On Writing Romance (7 page)

Choosing your own surroundings for your setting can be a great benefit.

Since you already know the setting, you don't have to search out the essential details that evoke the location for the readers. It's one less thing to look up, one less thing to distract you from the story you're writing.

Writing about your own surroundings can also be a big disadvantage. Since you already know the setting, you may find it difficult to step back far enough to see the important, telling details that the readers will want to know.

It's often a good idea to fictionalize your own surroundings if you live in a small town. If you want to set your story in a small New England town, make it an imaginary one. Then you can draw on your experience of living in a small New England town without being limited by the reality of your particular town.

If the city you live in is large enough that nobody knows every main street, important building, major business, or neighborhood, you don't need to fictionalize the setting. (In practical terms, that means you should fictionalize any town with a population of less than about a hundred thousand.)Even when using larger cities, however, it makes sense to fictionalize any element — such as a street, story, or building — if details about the real thing are hard to get or easily proven wrong. If you want to use a famous skyscraper as a setting, getting pictures of the interior for realistic descriptions may be difficult, and anybody who's even vaguely familiar with the real layout will know if you're faking it. Creating your own skyscraper leaves you free to visualize the real one while arranging apartments and offices exactly as you like.

If you're setting your book in a large-scale fictional location, like a made-up country, consistent and realistic details can make your entire story — and inconsistencies or gaps can break it. Modeling a fictional country on a real country (or a combination of countries) usually results in a more convincing setting than making up a nation out of thin air. You can know a great deal about how your fictional government operates, or how your royal family ascended to the throne six hundred years ago, without sharing all that detail with your readers. But figuring it out — even if it doesn't apply to the specific story — will help you avoid inconsistencies and make your story feel more real.

Laws, Legal Issues, and Established Traditions:
Many romances deal with legal issues — ownership of property, child custody, lawsuits, inheritance — so familiarizing yourself with legal basics early in your writing career may prevent you from wasting time and effort on impossible plots.

For instance, if you're writing a story in which your hero and heroine get married on two hours' notice, you'll need to know which states permit that and which don't. If you don't know before you start writing, you're apt to set your story in a state that requires blood tests and a waiting period, and you'll have a big job of revising to make the story fit the facts.

If you're writing about a divorce attorney, you'd better know right up front that she could lose her license if she starts dating the client she's representing, or you're apt to create a story scenario that simply won't fly.

If you're writing a Regency and you have the duke leave his estate and title to his younger son because the older one's a brat, then you're violating the laws of the time, as well as turning off readers who know about those laws.

Those big issues need to be investigated before you develop a story, so some general reading is a good investment of time. Smaller details — like what identification the couple needs to present to actually get married, or what the divorcing couple might argue over, or exactly what a younger son could inherit — are safe to leave until later, when you know more about the precise picture you want to create.

The larger the legal element is in your story, the more research you'll need to do. If one of your main characters is an attorney, consider reading biographies or autobiographies of attorneys in order to familiarize yourself with the backgrounds and thinking styles of real lawyers.

There are a number of good law reference books, written for laymen, that provide basic background; many list specific information as well. Though your local bookstore may not have a wide range of titles on hand, a quick search through Internet bookstores such as Barnes & Noble (
www.bn.com
) or Amazon (
www.amazon.com
) will bring up many useful books. For instance, keywords like
law for the layman
and
legal rights
will bring up books such as the
American Bar Association Legal Guide for Small Business, Know Your Legal Rights
, and many titles dealing with specific areas like real estate and child custody.

Your public library will have general legal references, though they may be somewhat dated, and can order specific books from other libraries through interlibrary loan.

For quick and up-to-date reference, the Internet is hard to beat. A Google search for
marriage requirements
and
states
returned thousands of sites listing the details of the current marriage law in each of the fifty states. Among the top three sites was
http://usmarriagelaws.com/search/united_states/
, which includes (along with a wealth of other information) the requirements in each state for getting a marriage license. Another good site is
www.findlaw.com
, which has archives of basic information on every legal issue you can think of.

If possible, cultivate the acquaintance of an attorney or two. Many of them love puzzles and will happily argue both sides of a hypothetical legal question while you take notes (especially if you offer to buy lunch, bake them a pie, or dedicate the book to them).

Medicine:
Researching medical questions so your character's health problems are realistic can be as easy as checking
www.WebMD.com
or as complex as spending days in the library of a medical school reading case studies. Some good basic reference books include home medical encyclopedias — especially those that index symptoms as well as diseases — and nursing textbooks. Medical-surgical nursing texts are amazingly detailed about common and obscure illnesses and treatments. Nursing schools frequently update their texts, so last year's editions can often be found in charity book sales.

