During our initial three trawls through the quagmire of wisdom that is Secrets Uncovered we learned of the basic elements involved in creating conflict for story-telling purposes. Following on from those lessons comes another fundamental insight, 'Emotional conflict needs to be emotionally impactful,' at least so say the editors at Romance HQ. However, these same editors proffer a warning that too much emotion will see your manuscript rejected just as easily as if you had not bothered with emotion at all. There is a careful balancing act to be performed, so your reader will be invested in your story and the journeys of your characters, but will never become afraid that something dramatic, or sad, is forthcoming, to shatter the warm buzz of romance and alcohol. Searching for additional insight, RIVA author Fiona Harper was drafted in to throw around her own experiences. 'New writers often make the mistake of thinking that emotion on the page is the same as drama on the page. However, too much high emotion can turn readers off just as quickly as too little emotion.' Once sense has been deciphered from that quote we are forced to ask, is this an implied call for subtlety, from the author of English Lord, Ordinary Lady and Swept Off Her Stilettos?
Ignoring that as skilfully as we have grown accustomed to, we move along. 'Too many manuscripts from aspiring authors feature heroes and heroines who are emotionally incontinent. You know the sort – the ones that just have to let it all out every time they get the urge! Toddlers might behave this way, but mature adults don’t. Or shouldn’t.' Until toddler romance fiction catches on a potential writer is best served reinventing the Mills & Boon standard with the introduction of mature adults, so long as mature means a woman no older than thirty and a man a few years older than his prospective bride, both of whom severely repressed because of previous relationships and unresolved issues with their parents. Now, instead of all this womanly talk of openly sharing, empathy and gin, we should embrace an era of heroes and heroines barely able to control their tempers, passions and other dangerous tendencies. 'Often, the most emotional scenes are the ones where a character struggles to keep a lid on their feelings. If your character doesn’t cry, your reader will.'
Therefore, the mental breakdowns of your protagonists must be carefully-structured, a deliberate-yet-inevitable build-up to forsaking all else for the love of a heartbroken cowboy billionaire recently returned from war. 'If you overdo the drama, you risk exhausting readers and they’ll switch off. Connection broken. Book put down. Also, if you use all your emotional ammunition on scenes that don’t need it you’ll have nowhere to go when the real emotional high points come.' Sound advice to many hopeful Mills & Boon fans, who must have no idea what they are doing in their new careers. There is an obvious pitfall to all this angst, hardship and crying, however. How much is too much and don't readers just want a hunky, yet egocentric, billionaire, a happy ending, a few sex scenes and about forty thousand words of padding? Surely depression, politics, addictions, heartbreak and brutal murder are at best ill-advised and at worst completely unjustifiable when telling the tale of two idiots falling in love against a backdrop of exotic paradise, or small-town America.
In what Bewildered Heart has chosen to describe as research we have witnessed the odd murder, the kidnap of a baby, the accidental death of a toddler, casual sexual assault, war and journalists in our past experiences with romance fiction. In the majority of those examples the serious issues felt unsuitable due to the superficial treatment they received in a character's back-story for present-day motivation. Despite this prescient warning, Secrets Uncovered turned to a self-proclaimed author of feel-good, emotional stories for Cherish, the sub-genre known to Bewildered Heart as Romance Romance. Donna Alward was more than happy to take some time away from fetishising cowboys to explain how to balance dark themes with inoffensive loving. 'There are times I walk a really fine line between deeply emotional and depressing. Let me say right now, if you have these tendencies, embrace them. It’s not a bad thing.' Fair enough, Donna Alward, but what kinds of gloomy tendencies should we expect from A Family For the Rugged Rancher, Honeymoon With the Rancher, or other depressing-sounding titles featuring ranchers?
'I’ve dealt with the death of a baby, miscarriage, physical disfigurement, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical abuse… I do emotional trauma.' There is nothing wrong with the big issues that plague the everyday lives of everyday people, and if Alward's books contain those traumas within the context of the stories, rather than as prehistoric scarring, then kudos to her. How does Donna do it then, and could she possibly tell us while skilfully publicising one of her own recent novels? 'I’m going to use my book Her Lone Cowboy as an example.' Well played. 'Noah is home from Afghanistan where he lost his right arm in combat. From the start I knew that he could be down but not out. He needed to be fighting to get his life back and reaching for a goal which may or may not be happiness.' Self-pity is not attractive, as most of us learn the hard way, and therefore Noah grasps heroically, albeit vaguely, for an objective that can be held in one hand. We can surely predict that his objective will involve a loving woman and maybe a ranch, with some horses.
