*without losing your voice

Substitute “damn” every time you’re inclined to write “very;” your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

If you’re in any way a normal writer, your first draft is likely to be bloated. Not with plot or characters, but with words. Performing a good slash-and-burn on your manuscript is an essential part of editing, but learning how to find the extraneous padding quickly and easily is key. Short of following Mark Twain’s advice (and that only really works for authors with editors), here are three tips to help you find what you need to delete.

1. Make wordle.net your friend

If you’ve not played worked withwordle yet, you’re missing out. For the uninitiated, wordle creates word clouds based on any piece of text you paste into the website. As well as being great fun, you can see what words you’re using most frequently. If any of these are ‘fluff’ words that don’t add anything to a sentence, such as ‘extremely’, ‘very’ or ‘actually’, get ready to hunt and destroy!

2. Get ‘Ctrl+F, delete’ happy

Now you know your fluff words, it’s time to scour your manuscript for them and eliminate them. The quickest way to do this is to use the Ctrl+F function, read each sentence that contains fluff and then use the delete key liberally. Trust me, your reader will thank you for it.

3. Use Word’s grammar tools

Generally I’d suggest ignoring the green wavy lines that Word uses to highlight supposed grammar issues, as they are unreliable at the best of times. There are some advanced options that are useful when you’re trying to combat word bloat however.

Go to Tools>Options>Spelling&Grammar and you’ll see the third section of the pop up window is entitled ‘Grammar’. On the drop down, select ‘Grammar & Style’ and then hit the ‘Settings’ button.

Scroll down and you’ll find a ‘Style’ section where you can tick a number of options, including:

• Cliches, Colloquialisms and Jargon
• Sentence length (more than sixty words)
• Successive nouns
• Wordiness

It’s then a simple task to run your manuscript through these filters and then search for what Word thinks are issues. You can always ignore the suggestsions.

What tricks do you use when you’re editing to cut down on word bloat?

Conflict is the life blood of the romance novel.

Are you sure, Cara? I thought it was all about two people falling in love.

Well, yes… But two people falling in love won’t stretch to 90,000 words. It wouldn’t even come close to 50,000 words. Plus, it’s kind of boring.

Sure, seeing two people who are obviously in love is cute. It warms the heart, makes you say ‘awwwww!’ under your breath. But other people in love are essentially boring. They agree with each other all the time. They have cute/nauseating nicknames for one another. And all they wan’t to do is hang out with each other.

Great for them. Not so great for someone on the outside looking in. And in the case of romantic fiction, the person on the outside looking in is your reader.

You can’t afford to bore your reader.

The way to not bore your reader is to make it hard for your hero and heroine to fall in love. Put obstacles in their way. Make the universe conspire against them. Make them their own worst enemies.

In other words: create conflict.

But how?

To my mind, there are three essential steps to creating killer conflict. Tick these off, and you’ll be on your way to making it almost impossible for them to get together.

Step 1: understand their goals and motivations, and where they clash

Understanding your characters’ goals and motivations is the first step in building conflict, both external and internal. Once you do understand them, you then need to search for the points at which they clash – these points are where conflict will flourish most easily.

An example always helps. Let’s say your heroine is an environmental activist. She lives in a rural community, close to her extended family, and works on a small organic farm. She volunteers for just about every cause that crosses her path, and is passionate about living a sustainable lifestyle.

Our hero is a lawyer from the city who’s travelled to the heroine’s small town to secure a land deal he’s been working on for months. Geological reports show there’s high quality coal in the region, and his client has applied for permits to explore. He drives a fast car, dresses in expensive suits and lives on pre-packaged meals eaten in front of his wide screen TV – at least, that’s when he’s at home. Most nights he’s working late as he climbs the corporate ladder.

So what conflicts can you see here? Our heroine is motivated by sustainable living, a simple lifestyle and preserving the status quo. In comes our hero, who’s motivated by achieving the impossible, the latest status symbols and economic progress. What do you think will happen when these two meet?

Step 2: Layer it up

To make really strong, enduring conflict that will last the whole novel, you need to layer it up. Above I briefly mentioned the idea of external and internal conflict; you need to have both of these to make a really strong story.

External conflict is what’s imposed by the outside world. So in our example book, the external conflict is created by the mining company wanting to explore in our heroine’s backyard.

Internal conflict is what comes from the characters themselves, and it’s internal conflict that you really need to focus on when crafting (or editing) your novel. Internal conflict is driven by your characters’ beliefs, desires and needs, their history and previous life experiences, and is the real meat of the novel.

Just with the brief character sketches I’ve drawn above, I can see a number of internal conflicts. For example:

• country girl vs city boy
• her large family vs his solo lifestyle
• their respective views on money
• their ideas of community

And that’s just based on the few lines above. If you delve into your characters’ past, you’ll find age-old wounds that are still impacting the present day; disfunctional relationships, absentee parents and best-friend betrayals are all grist for the internal conflict mill.

