Hopefully you know, but it’s possible you won’t.
Two things might be happening here. Best case scenario, you’ve done the prep work, you’ve written the setup and now you’re being pushed along by the momentum of your story. It’s still work to develop it slowly, word by word, but opportunities are growing right from the page, allowing you to craft scenes that build naturally and organically through the development of your characters.
Worst case scenario? You’re staring at the vast wasteland of Act II wonder what the hell you need to write next to meet your word requirement.
These next few chapters will deal with that, with suggestions that you can use to cross this chasm. The next 25,000 or so words that make up Act II can be quite intimidating. It stretches out in front of you, all these pages to fill with all these words you’ve yet to find. This is a daunting task, even if you’re prepared for it.
This chapter will show how using your individual perspective as a human will help you mine for material as a writer. In other words, when you pull your hair out in Act II wondering what the heck you’re going to do, I say that you do what another person can never do: Do you.
Let’s face it. The old adage, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” often applies to the stories we tell. I write romance, so, Boy Meets Girl hasn’t changed a whole lot throughout the millennia. It’s all about the quest for a happily ever after with the person of your dreams. This has held true for as long as I’ve been reading romance.
Even though modern characters are often hooking up (often and enthusiastically) before their happily ever after, which wasn’t that common in the 1970s and 1980s when I started reading romance, the whole reason we turn the page is to find out if that boy gets the girl for real and forever.
How a writer does this is key, especially if he or she wants to be remembered. Stories kind of blend together after a while, thanks to the glut of material that has been written over the years. Many of these have already exhausted practically every trope known to the genre.
Whether you’re writing a book about a marriage of convenience, a surprise baby, some billionaire boss who walks the line between dominant and controlling, or a vampire who has fallen in love with a mortal, best friends who find love, worst enemies that find love, cowboys, bikers or forbidden bad boys, most of these tropes have been mined well in some form or fashion by authors before you, to varying degrees of success.
Thousands of those books are published every year about all those things. Some might even eerily mirror what you’ve decided is a beyond-brilliant idea that no one else has ever done anywhere.
Parallel development is real, and it’s hell.
You can play around with the plot a bit, just to toy with convention, in your attempt to stand out from the pack.
“Hey, did I mention that in my story there’s a purple hippo dancing the merengue?”
“No kidding. I’ve never heard of that before.”
Your plot is important. No doubt about it. But what’s more important is the filter through which you see your plot. See, that’s what the other authors can’t write, even if they wanted to. You bring to the story a certain perspective. If you’re successful conveying that in your books, then anyone who reads it will be able to see the world, for a short time at least, through your eyes.
So how do you do this? How do you … do you?
You start by telling a story only you can tell. Temptation is strong to chase trends when developing a plot, because it feels like a way to either make easy money or a chance to get read by a larger audience. This is what everyone clamors to read, so clearly you have the best shot to break in by enticing them with a similar story all your own.
If you want to catch this “express,” it’s totally your prerogative. You take a risk blending in with the other authors who might be following suit, who have a larger fan base, who have more experience, who will stand shoulder to shoulder in front of you, obscuring both you and your book as the express whizzes by in a second, chasing that trend until it dissipates into a cloud of smoke when The Next Big Thing rolls around.
You’re going to have to work extra hard to be seen, no matter if you ride a trend or not. My advice? Don’t worry about the sale right now. Consume yourself instead with the passion to tell the story only you can tell, even if it echoes those books that came before it.
Why are you the author who absolutely, positively has to write this book?
This is an important question to ask yourself. When it comes to the sale, much later on, the reader will be asking the same question. “I’ve already read about a shape-shifting vampire who falls in love with a billionaire cowboy alpha, but marries her worst enemy out of convenience because she’s hiding a secret baby from her stepbrother. What makes THIS book so special?”
You do. You make it special.
You may write a book because you fell in love with that particular trope and want to take it for a test drive yourself. This way you aren’t swept along with the tide of someone else’s vision. You can do what you want, say what you want and have what you want, your terms.