The secret to Alward's definition of success? 'It’s about going deep. The conflict is not the issue, but it is easy to confuse the two. It is not that he has lost his arm and needs to adjust. It’s the ripple effect: his loss of identity as a combat leader, finding a new place in the world, reconciling himself to being home and the death of his father, falling in love but being unsure that he is man enough.' Suddenly his missing arm is the least of his troubles, as narrative necessities push it toward the periphery. Certainly, his disability is a telling metaphor for his feelings of emasculation, but Her Lone Cowboy is a poor example of chiaroscuro. The tale of Noah and Lily seems comparable to another Cherish title, The Dad Next Door, which heaped on the tragic crises, and then wasted them on soap opera histrionics. The sadness of losing a child, being jilted and the worst recesses of grief had happened before the story began, and this left the book itself to deal with the less dramatic telling of a coupling, one revelation that proved inconsequential, and the return of a secondary character, which was then dealt with ineptly. Alward's explanation is no showcase of the depth of Harlequin Mills & Boon, but merely proof that the tearjerker-elements should be kept to a non-existent prologue and then only sold under the Cherish banner.
The advice contained within Secrets Uncovered amounts to nothing more than Alward's statement that Noah is, 'Not self-pitying but proactive, always moving forward. A reader cannot cheer for your characters if your characters don’t cheer for themselves.' However, he must be proactive and moving the story forward, not to gain the reader's sympathy, but because he is a romantic hero, and the ostensible protagonist of the novel. With this the Conflict Chapter ends and the readers are left to ponder a few questions. How is our own attempt shaping up in view of these guidelines, and, just as importantly, were any of these guidelines useful? We have learned that our publishers share our dream of one day seeing a one-legged hero accidentally-impregnating a heroine, causing much internal conflict for them both, and while Bewildered Heart and our many followers pursue that immediately clichéd concept, we will examine Donna Alward’s debut Harlequin to see if her writing lives up to her shameless self-promotion. There is a wedding on the front cover and words such as pregnant, gorgeous, temporary and mistake within the blurb, so we can only assume that she learned about depth and ripple effects after Hired by the Cowboy hit the shelves.
Ignoring that as skilfully as we have grown accustomed to, we move along. 'Too many manuscripts from aspiring authors feature heroes and heroines who are emotionally incontinent. You know the sort – the ones that just have to let it all out every time they get the urge! Toddlers might behave this way, but mature adults don’t. Or shouldn’t.' Until toddler romance fiction catches on a potential writer is best served reinventing the Mills & Boon standard with the introduction of mature adults, so long as mature means a woman no older than thirty and a man a few years older than his prospective bride, both of whom severely repressed because of previous relationships and unresolved issues with their parents. Now, instead of all this womanly talk of openly sharing, empathy and gin, we should embrace an era of heroes and heroines barely able to control their tempers, passions and other dangerous tendencies. 'Often, the most emotional scenes are the ones where a character struggles to keep a lid on their feelings. If your character doesn’t cry, your reader will.'
Therefore, the mental breakdowns of your protagonists must be carefully-structured, a deliberate-yet-inevitable build-up to forsaking all else for the love of a heartbroken cowboy billionaire recently returned from war. 'If you overdo the drama, you risk exhausting readers and they’ll switch off. Connection broken. Book put down. Also, if you use all your emotional ammunition on scenes that don’t need it you’ll have nowhere to go when the real emotional high points come.' Sound advice to many hopeful Mills & Boon fans, who must have no idea what they are doing in their new careers. There is an obvious pitfall to all this angst, hardship and crying, however. How much is too much and don't readers just want a hunky, yet egocentric, billionaire, a happy ending, a few sex scenes and about forty thousand words of padding? Surely depression, politics, addictions, heartbreak and brutal murder are at best ill-advised and at worst completely unjustifiable when telling the tale of two idiots falling in love against a backdrop of exotic paradise, or small-town America.
