As Pat Rice mentioned in her recent Wench blog, I too have been preparing some of my older romances for ebook format. Same stories -- I'm very happy to discover that I really love these books, still love the stories and the characters -- but oh, that early overwriting had to go. So I've been editing them, trimming for wordiness (yow), over-the-top phrases, a plethora of exclamation points in dialogue (shudder), and some embarrassing indulgences in ooky sentiment. And I think these updated ebooks will actually be better books than the originals. And they'll be graced with beautiful new covers and will, I hope, read like fresh new romances. I'm very excited about these -- you'll hear more about them soon!
Working with the older romances got me to thinking about the differences between my first romances (my first book, The Black Thorne's Rose, was published in 1994) and the romances and historical novels I've been writing in the 2000s. One major difference is length -- I was getting away with a much longer book 10 or 15 years ago! And the length of the book is often influenced by the time frame within the story. I find it easier to write a shorter length novel (100,000 words and under) if the time frame of the events is on the shorter side. In some of my books, now and then I have to skip through time like a stone tossed over water, just skimming the surface ... and the bigger historicals sometimes need that ... I usually prefer to dive deeply into the story, timewise.
I wrote a blog about time a while back, so ... like my old romances about to become new ebooks ... I dusted that off for you here. I've been so busy editing this week I was short on blogging time -- and when that happens, we Wenches ring a bell and holler "Wench Classic!!" ... and so here you go:
TIME FLIES
Tempus fugit.
– Ovid
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
–Groucho Marx
How interesting that we sometimes refer to reading in terms of time (it being a temporal occupation on one level)-- I flew through that book, we’ll say. Oh I crawled through that book. Oh I had no time to finish it; oh, I have lots of time for reading this weekend (I wish!!).
This time awareness also applies to writing the books. Mostly I crawl through writing the first half, and fly through the second half racing the deadline. Authors can spend months, even years, writing a book, and yet readers speed through that story in a few days, a day, even an afternoon. So on the one hand, there's the time we take to write them; and there's the time we take to read them. And then there's the time frame covered in the story.
Romances have gotten much shorter over the last decade or two. Many authors are now expected -- and contract-bound -- to wind a story up in under 100,000 words, and shorter if possible. Ten or 15 years ago my books were around 120,000 words -- that gave me lots more time (so to speak) to develop the story. So it's an interesting challenge for an author when the book length is shorter. And there are lots of reasons for this -- paper costs are up, available reading time is down, and the fast-food mentality is now very much a part of the publishing industry, and tastes in reading have altered. We speed through books like we speed through so many things now. No more the leisure hours of the 19th or early 20th century. The planet is a quicker place, and books are quicker, in a sense, too.
And many romances that I've read in the last few years seem to cover shorter time frames -- a few weeks, a few days, a day or two for the development of a romance as well as a story. It's true in my own stories–-there have been times when the story takes only a few days or a two weeks. That's okay, says my editor. We don’t want the hero and heroine apart for too long. Readers don't have patience for that. Or do they?
I remember reading big hefty juicy romance reads where the stories took months, a year, even years to develop between hero and heroine. But the genre continues to develop and change, and is never stagnant. Fiction itself, whatever the form, is not a stagnant art --it keeps altering and morphing its shape. Is it an improvement in romance to have the hero and heroine meet quickly, jump each other’s bones quickly, fall in love (in whatever order), resolve all differences and live happily ever after in a matter of, say, ten days?
It might seem unrealistic-- but it certainly can happen when people fall in love.Love at first sight, together with a strong conflict--how much time does that fictional couple really need to get to a resolution? Not much, really. A fast time frame can add immediacy and a sense of urgency to a story, which heightens other tensions in the book, which helps us sit on the edge of our seats, and fly through a book. The time frame is brief and to the point, and the story is focused.
One of my Sarah Gabriel novels, To Wed A Highland Bride, has a time frame of about a month. And I had to stretch that out! It could have been two weeks, easy. So I established an earlier meeting for the hero and heroine, a couple of months prior to the action of the book -- a previous encounter years earlier can set up both a conflict and an attraction that will ignite when the story opens and carry through the rest of the book. For this particular novel, the story didn't really need a long time frame. And I found that the shorter time span helped focus the lens of the romance, that hyper-focus that centers on the H & H.
There isn’t much room for extraneous subplots and characters when the manuscript itself needs to be short, and the time frame of the story is brief. But the story doesn't need to drag on to pad in more time to make it "believable." Once a story gets rolling–-which is hopefully right off the bat–-we want it to keep going at a good clip, so that we can roll right along with it.
So time does fly in lots of romance. The technique works better with some storylines than others, of course. Love at first sight is perfect for a shorter time frame, which needs an intense, passionate attraction–-real chemistry at work between two potential lovers--and it needs intense conflict to challenge that potential happiness. We love romance ... but happiness can be boring. Really it can. Give us contrast, challenges surmounted, impossibilies conquered! And then we can enjoy the happiness.
What’s also interesting is that sometimes a writer does not make the time frame clear. The ticking clock that works so well in other genres-–mystery, romantic suspense, thriller and horror, for example--isn’t essential to romance, per se. Yet a bit of ticking-clock tension gives the conflict added fuel and keeps the story moving toward an exciting, adventurous, passionate, satisfying conclusion. A thriller author will make sure you see that clock, even noting it scene by scene -- but sometimes in romance, it's better to blur that clock.
But sometimes that time pressure is part of the fun -- that speed, that heady rush, that delirious experience of falling in love and conquering the odds to get there.
Writing mainstream historical fiction, I've found that the time frame can be just the opposite. A story may cover several years, decades, a lifetime for the main character. Some events need whole chapters, and other stretches of time can be covered in sentences or paragraphs. The story could span two or twenty or forty years, yet the story has to keep moving. And yet the writer of mainstream fiction may have a tight word count too -- my mainstream fiction novels come in at a little over 100,000 words, only a little longer than my romances, and yet they cover decades.
What do you all think of the shorter time frames in historical romance novels, and the faster pace of the shorter books we are seeing more often in all genres? How do you feel about larger historical novels that cover great gobs of time – do you lose interest? Do you feel satisfied by the story, or impatient? Or do you even notice the passage of time in a novel?
I have an advanced reading copy of QUEEN HEREAFTER looking for a home -- and I would love to send it to a reader chosen at random -- so please leave a comment and enter to win!
~Susan