Maybe you’ve read a lot of books about that subject simply because you enjoy revisiting the fantasy. You may read a book about a rock star and decide, “Hey. Yeah. That’d be fun,” and create your own little fairy tale as a result with all the things that turn you on.
When I wrote GROUPIE, there were already bookshelves full of successful, bestselling rock star romances, including a few notable indies. That wasn’t new. Hot rock stars, and the hapless, star-struck “good girls” who found themselves falling for their swagger, have provided common breeding ground for many a writer who wants to delve into the fantasy of falling for a musician/singer/rock star.
The reason the trope exists at all is because many women have this fantasy, and have since they first mooned over posters on their wall of whatever rock star that sparked their desire to go from groupie to girlfriend.
We didn’t just want to listen to the songs. We wanted to be the subject of them.
The good news here is that pursuing this kind of timelessly popular storyline means you’ll have a better chance finding readers for your material. Instead of it being a “trend” that pops up out of nowhere and takes the reading world by storm, these are tested plot devices that can hook the reader just on concept alone. You have a built-in reader base just dying to get their hands on another juicy rock star book.
The bad news is that popular tropes tend to exhaust every type of plot in existence because you are tasked with doing what other people haven’t done, lest you be skewered for copying another book or another author.
Plagiarism is every bit as real as parallel development. Unlike parallel development, however, it’s not about who does it best. It’s about who created it first. Guard yourself, and guard other writers, too.
There’s nothing to gain proving that you can do what they do. You build your career doing what they can’t do.
Eager readers will skim your blurb and decide in an instant if this has enough originality to hook them, or if it’s just like every other generic rock star book on the market. They’re not going to pay $2.99 or more on an e-book they’ve already read, by authors who have already earned their loyalty by writing good books.
I never set out to compete with authors like Jasinda Wilder or S.C. Stephens, both of whom had published massively successful rock star romances by the time I wrote mine. It was irrelevant to me what they had written, because I wasn’t chasing after them to make some quick money.
I wrote GROUPIE originally solely for my own enjoyment, and my own therapy.
When I decided to write a rock star book, the popularity of it played a pretty small part in my development of the plot. I wasn’t out to write something that someone else had written. Instead, I decided to insert myself all over that book, since that was what was missing from all the others.
What do I find sexy about this particular trope?
For me, it’s all about the angst. I had no real desire to write some episodic sex fest tied up in a neat little bow at the end, domesticating the bad boy after hundreds of pages of good lovin.’
That type of story didn’t work for me. It didn’t excite me. It didn’t turn me on. I didn’t find it a realistic enough plot to sell to myself, so I knew there was absolutely no way I could sell it to anyone else.
Because of my own unique life experience, I’ve danced pretty close to the forbidden flame of celebrity thanks to my exposure to several fandoms. I’ve met musicians and singers. I know several personally. I’ve seen their world from the back of darkened dive bars, where fidelity often goes to die.
I grew up a groupie, no doubt about it. But the closer you get to your idols, the less they shine. They become human. Mere mortals. Flawed, just like everyone else. Sometimes even more epically so, considering that performers experience life ratcheted up to levels of intensity most of us can only imagine.
That’s what makes them so darned sexy.
It is the very same thing that makes them dangerous, which makes them even sexier.
This is what made me want to write about them, and this was why I believed I was the only writer who could pen this particular story.
Yeah, it’s sexy to be pursued by a rock star… but what if you actually got him? What then? What’s the conflict? The juicy, angsty, can’t-stop-turning-the-page conflict? It’s not so much about the happy ending for me. If my couples get a happily ever after, they have to work for it. Then, and only then, is the reward that much sweeter.
Conflict should entice you to write your book, since that’s the reason you tell your story in the first place. Boy meets girl? Whatever. How does boy get girl? That is the story.
That, by the way, is often the question that drives Act II. It’s the question everyone wants answered, so they keep turning the page. If you’ve done your job properly, you will have enough conflict in Act II to carry you all the way to the climax and resolution in Act III.
