December 12, 2006
Things are looking up this week after a month or so when I feel I’ve shuffled around under a dark cloud. I keep getting new ideas, some of which I have found out recently, may not ’suck’ after all. I have been inspired to book a new year visit to a horsebreeding farm and a very special ‘factory’ by way of research. 
Also I am still getting lovely comments about Decent Exposure, many from Australians though I did have a saucy e-mail from my wine merchant and a slightly confused note from the president of the running club. I’m also enjoying seeing the book paired on Amazon with the other LBD’s and Rosy Thornton’s book.
And I finally plucked up the courage to take Julie Cohen ’s first page challenge. Not that anyone is listening now which serves me right for being a coward. Julie said:
I’ve been emailing a friend of mine, an aspiring romance writer, and we were talking about how to create character and conflict from the very first lines of your book. To show her what I meant, I took the first page of two of my books and added notes to show how I tried to portray from line one what these characters were like, and what their problems were.
I thought it might be kind of interesting, and could maybe help other people, so I’m posting them below. I challenge any other writers reading this blog to do the same thing with their first few paragraphs–post them on your blog (or, if you don’t have one, in the comment section of mine, below), and comment on how you create character and conflict right away.
So here goes. I suppose I ought to add a note that Decent Exposure is a single title romance not category and I guess that affects how the opening lines are written. You don’t need your hero, heroine and conflict on the first page (there is a conflict teased in here, but it is only one of the things that keep the hero and heroine apart) but you do need to grab the reader’s attention.
DECENT EXPOSURE
Copyright: LIttle Black Dress Publishing
Excuse me, love,’ said the bearded man in the front
row, ever so politely, ‘did you say naked?’
(Get that word naked in the first line. And bearded? He can’t be the hero, can he? And ever so politely? Could that be a British colloquialism and some extra emphasis to boot? Is the polite man a bit unsure of himself?)
Emma Tremayne clutched her folder of proposals
tighter and smiled a smile that went no further than her
cherry-scented lipgloss.
(She’s nervous and she likes lip-gloss, maybe a bit of stone fruit too.)
‘That’s right, Bob. Naked.’
(She’s not scared of Bob, whoever he is. Or she isn’t going to let on that she’s scared.)
Bob, bald, ruddy-faced and fifty-something, nodded as
if she’d just confirmed the price of a cheese scone in the
local café.
(Time to break the rule of not using too many adjectives in the interests of alliteration and rhetoric. The cheese scone reference tells you that this is the UK and I think that may be bathos – the juxtaposition of manly nudity and scones.Or burlesque because it’s intentional bathos. Or maybe it just shows that this Bob guy doesn’t sweat the small or big stuff: he just might be a hero after all, if not the one we’re waiting for. Note that I haven’t specified the type of cheese though. Too much detail.)
‘You mean without any clothes on?’ murmured a
whippet-like lad whom Emma recognised as a local
builder.
(Whippets are like mini-greyhounds therefore small and lithe. Also slightly timorous, hence the murmured. They have humorous connotations in the UK. You can’t put one down your trousers though, that’s ferrets.)
‘That’s the general idea of a nude calendar, Jason, yes.’
Smiling sweetly, she fixed her eyes on him, then regretted
it as a blush spread to the roots of his hair, competing with
his red curls for colour.
(This lad - a ‘colloquial’ term for young-ish British guys, esp Northern - is hoping the floor is going to open up and Emma is trying and failing to reassure him. Perhaps her good intentions are sometimes ill-advised.)
Now that was odd, she thought, as a dozen faces tried
terribly hard not to look in her direction. If she’d known
how easy it was to turn a roomful of hard-bitten men into
quivering jellies, she’d have tried it years ago. Unfortunately,
right now it was exactly what she didn’t want.
(I’m using Emma’s voice in her pov here. She’s quite posh and earnest so a few Mallory Towers type phrases there. She’s scared them as much as they’ve scared her. And of course, by this point I hope the agent, editor and reader are wondering what on earth she’s up to with all those um… buff guys quivering like jellies - that’s not jam, by the way. Jam doesn’t quiver unless you have got the recipe badly wrong.)
Shortly after this, someone speaks up from the corner. He’s tall, dark and gruff therefore most romance readers will realise he is an Alpha hero. He also likes washing up, listens to Meat Loaf’s Greatest Hits and drinks an obscure brand of Cumbrian beer. So they’ll probably guess he’s not going to arch a cruel eyebrow, pin her to the bed, command his entourage to throw her in his private jet and whisk her off (cruelly) to his Ruritanian shag-pad. Not just yet anyway.
That’s it. XX
Posted by Phillipa in Uncategorized @ 5:23 am
Rosy Thornton Says:
Phillipa, this is wonderful! It would provide real insight into the thinking behind your characters and opening scene…. if you weren’t sending yourself up something rotten! I have been laughing over it for fully fifteen minutes.
Rosy x
rrren Says:
Hey Pip,
Thanks for the comment on my blog, right back atcha!
Merry Christmas to all in the House of Pip.
Loved your character analysis btw
-x-
Jessica Raymond Says:
Nicely done, Pip — I wish I had more humour in mine now!
Jess x
Phillipa Says:
Jess - with a story about a nude calendar it’s going to have to be funny. And the characters also use humour to help them cope with their jobs. A very British thing, I suppose, but that’s what struck me when i did the research. I also fear the analysis is way funnier than the book! I have a horror of getting too serious and heavy about this process as I can recall all the literary criticism I had to do at uni on the greats like Jane Austen and Dickens. Doing the same on my own work seems a bit um… pretentious, really so I’ve had to be tongue-in-cheek about it. I definitely didn’t think about any of these effects while I wrote it, unless they happened subconsciously. The reason being that the first chapter was written at the very end of the novel. It pretty much went down in one go, but only because, by then, I knew the characters and the plot. The original opening took months and dozens of re-writes. All to no avail…
Jude Says:
Pip
I love your cheese scone line. I laugh every time.
Great stuff!
jx