Professional Codes of Ethics:
Most professions have ethical codes, written or understood, and those rules affect how characters in those professions can behave. There are, for instance, many ethical considerations in how doctors interact with their patients and their patients' families. If a relationship starts to develop between a doctor and a patient, the doctor may be required to remove himself from the case. There are ethical considerations governing when a doctor can treat members of his family and when he should step aside.

The important point is that, even if the doctor you've created doesn't actually follow the rules, he knows about them. If he violates the ethical code and has a relationship with a patient, he might feel guilty, or sly, or proud — depending on the sort of person he is — but he'll feel something. If you don't know about medical ethics, then no matter how your doctor behaves, he isn't going to be believable to the readers who do.

If in doubt about ethics, ask a member of the profession about what's acceptable and what's forbidden. Can't find someone in the profession? Search the Internet for a professional organization or union and contact the public relations office. Professionals want to be portrayed accurately and realistically, so they'll help wherever they can.

Some professional fields — medicine, technology, computer science — change more quickly than others. Computer-centered plots are not well received by publishers for this very reason. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use fast-changing fields in your story, but if you do choose to use them, proceed with caution. Select details with care, and don't be so specific that rapid change will make your story obsolete.

An amazing number of people decide to write historical romances without knowing much about the time period they're interested in, and some write without even having a preference for one period over another. Others, in contrast, have done so much research that they have to fight the temptation to write a history text or a sociology study or a language manual rather than a romance.

No matter what the historical period you choose, it's important to know enough about it to portray it realistically. Small, everyday matters usually present the greatest difficulty. Research books don't often go into detail about domestic routine, and chasing down the fine points of how a gown would be trimmed or what the heroine would have worn underneath can be time-consuming. However, including such detail is helpful in creating the picture in the readers' minds and keeping them absorbed in the story.

There are a number of costume museums around the world, and many have illustrated Web sites that can be of help. The Museum of Costume in Bath, England (
www.museumofcostume.co.uk
) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (
www.metmuseum.org
) both display fashions from several centuries on their Web sites. Encyclopedias of world costumes may be available at your library.

There is an increasing number of good reference books that offer specific details on historical periods. Writer's Digest has a series of volumes about everyday life in various historical eras (Regency, Victorian, Elizabethan) that specializes in the down-to-earth details, and books like Daniel Pool's
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew
explain such things as inheritance law, criminal justice, and society's rules in a specific time period.

Primary sources are particularly important in historical research. Letters and diaries tell more about real people in a particular historical period than history books can, while newspapers relay not only what was going on but also the relative importance the event had at the time. Letters, diaries, and newspapers can help you adapt your ear to the vocabulary of the time. Many historic newspapers are available on microfilm through your local library, and front pages for historic dates are published in collections or available as individual reproductions.

Historical fact occasionally collides with modern sensibilities, and in some areas the wise historical author bends fact to fit the beliefs of the modern reader. Women's rights, age at marriage, and personal hygiene are all areas where modern values sometimes clash violently with historical fact. Heroes and heroines of historical romances are apt to be more modern in outlook and action, older, and cleaner than real-life brides and grooms of centuries past.

Many books use real historical figures, with varying success. Georgette Heyer is perhaps the best example of an author who successfully portrayed a historical figure. In
An Infamous Army,
a love story set against the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, she brings the Duke of Wellington to life by using his own words (taken from his letters and dispatches) to create his dialogue.

Though it seems it should be easier to portray real people than to make up fictional ones, it's actually more difficult. When real people appear in fiction, they tend to come across as stereotyped or cartoonish. A real person is best used as a background or secondary character, rather than as a prominent part of the story. If you use real people, keep them consistent to reality — if the real king was a tyrant, then your fictional portrayal won't be believable if you show him as a gentle, misunderstood soul.

Real people can be researched through encyclopedias, biographies, letters, and diaries (either the diaries of the subject or of someone who knew him).

Whenever possible, adapt what your real character says from the records of what he actually said or wrote so his style, words, and attitude ring true. And aim for small amounts of consistent detail rather than adding a large number of facts.

Another valid approach is to fictionalize a real person — using the basic facts but changing the name and details — so your character doesn't have to match in every respect. Fictionalizing a real person leaves you free to change the person's personality and behavior in order to create the best possible story. This approach is more feasible with moderately well-known individuals than it is with truly famous ones; fictionalizing Henry VIII would be considerably less successful than creating an additional member of the aristocracy in Henry's era.