On Writing Romance (18 page)

If so, you appreciate the value of straightforward narrative — simple words, simple (though varied) sentence structures, and events coming one after another in the same sequence in which they actually occurred. Using simple words and uncomplicated sentence structure does not make a story dull. In fact, straightforward writing is more difficult to compose well than more complex and literary flights of fancy because every word counts. Writing so the story will be easy for the readers to comprehend is not a simple task.

When you're writing, keep in mind the order in which things actually happen, and follow that order. Tell the readers that someone new has come into the room before the new character starts talking. Show the event and then the reaction. It's far easier for the readers to follow and enjoy action when they see it happening in real time and in order.

Don't let your point-of-view character react before you tell the readers what she's reacting to — as I've done in this example:

Notice that I've put Jane's gut reaction first, then a more reasoned reaction, and then finally the comment that caused the reaction. The result will probably make the readers go back and read the paragraph over again to figure out what happened when.

But when you share events in the order in which they happen, the readers are right there watching, as in this example from Susan Elizabeth Phillips'
First Lady
, when her hero, Mat, is driving Lucy and her baby sister to a lab for blood tests to prove he's not their father:

Phillips gives us enough details to picture the scene as it's unfolding, and it's important to note what she doesn't tell us: how many miles it is to the lab; how many red lights they stop for; how many dents the Winnebago has; whether the lab building is brick, frame, or stone. Instead, she focuses on the events that are important at this point in the story: Mat starts up the mobile home with difficulty, drives to the lab, and parks; Lucy gets out and throws up. Showing the sequence of events in neat chronological order actually builds suspense, because during the drive to the lab, our suspicions are growing that this can't possibly go as smoothly as Mat hopes it will.

Narrating the events in order automatically limits the amount of information the readers get. When you're telling about events and people, it's easy to tell too much. But when the readers see and hear what's going on for themselves, they have some limitations — and they become more involved with the story as they try to figure out what's going on.

Story-showing has limits. Not every event is important enough to be worth the time and space required in order to show every instant of the action. Not every movement or thought is crucial to the readers' comprehension. Many episodes can be made clearer with a single summing-up sentence than with pages of descriptive detail. Summary and exposition are the tools you use when you need to let readers know something but using story-showing details would only slow things down.

Summary is a concise statement of facts or the order of events; it's straight telling, without using dialogue or action. Summary is “just the facts, ma'am.”

Exposition is summary with a twist — it tells what happened, but it also explains why. Exposition doesn't simply show the action and allow readers to make their own judgments; it tells the readers what to think.

The single sentence “Sara hadn't seen Max in years” is a summary — it simply and efficiently states a fact that readers need to know. This simple sentence is much clearer than a paragraph or two giving the details of Sara's confusion and happiness and memories at the encounter. And especially if Max isn't critically important in Sara's life or her story, the space you save by summarizing could be better used for other things.

Exposition is a little more problematic. If your heroine is chatting with an old friend and you break off the conversation to say, “Sally met Jane when they were in kindergarten and Jane had been her best friend ever since,” you're using exposition — you're telling readers rather than letting them discover for themselves. Whether readers need or want to know that these two characters have been friends for twenty years is another question altogether, and that's where the use of exposition becomes clouded. Is it better to tell, or is it better to show Sally and Jane reminiscing about their school days? The answer will depend on the story. If what happened in kindergarten is important in Sally's current story, perhaps you need to show it through dialogue or even flashback. If it isn't, the single line of exposition is preferable — if you need to explain anything at all.

In Tanya Michaels's romantic comedy
The Maid of Dishonor
, the heroine is attending a cocktail party, but the conversation isn't important to the story — so Michaels wisely opts for two paragraphs of summary instead of giving all the details:

By summing up the unimportant talk, Michaels quickly moves her heroine out to the terrace where the next important event will take place.

If you introduce your main character by saying “Sally Jones, who was the personal assistant to a powerful businessman, answered the phone,” you're telling the readers about Sally, her boss, and the office, rather than letting the readers find out for themselves. You're cheating the readers out of a chance to see Sally in action.

If you stop in the middle of your main characters' quarrel to explain why they've never been able to get along, you're taking away from the readers the joy of figuring that out for themselves.