Step 3: Keep it real, play fair and move forward

You need to make sure your conflict is realistic. Ideally, conflict should be strong enough to make the reader worry about whether or not the hero and heroine are actually going to get together. And we want the reader to worry – that’s what keeps them turning the pages.

However, there’s a risk you go too far, and end up with characters who just seem to hate each other, all the way through the book. In this situation, the conflict isn’t resolved – the hero and heroine just suddenly decide they like one another, and that’s it. 

Hmmmm. Unconvincing conflict resolution results in books being thrown at the wall. To avoid this, we need to:

Keep it real

When we start getting to know our characters, it can be tempting to load the conflict on thick. One of my early heroines was an orphan who’s only remaining relative had been murdered; she’d been abused by a previous boyfriend and now her career was hanging by a thread thanks to a git of a boss.

Too much. All of that past trauma gives our heroine way too many issues to be dealt with in the space of a novel. Just one of those past incidents is enough to set the basis for some great conflict, so don’t weigh your characters down with too many past issues.

Play fair

Playing fair is all about making sure your characters have some redeeming features. Your hero can be as mean as satan, but there has to be some glimmer of light, some crack in the armour that makes his relationship with the heroine convincing.

Think about Rochester (Jane Eyre). He’s gruff, unyielding, miserable… but he has taken Adele under his wing. For Jane (and for the reader), this is a hint at what lies beneath.

Move forward

You need to keep your characters moving forward through their conflicts. Progress is important in a novel; without it, we just end up with two characters going round in circles over pointless arguments. If you’ve layered your conflicts up nicely, it should be easy enough to expose the next conflict as each one is resolved – think of it as peeling an onion!

Keeping it real was brought home to me when I watched The Proposal. This movie features Sandra Bullock  and Ryan Reynolds, and the basic conflict is a marriage of convenience. There’s some layering as the heroine travels to Alaska with the hero to meet his family and has to endure a weekend away from her normal, safe city life.

So far, so good. However, all the hero and heroine did was argue, snap and humiliate one another. Half way through, I’d yet to find a single redeeming feature in either of them, the hero was weighed down by too many family conflicts to keep track of, and they were having the same argument over and over again.

It got turned off. There was just no way I could see the conflict being resolved convincingly. I had a horrible sense that the director was just going to manufacture a scene where they’d suddenly see each other with fresh eyes, layer some appropriate music over the top, and wham – they’re in love!

I don’t think so.

The key thing to remember with conflict is that it has to seem natural, not forced – and its resolution also has to feel natural to the reader. Without natural-seeming conflict, your book might just get thrown at the wall.

And you wouldn’t want that, would you?

With love,

Cara

xx

I’m always on the hunt for ways to make my precious writing time more efficient. As a pre-published author, I’m still working full time, so the time that I can eke out of my day for writing has to be used as effectively as possible. So when I read about The Pomodoro Technique I was excited to give it a try – and not least because it’s name after one of those cheesy tomato-shaped kitchen timers!

There’s a whole heap of information on the website, but in essence it comes down to five steps:

1. Decide what you’re going to work on
2. Set your timer (the Pomodoro if you can find one) for 25 minutes
3. Work on the task until your timer rings
4. Take a short break (5 minutes is fine)
5. Repeat, taking a longer break after four ‘pomodoros’

Simple, eh?

I decided to give it a go today. I don’t have a kitchen timer, so I used focusboosterapp, an online version of the timer which is set at the default 25 minutes. Because I’ve been working from home today, I decided to start on some tasks for my day job.

How did it go? Really well – surprisingly so in fact. I had doubts that 25 minutes would be long enough to get much done, but I think the fact that I knew I only had 25 minutes focused my mind and attention, and I stormed through the work. In the space of three ‘pomodoros’ I’d reviewed six sets of company accounts. A report I’d been putting off for weeks (ahem!) took another two ‘pomodoros’, and reviewing a proposal document took another two.

During my lunch hour I tried applying it to writing, and in 25 minutes got 500 words down. Not bad.

So if you want to try this technique, this is what you need to know:

1. You can achieve a surprising amount in 25 minutes
2. It’s a great way of working out how long things take you – no need to write down start and finish times, all you do is record the number of ‘pomodoros’ you’ve used on a task.
3. The timers make a ticking noise – even the online one. Apparently this is all part of the technique, and I do think that having the ticking going on in the background is enough to stop your mind wandering. However, it makes it difficult if you’re in an office with other people. Today I was working at home, so the only ones bothered by the noise were my cats – but if I were at my desk at work, I’d need headphones to make sure my colleagues weren’t put off.
4. Your breaks need to be proper breaks – no surfing the net or quickly checking emails. Get up, walk around the block, make a cup of tea – whatever. The important thing is that your mind is switched off from what you’re doing.

Do you think writing in ‘pomodoros’ will help your productivity?

With love,

Cara

xx