In what Bewildered Heart has chosen to describe as research we have witnessed the odd murder, the kidnap of a baby, the accidental death of a toddler, casual sexual assault, war and journalists in our past experiences with romance fiction. In the majority of those examples the serious issues felt unsuitable due to the superficial treatment they received in a character's back-story for present-day motivation. Despite this prescient warning, Secrets Uncovered turned to a self-proclaimed author of feel-good, emotional stories for Cherish, the sub-genre known to Bewildered Heart as Romance Romance. Donna Alward was more than happy to take some time away from fetishising cowboys to explain how to balance dark themes with inoffensive loving. 'There are times I walk a really fine line between deeply emotional and depressing. Let me say right now, if you have these tendencies, embrace them. It’s not a bad thing.' Fair enough, Donna Alward, but what kinds of gloomy tendencies should we expect from A Family For the Rugged Rancher, Honeymoon With the Rancher, or other depressing-sounding titles featuring ranchers?
'I’ve dealt with the death of a baby, miscarriage, physical disfigurement, post-traumatic stress disorder, physical abuse… I do emotional trauma.' There is nothing wrong with the big issues that plague the everyday lives of everyday people, and if Alward's books contain those traumas within the context of the stories, rather than as prehistoric scarring, then kudos to her. How does Donna do it then, and could she possibly tell us while skilfully publicising one of her own recent novels? 'I’m going to use my book Her Lone Cowboy as an example.' Well played. 'Noah is home from Afghanistan where he lost his right arm in combat. From the start I knew that he could be down but not out. He needed to be fighting to get his life back and reaching for a goal which may or may not be happiness.' Self-pity is not attractive, as most of us learn the hard way, and therefore Noah grasps heroically, albeit vaguely, for an objective that can be held in one hand. We can surely predict that his objective will involve a loving woman and maybe a ranch, with some horses.
The secret to Alward's definition of success? 'It’s about going deep. The conflict is not the issue, but it is easy to confuse the two. It is not that he has lost his arm and needs to adjust. It’s the ripple effect: his loss of identity as a combat leader, finding a new place in the world, reconciling himself to being home and the death of his father, falling in love but being unsure that he is man enough.' Suddenly his missing arm is the least of his troubles, as narrative necessities push it toward the periphery. Certainly, his disability is a telling metaphor for his feelings of emasculation, but Her Lone Cowboy is a poor example of chiaroscuro. The tale of Noah and Lily seems comparable to another Cherish title, The Dad Next Door, which heaped on the tragic crises, and then wasted them on soap opera histrionics. The sadness of losing a child, being jilted and the worst recesses of grief had happened before the story began, and this left the book itself to deal with the less dramatic telling of a coupling, one revelation that proved inconsequential, and the return of a secondary character, which was then dealt with ineptly. Alward's explanation is no showcase of the depth of Harlequin Mills & Boon, but merely proof that the tearjerker-elements should be kept to a non-existent prologue and then only sold under the Cherish banner.
The advice contained within Secrets Uncovered amounts to nothing more than Alward's statement that Noah is, 'Not self-pitying but proactive, always moving forward. A reader cannot cheer for your characters if your characters don’t cheer for themselves.' However, he must be proactive and moving the story forward, not to gain the reader's sympathy, but because he is a romantic hero, and the ostensible protagonist of the novel. With this the Conflict Chapter ends and the readers are left to ponder a few questions. How is our own attempt shaping up in view of these guidelines, and, just as importantly, were any of these guidelines useful? We have learned that our publishers share our dream of one day seeing a one-legged hero accidentally-impregnating a heroine, causing much internal conflict for them both, and while Bewildered Heart and our many followers pursue that immediately clichéd concept, we will examine Donna Alward’s debut Harlequin to see if her writing lives up to her shameless self-promotion. There is a wedding on the front cover and words such as pregnant, gorgeous, temporary and mistake within the blurb, so we can only assume that she learned about depth and ripple effects after Hired by the Cowboy hit the shelves.
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