I had plenty of material to mine when I sat down to write GROUPIE. At the time I was ovaries deep in a fandom, where I had the rare and often regrettable opportunity to peek behind the curtain of fame. I saw the opportunities and excess available to people in that world, particularly when they were successful. I got to see where public image and reality collided, often with disappointing or devastating results. I also got to see, first hand, what people were willing to do to get closer to those who actually were successful. This can prove to be a toxic, explosive combination.
When I found it turning things upside down in my world, I did what I always did. I decided to write about it.
I had no intention whatsoever to write some fluffy little romance that just so happened to star a rocker. I wanted to tear down all the illusion around celebrity like tissue paper, to talk about what it was like to fall in love with someone who needs the love of the entire world, who will never completely belong to any one person, and you're expected to be okay with that because he’s a rock star. It’s a crazy, mixed-up world that turns fairy tales on their ears.
This is what spoke to me in 2011.
Since I couldn’t write about what I was going through, I decided instead to craft a fictional story and put my characters through even worse stuff. The more extreme, the better. I took what I knew to be true and just added liberal splashes of Ginger everywhere. The first and most important part of that, I put myself in the lead character, even though I, personally, had never pursued or landed anyone famous.
I, personally, didn’t dream of a happily ever after with a rock star, because at that time I was 100% certain that was impossible. You can get him into bed, that's no trick. Building a worthwhile relationship with someone who needs and wants the adoration of fans the world over is much, much trickier. This complication not only ended up driving the plot for the first book, it spawned two more.
Since I’d already decided to take a detour with the message of the book, I decided to make my lead a little more unconventional as well. I felt it was unrealistic to turn a bad boy rocker into a devoted, faithful boyfriend, so I did what everyone else thought was unrealistic as well. I used a woman of size to attract him in the first place.
I came of age in the 1980s, so I was part of that inaugural MTV generation. I watched music videos all night long till my eyeballs bled, so I was pretty familiar with the kinds of girls who typically attracted rock stars. I’d seen Bret Michaels and the women he tried to romance on “Rock of Love.” I knew the deal.
I simply didn’t care about the deal. Not one tiny, teeny weeny, itsy bitsy little bit.
What I brought to that story was my own unique perspective. By 2011, when I wrote this book, I had come to the conclusion that being one of the many ports of call for these scandalous rock stars wasn’t that far removed from being “the fat girl.”
For those of you unfamiliar, there are certain men in this world that treat women differently based on their size. To the world, they set the standard of what kind of woman they deem worthy to be their companion, with beautiful women on their arm at every opportunity. Behind closed doors, however, they seduce all the weirdoes and freaks they’d never be caught dead with in public, just because they can.
I knew something about that, thanks to my own history. I was all too familiar with the kinds of guys who would sleep with you because the opportunity presented itself for an easy score, only to be publicly linked with girls more socially acceptable as a mate.
And, just like far too many “fat girls,” groupies will accept these crumbs eagerly and happily because the opportunity to get with a hot guy who acts like he wants them just doesn’t come along every day. If you’re backstage with your idol, and he decides to take you back to his hotel for a little sis-boom-bah, you’re going to freaking go, consequences be damned.
If the guy is truly an asshole, then he’ll test the limits with you, just to see how much he can get away with, simply because you’re so desperate for his attention. The stories are legendary, and disheartening.
It’s almost as if these kinds of guys resent you for having to settle for you, so they make you pay even while they get their rocks off. They’re doing you a favor, so you get to do them a few favors too, including all the other stuff that girls with standards wouldn’t do.
Some rock stars are notorious for this kind of despicable behavior.
It was as natural as breathing to cast a fat girl as the “groupie” in question – the sweet, innocent good girl who just had the misfortune for falling for a rock star’s act. Their entire purpose on the planet is to attract you with their song. Many are masters of this, who make women fall in love with them on the regular.
Who they love in return, we don’t always know. We only see what they want to show us. This is part of the appeal, which is why getting them behind closed doors is so enticing. We need to figure out what part of their act is real, and which part is fake, and how – exactly – we can fit into it.
