{"id":22462,"date":"2014-02-19T22:00:16","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T03:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=22462"},"modified":"2014-02-19T22:00:16","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T03:00:16","slug":"rhiannon-held-five-things-i-learned-writing-reflected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2014\/02\/19\/rhiannon-held-five-things-i-learned-writing-reflected\/","title":{"rendered":"Rhiannon Held: Five Things I Learned Writing Reflected"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The Were have lived among humans for centuries, secretly, carefully. They came to America with the earliest European colonists, seeking a land where their packs could run free. Andrew Dare is a descendant of those colonists, and he and his mate, Silver, have become alphas of the Roanoke pack, the largest in North America.<\/em><\/p>\n

But they have enemies, both within their territory and beyond the sea. Andrew is drawn away to deal with the problem of a half-human child in Alaska, leaving Silver to handle the pack and his rebellious daughter just as a troublemaker from Spain arrives on the scene.<\/p>\n

1. Sex scenes are complex<\/h2>\n

I thought about making this title \u201cSex scenes are hard\u201d but besides the potential puns, what I learned about sex scenes while writing Reflected<\/em> was actually back one step in the process. Sure, the actual scene may be difficult to write, but first you have to decide whether to write one at all. My position is that if you want to make your readers hot and bothered, the best way is to show how hot and bothered your characters are, not to catalog the actual sex acts. A list of sex acts is certainly sometimes hot and bothersome (Erotica? Yes please! But separate from a novel) but not equally to every reader. What turns one person on might turn off or bore another. If, however, you instead establish how turned on your characters are and fade back, leaving a sex-act-shaped blank, the reader\u2019s imagination eagerly rushes in and fills that blank with what turns them on down to the tiniest detail. And you didn\u2019t even have to use mighty author powers of clairvoyance to predict every single reader\u2019s kinks!<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I did with the first two books in my series. There\u2019s plenty of sex had by the characters, but few explicit sex scenes. Reflected<\/em> was different. Felicia, the rebellious daughter mentioned above, gets it on with her crush in chapter one. It\u2019s their first time with each other, so in the end I decided to write much more of the scene. Why? Because her emotions were complicated and changed throughout the sex. Because it was their first time together, and seeing how they learned each other (or didn\u2019t) illustrated their relationship. And because I wanted to make it clear that even though she was a teen, they weren\u2019t having birds-and-bees sex.<\/p>\n

Remember the first line of the proverbial Talk? \u201cWhen two people really love each other\u2026\u201d Adult characters can have no-strings-attached sex, or friends-with-benefits sex, or a fling simply for the intimacy of it. But so often teen characters either really love each other, or it\u2019s a Bad Choice that leads to Bad Consequences. Why can\u2019t a teen be intimate just to be intimate? So I decided to follow the sex scene to explore that idea. But it was a decision I had to come to, based on complex factors.<\/p>\n

2. When you can, find an informant<\/h2>\n

Reflected<\/em> was a research heavy book\u2014the characters deal with police, law, and therapy professionals all in one book. Even one of those arenas has a whole pile of jargon, rules, and details involved in portraying it properly. I quickly realized I needed knowledge organized for problem-solving<\/em>, something Google, or your preliminary source of choice, isn\u2019t set up to do. It all depends on whether your plot turns on the cause or effect of a character\u2019s actions. Does your character need to set something on fire, and you want to find out the consequences should the police arrive? Or do you want the character arrested but you don\u2019t know for what? Google can help you with \u201cmaximum penalty for arson\u201d but type in \u201cwhat can someone be arrested for that is serious, but not too serious?\u201d and you\u2019re not going to get much in the way of helpful results. Finding causes for plot-fixed effects is tricksy to the extreme and\u2014probably needless to say\u2014was the situation I found myself in for Reflected<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of course, you can certainly read everything about a subject until you\u2019ve found every single possible cause and can choose among them. But that\u2019s assuming you have that much time to spare and have a love of research for its own sake (I don\u2019t). Or you can ask the right person.<\/p>\n

When it came to police procedure, I was aware of things like citizen\u2019s academies that could give one a good general grounding in police procedure, but I wasn\u2019t sure who to ask specific questions. I didn\u2019t know anyone personally, and of course I didn\u2019t want to bother anyone who was busy keeping me and others safe. I contacted the local department\u2019s public information officer, though, and she pointed me to the police training academy. The commander himself invited me to visit and talk to him, and it was one of the most fun, friendly research interview experiences I\u2019ve ever had. I came away with not only correct information, but exactly the kind of situation I needed for my plot!<\/p>\n

3. Reality isn\u2019t exciting enough<\/h2>\n

When it came to the therapist scene in the novel, I thought I was good to go. I found my informant, wrote the scene, and felt pretty confident. What did my beta readers think of my impeccably researched scene where the therapist does a mental competency evaluation on my character?<\/p>\n

They thought it was completely unrealistic.<\/p>\n

Most of my readers thought the therapist was too \u201cnice\u201d and that the scene felt more like he was giving the character therapy rather than evaluating her. I went back my informant and relayed the readers\u2019 comments in confusion. She said, \u201cOften, an evaluation would<\/em> be like the beginning of therapy.\u201d So I was completely correct, just not narratively gripping enough.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve never been in that situation before, let me assure you, it\u2019s incredibly<\/em> frustrating. In the end, I returned to the problem-solving brainstorming I had to do above, looking for things that were also realistic, but were a little bit more exciting. My breakthrough came from a friend who told me stories about a therapist she really hadn\u2019t clicked with. She said he\u2019d gotten an idea in his head, and refused to let it go even when she repeatedly assured him she didn\u2019t feel that way. Once I started thinking of my therapist character as a fallible human being, likely to have a misconception or two, the whole scene snapped into focus and readers declared it plenty exciting.<\/p>\n

4. Many people don\u2019t conceptualize gender like an anthropologist<\/h2>\n

You probably read that title and frowned a little suspiciously. Possibly you said, \u201cduh?\u201d It\u2019s a thing I had to learn, though. After years of academia and anthropological theory for my day job as an archaeologist, I take my gender conceptualizations for granted. The number of gender categories we have, where we draw the lines between, and how fluid they are, are all culturally influenced. I mean, obviously, right? That\u2019s why some cultures have a third gender, others allow people to choose one of two despite whatever their biological sex might be, some allow people to take on some characteristics of other genders, but not others\u2026all kinds of variety! If you think it\u2019s a continuum, if you think it\u2019s neat boxes, that\u2019s all influenced by your culture.<\/p>\n

Knowing that, in Reflected<\/em>, I gave the werewolves\u2014since they\u2019re a species, with their own culture from birth\u2014a conception of sexual orientation slightly different from the Western norm. In one scene, a Were explains to a human that the Were differentiate between sexual encounters and long-term relationships. Or as someone once said pithily on a sex advice podcast: \u201cMy heart wants one thing, but my genitals sometimes want something different.\u201d Most Were, in Western terms, would be bisexual, except for in long-term relationships when they\u2019re gay or straight (and sometimes bisexual) instead.<\/p>\n

When I sent the novel out to beta readers, one reader looked at me in critique session and said, \u201cI don\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I flipped to that paragraph and reread it. \u201cWhat don\u2019t you get? They mentally split between sex and relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n

She shook her head. \u201cI didn\u2019t get it. I guess I kind of do now, listening to you talk about it. But it didn\u2019t make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s when I thought (and did not say) Sorry, I don\u2019t get what you don\u2019t get.<\/em><\/p>\n

But I did rephrase the explanation in that scene to try to clarify. Since not everyone has a degree in anthropology.<\/p>\n

5. Proto-adults are hard to write<\/h2>\n

So fictional teenagers, right? Plenty of fiction dives straight into the sheer emotional intensity of that period in our lives. But I\u2019ve always been much more interested in the rise of emotional maturity. Not a teen taking on adult responsibilities, but the fundamental mental change that takes place, perhaps later than the advent of those responsibilities. It\u2019s a change formed of learning at least some part of better delayed gratification, empathy, bullshit detection, and an ability to game out consequences far into the future, as the tide of emotional intensity finally ebbs.<\/p>\n

I knew I wanted to place a character right on the cusp, when instincts have formed, but the character doesn\u2019t know what they are yet. It\u2019s the point between \u201cWhat you\u2019re offering sounds dangerous and FUN. WHEEEEEE,\u201d and, \u201cWoah, I call bullshit. Back off,\u201d when maturity taps you on the shoulder and you think, \u201cThat sounds like fun, but something seems\u2026off. I\u2019m totally uncomfortable. Why am I uncomfortable? Maybe I better not.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trouble was, that\u2019s a teetery sort of cusp to be living, much less to write. I worried that Felicia would seem older than her eighteen years, but early readers mentioned she sometimes seemed young. As near as I can tell, that\u2019s because she read as mature enough they started to hold her to adult standards of sensible behavior, when she still had plenty of emotional intensity left. In the end, I let her be more sensible, and used the plot to close some of the sensible avenues once available to her. I wrote her using the memory of my own time teetering on that cusp of maturity, and hopefully it will resonate with others\u2019 memory of that time as well.<\/p>\n

Rhiannon Held: Website<\/span><\/a> | Twitter<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Reflected: Amazon<\/span><\/a> | B&N<\/span><\/a> | Indiebound<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Were have lived among humans for centuries, secretly, carefully. They came to America with the earliest European colonists, seeking a land where their packs could run free. Andrew Dare is a descendant of those colonists, and he and his mate, Silver, have become alphas of the Roanoke pack, the largest in North America. But […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22462","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-5Qi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22462"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22471,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22462\/revisions\/22471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}