What Will Get You Published? Story!

Excellent advice by the famous Bernard Cornwell to the first-time historical novelist:

"The most important thing, the all important thing, is to get the story right. Write, rewrite, rewrite again, and do not worry about anything except story. It is story, story, story. That is your business. Your job is not to educate readers on the finer points of Elizabethan diplomacy or Napoleonic warfare, your job is to divert and amuse people who have had a hard day at work. What will get you published? Not style, not research, but story."

This is a good reminder for me as an aspiring novelist. I may have this fabulously researched piece of history, but if I do an info-dump without weaving it into the story, it's no good. Better to have a strong story that's light on history, rather than to have a mediocre story bogged down by heavy research. It's not simply good enough to get the historical details right—make no mistake, they have to be right—but it's important to know which details are pertinent to the story and how to minimally employ them. History in service of a good story, that is a historical novel; not the other way around.

Joanna Bourne's Writing + Giveaway

Whenever I'm about to start a new Joanna Bourne book, or even an oft-read book, I get this fillip of excitement. I know I'm in for a great reading experience.

I've been a fan of Bourne since her first book, The Spymaster's Lady. The romance book world was abuzz when that book was released. People felt the way I did—we were watching the launch of a legend in romance. Was it the story? The action? The plotting and pacing? The characters? The dialogue? Well, it was everything, and it dazzled us.

What I noticed first and last and always was the writing. When you read a Bourne, you realize how well-crafted her prose is. It's not just beauty and elegance of phrasing but it is the carefully chosen nuance and shades of a nuance that'll portray that particular detail layered with that particular emotion just at that perfect moment in time.

For example, look at how she reveals Pax's character in Rogue Spy:

The woman he'd been watching tossed another wide circle of crumbs and her cloak flowed like water falling. Sparrows hopped and scuttled madly left or right around her feet. He's do that lone, self-contained figure in chalks, the sweet curve of her cloak laid in burnt sienna over indigo. He'd thumb in one soft smudge of pale amber under her hood, where the plane of her cheek showed.

Bourne shows here that not only is Pax a very observant spy, but he's an artist of some skill who prefers to work in chalk. He looks at the world like it's a painting he can emulate.

What does it take to be perceived as a coachman? See in The Spymaster's Lady:

Across the courtyard, Will Doyle was playing coachman, pacing the off-side horse, a big piebald mare, in a wide circle around the inn yard, watching its gait.

Here's another example, where in one fell swoop, she reveals the character of Justine, Séverine, Maggie, and Doyle and the political climate of the story in The Black Hawk:

Her sister was well cared for. She was held within that mansion as in careful cupped hands. She was given the pretty riding habit and sleek, playful pony. Given the tutor — he had been a great scholar in France before he was broken and tossed aside by the Revolution. That was another soul Marguerite gave refuge to. Alert, dangerous veterans of the war, some missing an eye or an arm, patrolled the perimeter. Three monster dogs coursed the grounds after dark. If there were any peace and safety in the world, William Doyle folded it around his wife and the children in his house.

I find that I have to be very alert when I'm reading in order to not miss gem after such gem. And they are on every page to be discovered on the first read-through or the tenth.

Right at the very beginning of her books, Bourne launches the reader into a chaotic and agonizing scene for one of her protagonists. The stories take off with a bang and the action never lets up. Take a look at the beginnings of three of her books:

She was willing to die, of course, but she has not planned to do it so soon, or in such a prolonged and uncomfortable fashion, or at the hands of her own countrymen. —The Spymaster's Lady

The past caught up to her in the rain, in Braddy Square, six hundred yards from Meeks Street. —The Black Hawk

The end of her own particular world arrived early on a Tuesday morning, wrapped in brown paper and twine, sealed with a blog of red wax. —Rogue Spy

You immediately know something about the three heroines and the dire situations they face. They're at the end of their rope, so the only way to move forward is for them to be extremely resourceful. And the reader is thus launched into the story, dying to find out.

In the midst of all the angst of on-stage and off-stage physical and emotional action, Bourne's stories are romances, not just thrillers with love scenes. These days, it is rare to find this: love scenes that are organic—that are there because it's a natural progression in the characters' growth arc for them to be intimate, that are never of the "X number of scenes with Y positions" variety sprinkled with a liberal hand in the narrative at the expense of actual story. From The Spymaster's Lady: Lovemaking is of the mind, not a grappling of anatomies.

