Listen to Your Characters by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE HERE

When talking to readers who do not write, the question of how an author creates characters is often raised. 

I am quite fortunate in that I don't often have problems visualizing them. I get the hair and eye colour, their body type even before I have named them; I write out a timeline for them and create their birthday. Using astrological signs is one way of determining their strengths and weaknesses which is often an indication of how the conflict in the story might develop. If they have siblings can also affect their character depending on where they come in the lineup. A firstborn, for instance, is often an A-type personality.

The one thing that often causes an 'oh, yeah', kind of look is when I say I listen to my characters and go where they take me. But, if you are the author, I'm asked, how that can be? Don't you just have them do this or that and move them around like pieces on a chessboard? Well, no. That would lead to creating a cast of cardboard characters, so I do not ignore what they tell me. All of my characters are very different. Emmaline in His Dark Enchantress and Juliana in His Ocean Vixen, are both pretty feisty, outside the box kind of gals. Olivia, in His Unexpected Muse, is quite the opposite. She has reasons for being quiet and shy and I found it much more of a challenge to tell her story. 

I love each of my leading ladies. They have made me laugh, given me headaches, surprised me in some of the things they have done but never, ever, bored me. I hope that comes across in my writing and that my readers enjoy my characters as much as I do.

Victoria Chatham

 AT BOOKS WE LOVE

 ON FACEBOOK

 MY WEBSITE

 

Announcing a New Book by Victoria Chatham

There is nothing quite as satisfying for an author as to write THE END on a current work-in-progress as I have now done with His Unexpected Muse, Book 3 in my Berkeley Square Regency romance series.

When I started writing Book 1, I had no idea that it would expand beyond that. It wasn’t even Book 1 at that point, just an idea for a stand-alone Regency romance. My heroine in that book is Emmeline Devereux, whose best friend Lady Juliana intruded at every opportunity

but that’s what happens when characters almost jump off the page and demand their own books.

Okay, okay. Not literally, of course. It’s just one of those quirky writer’s

foibles. Non-writers rarely get the concept of having people wandering around in your head and whispering in your ear from the inside out. When I finally promised Juliana that I would write her story, His Ocean Vixen, Book 2 in the series, she went away and let me write Emmaline’s story in peace.

When that book was finished, and believing I had done with those characters, I started thinking about what else I could write. However, a reader query asking if Lady Rosemary Darnley, the villainess in Book 1, ever got her comeuppance, started me on another path which led to His Unexpected Muse, Book 3. This involves the unexpected (as the title suggests) romance between Lady Olivia Darnley (Rosemary’s daughter) and Lord Peter Skeffington.

Olivia and Peter, both characters from Book 1, are very different from the rest of the cast. Olivia is shy and retiring and Peter is painfully aware of his tall and very slender physique, nothing at all like your regular nonpareil Regency beau. How these two characters fall into romance was a very different path to take from that of Emmaline and Juliana, who were both pretty feisty females.

I am already at work plotting a new Regency series and am looking forward to meeting some new characters and telling their stories. But, for a few weeks at least, I’m going to enjoy kicking back and catching up on books on my To Be Read list.

 To be released August 3rd, 2019

YOU CAN FIND ALL MY BOOKS HERE

and more about me here

 ON FACEBOOK

 MY WEBSITE

The Cunning Cliché by Victoria Chatham

AVAILABLE HERE: CLICK ON THE COVER OF YOUR CHOICE FOR ALL MARKETS

I call clichés cunning for the simple reason they are so ingrained in our lives it’s easy for them to slip into our writing, unannounced and right under our noses. Hopefully, they only appear in your first draft, but sometimes it takes an eagle-eyed beta reader to ferret them out. These short phrases encapsulate a precise meaning most people recognize and so we use them almost without thinking.

But what, exactly, is a cliché? According to Webster’s, it is ‘something that has become overly familiar or commonplace.’ The problem with clichés is that, rather than enhance your writing, they make it mundane. I found this out the hard way after having submitted the first ten pages of a novel to a Harlequin editor at a conference. In her opinion, if I removed all the clichés, I would only have had half that number of pages to submit. Amongst those she pointed out were ‘cut like a knife’, ‘legs that went on forever’, and ‘like a bolt of lightning.’ She went on to explain that the use of clichés were the hallmarks of lazy writers and that if we, as writers, couldn’t replace them with fresh, exciting descriptions that kept readers reading, we didn’t deserve those readers.

As time has gone on, I have come to mostly catch myself but there are those genre-centric phrases that still leap out at me.  Anyone who reads Regency romances will recognize the phrase ‘her toes curled in her boots’ or ‘she shattered’ at the culmination of a sexy romp. Then there is the descriptive phrase for our hero whose ‘hair was slightly longer than fashionable.’ I must admit to having used that last was one myself and not catching it until after the book came out in print.

One way to overcome using a cliché is to ask “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how” as answering these questions can jump-start your imagination and provide specific details to more fully engage your readers. Clichés, more often than not, date themselves and are therefore worn-out and well past their sell-by date. Old and stale does not make for a good read. For more on the subject of clichés, look on the Internet for some of the American humorist Frank Sullivan’s essays about Mr. Arbuthnot, the Cliché Expert, as published in The New Yorker magazine or, just for fun, take a few of your favorite clichés and re-write them. I dare you!

For more about Victoria visit her here:

 AT BOOKS WE LOVE

 ON FACEBOOK

 MY WEBSITE