Research Bites

Research bites.

Right now I’m researching for my very first paranormal romance. That fact is basically why this blog has been focusing so much on that area of the paranormal. I won’t focus on the romance forever though because my super project is nothing of the sort, but since I’ve yet to finish a novel, I thought I would create a smaller world with less political intrigue and one that while it technically spans the ages, I don’t have to weave it too much into our history.

I have written some vignettes of my characters. I’ve found doing so lets me discover the person behind the concept and it leads me to cultural characteristics like slang, style of dress, and general world outlook.

I suppose it is possible to skip the vignettes and just work my way through these things as I write the story, but I don’t seem to work that way. I need a foundation before I start. Otherwise, I get caught up in the nuance and ignore the story line or vice versa.

In essence the pieces come out flat, without any texture.

Anyway, I’ve decided on werewolves and vampires. Yes, it’s been done a hundred times by now, but I have my own spin on it. It will have gods and lots of cool characters. I even have a freaking plot!!

It’s funny. I am a good writer in terms of quick stints, vignettes, and flushing out characters and dialogue. That part of it comes very naturally to me. But novels are different.

In a novel a writer has to captivate the reader page after page. You have to control the ebb and flow of the story. You can’t pile too much adventure into a story at once. You have to give the reader a break, before you continue pummeling him/her with excitement.

And you can’t be too boring either.

And you have to have reasonable motivation.

I read a book, a werewolf one in the recent past. Hmmm, when I say “read” that implies I finished the book doesn’t it?

I didn’t. I didn’t get past the first chapter and I sold it then next week. It was the worst book I’d ever read and I was offended that publishers dared to put that on the shelves and try to pass it off as literature.

Even paranormal romance has to be smart.

I think you can do whatever you want in a book. I can have pig men that get their strength from eating the toenails clippings of blonde females while they battle the Greek pantheon in order to save the world from demonic muskrats as long as I work within the parameters of my own created law and the characters never betray who they are.

I can do this story as long as it’s balanced between the fantastic and the logical, as long as it is balanced between adventure and the mundane. Essentially, you have to be able to identify with my pig men and demon muskrats. Otherwise, the whole damn thing is just silly.

And crap to boot.

So, I know all of this. I understand all of this, but knowing and doing are not the same thing.

I told my friend the other day that I was going to write a paranormal romance. She scoffed. “That’s junk.” She told me. Well yes, paranormal romance will never stand next to greats like Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, but the genre isn’t aiming for that. The genre has a specific target and quite frankly in this day and age, no market is full of dumbasses.

Readers of horror, science fiction, mystery, romance, and of every genre and subgenre are intelligent and expect a level of competency from the author, even if the basic story line is cliché.

So, even my “junk” has to be intelligent junk. It has to be balanced, have believable characters, logical motivation, a good story line and over all it has to be fun.

Fun.

That’s why we bother isn’t it? That’s why we’re not chomping at the bit to read Tolstoy at our lunch breaks. Don’t get me wrong. I read Shakespeare. I’ve read the Odyssey and the Iliad. I’ve read Dante’s Inferno and Little Women. I’ve done my time in the “real” literary world and I will go back again, but sometimes I want a hunk of man saving some soft piece of ….

Well, I want some fun. I’m hoping I can get it all together and write some of it, too. I’ve been doing a lot of research in the midst of reading the genre. I’m going to spend the rest of the month in that mode and I’m going to do NanoWrimo this year. I’ll be ready like I’ve never been ready before and hopefully I won’t stop at 30,000 words. Hopefully, I’ll stop when the story is ready too, not when I am. ~Lilia