{"id":685,"date":"2010-12-27T12:22:52","date_gmt":"2010-12-27T17:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=685"},"modified":"2010-12-27T12:25:59","modified_gmt":"2010-12-27T17:25:59","slug":"tackling-the-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/birthmarked\/tackling-the-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"Tackling the Romance"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oops. Cliche.<\/p><\/div>\n

Someone asked me recently how far my characters would go.\u00a0 It made me laugh.\u00a0 Gaia\u2019s sixteen, and there are two more books in the trilogy, so theoretically, where she could go romantically and physically is pretty wide open.\u00a0 I was thinking of ninth\u00a0graders when I first wrote Birthmarked<\/em>, so I was surprised when it was published for age group 12+ because I knew that meant that avid ten-year-old readers would find their way to my book, and they have.\u00a0 Then again, I\u2019ve heard from quite a few grandmas and grandpas who have liked the book, too, so while I feel a responsibility not to make kids squirm, I certainly have readers who can read between the sheets.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written romances.\u00a0 I know what that takes, and my YA novels are not romances. \u00a0In a traditional romance, the relationship, with its growth and tension and conflicts, drives the plot.\u00a0 The boy had better show up early and often, and he had better be the focus of the heroine\u2019s thoughts, even if she\u2019s resisting thinking about him.\u00a0 I can\u2019t tell you how wonderful it is for me to be writing books where my protagonist is concerned with other very real problems.\u00a0 It makes it all the more delicious when some cute, brooding boy shows up to get slammed by the real plot, too.\u00a0 When a relationship has political consequences and brings disaster, I am beyond happy.<\/p>\n

So, what do I do with the actual scenes?\u00a0 How far does the romance actually go?\u00a0 I\u2019ll tell you one thing.\u00a0 A romantic scene had better feel as real as the rest of the book.\u00a0 Since it\u2019s a time of peak emotion, I have to be especially careful not to gush, or use clich\u00e9s, or explain too much, or have someone say something that doesn\u2019t match his or her character.\u00a0 But I can\u2019t skimp, either.\u00a0 It has to be long enough and in real time, so that the reader can live it along with Gaia.\u00a0 It had better be good.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been working on three pages of Prized<\/em>.\u00a0 This is my twelfth draft, but this particular scene I\u2019ve revised between twenty and thirty times.\u00a0 We\u2019re past copyedits now, so I\u2019m only going to get one last chance to put in changes and they can only be minute.\u00a0 That\u2019s all right, because most of it is fine, but I\u2019m looking at two lines of dialogue, and they\u2019re just wrong.\u00a0 The boy says something that has the right disappointment, the right humor, the right longing, but the words themselves would be better from someone who\u2019s thirty and he\u2019s a teenager.\u00a0 Reading quickly, you probably wouldn\u2019t even notice, but it bugs me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been trying for days to figure out what he\u2019d say instead, and I\u2019ve come up with a dozen other lines that are wrong, too.<\/p>\n

It can\u2019t sound too studied.\u00a0 It can\u2019t be too blunt.\u00a0 It has to be in his voice.\u00a0 My characters aren\u2019t the types to say \u201cI love you\u201d to each other.\u00a0 They don\u2019t seal anything with a kiss.\u00a0 I finally backed into the scene again with a more specific sensory detail, so I could really see myself there, really hear what they were thinking, and at last he said the right thing for me to write down.\u00a0 I\u2019m very happy with him, and so is our girl Gaia. \u00a0At least in that scene.<\/p>\n

Sigh.\u00a0 It kind of makes me wonder if it would be fun to write a YA romance, straight up and for real.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone asked me recently how far my characters would go.\u00a0 It made me laugh.\u00a0 Gaia\u2019s sixteen, and there are two more books in the trilogy, so theoretically, where she could go romantically and physically is pretty wide open.\u00a0 I was thinking of ninth\u00a0graders when I first wrote Birthmarked, so I was surprised when it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[29,37],"class_list":["post-685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","tag-gaia","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=685"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":688,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/685\/revisions\/688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}