What was highly intriguing to me about The Spymaster's Lady and Rogue Spy is how those two storylines fit jigsaw puzzle-like with each other. Even as the first was part-way through, the latter was taking off, and the two heroes, Grey and Pax crossed each other and interacted with each other in the other's storylines. Bourne does this over and over again with her characters and other books. How in the world does she keep those tiny details straight in her head to avoid making mistakes within the books and across the books? Quite impossible to maintain such a detailed book bible.

Many times in series, characters who're going to be heroes or heroines of their stories show up in the first book as minor characters with not much happening to them. Not so with Bourne's stories. Her sequel heroes have their stories start from the very first book even if they're minor characters. So while each book is a standalone, reading the books in order makes for a far better reading experience, because it allows you to weave a rich tapestry of Bourne's world, and in her world, every tiny detail counts.

Note that the order of publication is not the order of the series, since Bourne has written books out of chronological order in her series.

I really like how she's grounds her characters and the storylines with a great concept of home for these rootless spies. Number 7 Meeks Street is their headquarters. This is where they come to confess their darkest moments and find succor. Within its walls, these assassins find peace to examine their lives and choose new directions. Galba is their taskmaster, secretive and ruthless, and yet he exerts a benevolent influence over the motley societal misfits.

From The Spymaster's Lady:

"One more thing..." Galba had become grave. He moved the inkwell upon his desk a finger's breadth to the left and stared at it, his lips compressed and twisted at the corner, as if the inkwell had blighted many hopes. "We heard of your mother's death, but not how it happened. Will you tell me?"

Her point-of-view worldview is masterful. Her characters don't slip out of, well, character. They don't see things they can't, they don't infer things that only others would know, and so on. When you're in one character's head, you're enmeshed in that character's personality, knowledge, experience, and vision.

I could go on and on about what I find fascinating about the writing and the world of Joanna Bourne's stories.

[A complete aside: May I gush on about how very much I like the cover of Rogue Spy? There's human interest, there's drama and atmosphere, there's a historical feel, there's a romance feel, it's classy and understated—just the perfect cover.]

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I'm giving away one print copy of Rogue Spy to a commenter. This offer is good for U.S. and Canadian readers only. Deadline for commenting is Thursday, November 6, 2014 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Please tell me: Have you read any of Joanna Bourne's books? If so, which one is your favorite and why? If none of her books worked for you, why not?

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Five Tools for World Building in Historical Fiction

Right around the time of the Romance Writers of America's annual conference in July, I came across a two-part article on world-building for historical fiction novels by author Tim Weed for The Grub Daily.

I read the article over and over again, thought about it a lot, tweeted about it, then thought about blogging about it, then promptly forgot about it. Then suddenly last night, when I was wondering whatever I am going to blog about tomorrow, it flashed in my inward eye (misquoting Wordsworth) and was deemed perfect for today's offering.

I am going to very briefly summarize the article's five main points below. However, I urge you to read the article in its entirety here and here.

Vivid Descriptions of Nature
We instinctively recognize natural landscapes, whether or not we've spent a significant of time communing with nature and whether or not the landscape is deeply familiar or completely foreign. As a result, they always elicits deep emotional responses.

Accurate Portrayal of Recognizable Human Emotions
Evoke plausible and vivid emotional states for your characters that ring true to us and they will come alive for us, and through the characters, hook us into the story.

Incorporating the Exotic
Provide us with a vicarious experience of the unfamiliar. Make us see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, touch it, sense it.

Defamiliarization
Show a different way to see the same situation or person. Show something that is "familiar, even clichéd, in a compelling new light. In the process, it makes us wake up and pay attention."

Use Period Details—But Sparingly
Don't fall into the temptation of an infodump. All your research doesn't have to be unloaded into your story. You want to add it delicately like a strong spice in your dish. The nuances are where the beauty is, not in the actual description. "Remember: period details must make sense given what's happening in the story and the point of view character's emotional state."

Summation
"Vivid, concrete, specific detail is the lifeblood, the gods' nectar, of fiction."