Sometimes, especially when a passage of this sort goes on for a while, it's referred to as an information dump — as if the author has upended a basketful of facts over the reader's head.

As we saw in the storytelling and story-showing examples at the beginning of the chapter, giving all the details so readers can make up their own minds takes a great deal more space. If the action isn't concise and fast moving, or if it isn't particularly important, summary may be the best way to handle it. If all you're doing is moving your heroine across country, you probably don't need to detail every stop sign and road change. It's better to write, “The journey seemed to take forever, and the endless parade of gas stations meshed into a blur in her memory,” and let it go at that.

Summary and exposition can be very useful to set the stage, giving the details necessary for readers to create a picture in their minds. “In matching fireplaces at each end of the room, gas logs flickered, banishing the gloom of a rainy afternoon,” gives the information succinctly. You could have the main characters chat about the fires and the weather instead, but it would take up half a page and not add much to the story.

Even in a long novel, your space — your number of words — is limited. Use them for showing the important things, and let the readers fill in the rest from their experience and imagination.

Sometimes, especially when a story takes place over a period of years or has its origins in a long-ago event, flashbacks are a useful story-showing tool.

A flashback is a scene that takes a character back in time to an event, so the character actually relives what happened. The readers see the scene from the character's point of view at the time, and they hear the actual words spoken, not the character's recollection of what was said. The scene takes place just as it would if it were a present-day event; it's not just a memory.

Flashback is most often used in romance stories in which the hero and heroine have had an earlier relationship. The flashbacks show significant bits of their past interaction so the readers can see these important events for themselves and understand why the characters are still reacting to those events today.

Since a flashback presents events as they actually happened, it uses straightforward narrative. Because flashback scenes are usually relayed just like a scene from the present action, readers sometimes find it difficult to tell when they've entered a flashback. You can use a number of techniques to help make the transition clear to the readers.

• Warn the readers of what's coming.
  Make sure they know they're about to enter a flashback. You can do this by using past perfect tense during the shift from the current story to the flashback. During the rest of the flashback scene, use the simple past tense, returning briefly to past perfect to finish the flashback. In many cases, a sentence or two of summary at the beginning and end of the flashback are necessary to set the scene and establish place and time. (If the main part of the story is being told in present tense, then the body of the flashback also will use present tense. You can signal the start of a flashback in this case by using past tense.)
  

• Create a logical transition from present to past.
  Memories don't come out of nowhere. What brought the past event to mind? What's making the character think about it right now?
  

• Place the flashback in a plausible spot in the story.
  Does the character have time for the luxury of memory? While the heroine's being chased down the street by the bad guys, she's not likely to be reconsidering her life. If she's holed up in a closet, holding her breath and hoping they'll overlook her, she might.
  

• Don't use flashbacks early in the book.
  Never start a story with a flashback. Get the present-day story well established first. By focusing on the main story, you'll build sympathy for your characters and reader interest about what happened in their pasts. If you've done a good job of making your characters sympathetic by the time you take your readers on that journey into the past, they'll be happy to accompany you.
  

• Break large flashbacks into smaller portions.
  If your story has a great deal of important past action, it's a good idea to feed it to your readers in small chunks, returning to the present at intervals — even if only for a few paragraphs — in order to reestablish the main story.
  

• Finish a flashback by returning your readers to where (and when) they were before the flashback started.
  This helps make it apparent that the side trip is now finished and the readers are once again on the main path.
  

In one of my books,
Promise Me Tomorrow
, the hero and heroine have a vast amount of shared history, including an unplanned pregnancy, a marriage of convenience, a miscarriage, and a divorce. All of that is important because it affects what happens to them in the present-day story; the readers need to see the events and be allowed to judge for themselves what happened, rather than seeing things as interpreted much later by the now more mature characters.

To put all that powerful history into a single flashback would overwhelm any story, no matter how carefully the flashback was handled. I split the past events into a half-dozen segments scattered throughout chapters two, three, and four — almost the entire first half of the book — and as a result, the flashbacks became a powerful secondary narrative, almost a subplot.

One of these flashback episodes is introduced when the heroine, shortly after encountering the hero for the first time in several years, is alone in her bedroom:

The flashback begins, using past perfect tense (
had been, had had
) to indicate a time long past, then sliding into past tense (
was, said
) as summary gives way to action: