an eyelash, I’d thought about my story Wild Point Island and thought I was telling the truth when I said that the first season of True Blood, that hot HBO drama on TV, had been my main inspiration.  After all, I had a clear memory of sitting there in front of my TV, watching with my mouth open, the doomed romance between Bill Compton, the 173 year old vampire and Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic small town half fairy waitress of Bon Temps, Louisiana, and then wanting to immediately create a romance like that--two people who seemed destined to be together but who couldn’t for obvious reasons.  

         Now that part was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth, and I didn’t realize the entire truth until I went home and stood in the once woods but now a park behind my old backyard and peeked over the fence with my four sisters.  There we were--like a bunch of peeping Toms--staring into our old backyard, noticing that the giant oak tree was gone along with the sandpile and the garden and the pool and the hedges that had once surrounded the perimeter.  Now there was only grass, surrounded by a white slatted metal fence. 

         Had I actually expected my old backyard to look the same? 

         I wanted it to.  I wanted that yard to look exactly the way it had looked the last time I’d walked through it some twenty years before. 

         The awful truth struck me then.  
         What writers do.  
         I understood more clearly why and for whom we really write.  Although we may write for a lot of reasons, we write for ourselves and use our stories to recreate the world we want to have. 

         There is a scene in Wild Point Island that I wrote six months before I pilgrimaged to my home for real.  In the scene Ella Pattenson, my heroine, returns to the island after having been banished as a child, twenty years before.  She returns to her childhood home.  And what does she find?  Everything is exactly the same as she left it.  Nothing has changed.  There isn’t even dust on the furniture.   I wrote that scene never realizing how important it would be for me to have things stay the same.  

Ella's house on Wild Point Island

         In my story Ella returns home to rescue her father from imprisonment.  She hasn’t seen him in twenty years.  She fears he’s no longer alive.  She’s obsessed with the notion of getting her family back together.

         And this is where I admit that returning to my hometown was a very bad idea.  My dad passed away years ago, and there was no way I was going to catch a glimpse of  him in any of the usual haunts.  I knew this; of course, I did.  And yet my heart quickened everytime I glanced at those spots where he had once occupied space.               

         Now even the usual haunts had changed--the bakery and the church and diner.  They all played havoc with my memory.  All I had left is my memory.

         And, I guess, my writing. 

         Writing fiction is grand.  You can make it turn out anyway you want.  Ella can return home and find her childhood home exactly the way she left it.  She can find her father still alive and rescue him.  She can reunite her family.  And she can even find true love with Simon Viccars, a revenant, all in the pages of a paranormal romance. 

         So, yes, I lied when I said my book was inspired by True Blood.  It’s so much more complicated than that.  

         I wanted to set the record straight.

         If you'd like to read about how Ella rescues her father and falls in love with Simon, 

log onto Amazon.com and read the sample on your Kindle or you can log onto BarnesandNoble.com and read it on your nook.  You might enjoy this paranormal romance, which readers have been calling a real page turner.   And, please, don't think about those other things I shared--how writing the book helped me come to terms with my own life.
         It's what writers do, I suspect, all the time.  

   

          

Essence of Romance

As I arrived at the one day conference early, I grabbed a seat in the front row and thought to myself--prepare to be inspired.  Yes, I am one of those kind of people who obsessively need to be close to the action.
  

But let me start from the beginning.

Four years ago, one of my critique partners--I write paranormal romance--had gone to a conference in California and heard a rather famous Hollywood scriptwriter, Michael Hauge, speak about storywriting.  About why some movies/stories work and go on to become mega blockbusters and others don’t. 

Now Hauge was here in New Jersey, my home state, and he was giving the same talk and focusing on romance.

He said that many love stories don’t work because there’s no logical reason why two people get together other than the scriptwriter/writer wanted them to be together.  Even though a “spark” can get two people together.  Even though physical attraction between two people is important, the beautiful faces and gorgeous muscles we see gracing the silver screen or the covers of so many of our novels ALONE can’t sustain a relationship over the long haul in real life and in our fictional world--and the reader knows it. 

If the writer wants the romance to be believed, she must first have the hero ask the question: Why is the heroine his destiny?  Out of all the millions of women out there, why is she the only person for him/her?   And then the heroine must ask the same question:  Why is the hero her destiny?  Why is he the only one for her?

Let’s focus on the hero for a minute.  According to Hauge, the answer lies in the fact that the heroine can see beneath the hero’s identity. By that, Hauge means she can see through the face he puts on for the rest of the world, the face that hides who he really is.  She can see through the person he pretends to be.  The heroine is the only one who can connect with the hero’s essence, with the person he has the potential of becoming once he achieves his inner goal, his character arc, his growth toward becoming a better person. She sees his goodness.  

Hauge says that a romance or a real love match between the hero and heroine will be believable if the reader can see their connection on that level.  

The hero in our stories, just like men in real life, put on a face to meet the other faces, wear a mask to hide a hurt or a wound they’ve suffered in childhood.  They need the courage to take off the mask and fully inhabit their essence. The heroine can see through the mask.  

The trick, of course, is to show this on the screen or in the novel so that the reader can see the connection being made between the hero and heroine.  

One of my favorite movies--Breakfast at Tiffany’s--illustrates this concept perfectly.  George Peppard, the hero, plays the struggling literary writer Paul, who allows himself to be “kept” by a socialite. But when he meets Holly, the heroine, girl about town, played by Audrey Hepburn, she immediately sees through his mask and calls him Fred, identifying his true essence, because he reminds her of her brother--who represents all innocence and goodness.  Paul, the hero, likewise, isn’t dazzled by Holly’s outer suave sophistication because from their first encounter, he sees the small town Eula May underneath the Holly, the role she’s assumed to cover over her hurt.  


 The smash HBO series True Blood also illustrates the power of this concept.  Sookie Stackhouse, the heroine, is unable to connect romantically with anyone until she meets Bill, the vampire hero of the series.  In the first season it's clear the two are meant to be together.  She can see him as a man.  She's not freaked out by the fact that he's a vampire.  He asks her early on--who else can you be yourself with   but me?  Because he's a vampire, she cannot read his thoughts, and that's a great relief to her.  Even though it seems impossible for a "human" and vampire to get together, the audience roots for their relationship because they seem so perfectly suited for each other.  Interestingly, later there's a complication and a third character--Eric, another vampire, becomes a contender for Sookie's heart, but he's only a viable candidate when he's injured many seasons later and loses his memory.  At that point his essence is revealed to Sookie, and she can see him more clearly.  

After the Michael Hauge conference, I rushed home and examined my own work in progress. 

Had I written a blockbuster or a dud? 

Was my heroine Ella’s love for Simon, my hero, more than just physical attraction?  

I scoured my manuscript looking for evidence . . .

         

In my novel Wild Point Island, my hero Simon Viccars is a loyal revenant, a descendant of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, but he’s been trapped on this island he lives on now for over 400 years.  Once human he’s been changed into another life form and given immortality, but at the price of his freedom.  When he saves the heroine Ella, a half and half, from her uncle, when she returns to the island, she's the only one who's able to see through his identity as a loyal revenant.  She rejects the idea that he has gone rogue to be free of the island. She believes he really wants to help her in her mission to free her father, even if it means forfeiting his own chance of leaving the island.  

Likewise, the hero must also be able to see beneath the heroine’s identity to her essence.  He must be able to see the person that she has the potential of becoming once she achieves her inner goal.  

Ella Pattenson’s desire to begin a physical relationship with Simon, a revenant on Wild Point Island, does not fool him.  Her insistence that she is ready, willing, and able to share a future with him, although tempting, does not lure him off center.  He understands that she first must come to grips with her past and the decisions her parents made before she can understand the kind of future she wants.  He sees her almost more clearly than she sees herself.  

This powerful connection between the hero and heroine makes the reader root for the love relationship to succeed.  We want them together by the end of the story.   

That’s what a good love story is all about.

Wild Point Island, my paranormal romance, is officially released on June 15, 2012.  It is my first published novel.  To read an excerpt -- Prologue and Chapter One where Ella meets Simon and the sparks fly . . .  log onto my website: www.katelutter.com.  

You can order Wild Point Island as a mass market paperback or ebook on www.Amazon.com  or www.barnesandnoble.com.

Or you can follow me at: www.katelutter.blogspot.com 

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