Since this was my show, I cast it with a size-16 heroine, a real downhome Tennessee girl who didn’t give a rat’s ass if someone didn’t like her because of her size. Ultimately this was what attracted the rock star in question. Confidence is sexy. She dared to show him she wouldn’t be an easy conquest, regardless of her size or the fact she saw him for the first time when he was up on stage and she was down in the audience. This attracted him even more.
Conflict is never easy. And that was the conflict that drove the story. The more she made him chase her, the more he wanted the conquest. When she finally caved, that’s when the true second act began. That’s when I explored the themes I wanted to explore, such as being careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.
My experiences crafted the plot. My unique perspective as a woman of size developed my heroine, and my own personal tastes with my own idols, fallen and otherwise, crafted my hero. Because of this, he wasn’t that much of a hero at the start. He was a douche, who just wanted–needed–the whole world to love him.
Just like that, I did what other rocker romance writers couldn’t do. I did me. I wrote what I saw from my own life experience. Not only did I craft characters based on people I knew in real life (Iris is real, y’all, and she’s every bit as awesome as she was in the book,) but I used stories I had heard from other fans to inspire all sorts of sexy, or even scary, scenes that placed one brick upon the other, setting up a story, flushing it out, bit by bit and piece by piece, until you had a book that only I could have written.
Likewise I used some rather negative experiences I had encountered in fandoms to create the villain, with a crazy stalker who didn’t recognize or respect boundaries. Unfortunately I had more experience with those types of girls than anyone who doesn’t actually get in front of an audience to sing should ever have to. To this day I can’t read the Talia parts of the first book. I did my time with all that in real life. It’s over now, and I’d rather keep it contained to chapters I can skip. The poison has been sucked out, and I plan to keep it that way.
GROUPIE wasn’t a Nano project, but it probably could have been. The words came fairly quickly because I was scraping the infection out of my own soul when I wrote them. I couldn’t control the chaos I was forced to deal with on a daily basis back then, but I could control the story. That drove me to the computer day after day, to see what Vanni and Andy were up to next. Even when they frustrated me, I knew the end game, so I had a destination locked in to help me keep going.
The same could not be said for the real life events that inspired me to write the book. I was mired tits deep in uncertainty, especially not knowing whom I could trust.
If you’ve read GROUPIE, you probably see how that influenced the work.
And that’s kind of the point. If someone knows me, they can pick up any single book I’ve read and pinpoint exactly where I’ve placed myself like my own little Easter egg.
In THE LEFTOVER CLUB, a story about the oft-explored trope of unrequited love, I crafted a plot around another curvy girl who came of age in the 1980s like I did. I told the story in a series of flashbacks, from the 1970s to the 2000s, where my character Roni led a life often very similar to my own. (Big surprise, right?)
I wasn’t out to write an autobiography. I kind of, sort of did that for Nano in 2006, when I started out crafting a story using two core memories that had guided my life (for good or bad,) and ended up writing my own memoir instead.
That book is so raw and revealing that even though it’s complete, it’ll never be released.
Not every book you write will be. Some will be just for you. The others you leave like little nuggets of immortality you can leave behind as part of your legacy. That was what THE LEFTOVER CLUB really was to me. It was the opportunity to leave pretty big chunks of me and my life behind, so it will serve as a memorial to those experiences long after I’m gone.
I took my personal experience of growing up as a “fat girl” in the 1980s, and all that meant when it came to interacting with the opposite sex, and turned the knob up to 11. From the first kiss to the run-in with the gym teacher, my own experiences were tweaked and adjusted to fit right into my story. Through my characters I relived some of my childhood by using the same house I grew up in, the same music I listened to, the same movies and TV I watched. Even relationships I had with my childhood friends were immortalized in some way in the book.
As long as these things are remembered, we will live on forever. And that’s a pretty amazing thing.
It was also a scary thing. Though I had a wealth of memories to mine as I crafted my scenes, I found things got a little too real sometimes, particularly when Roni did stupid stuff. I had grown past that awkward teenager and unhappy twenty-something wife and mother who realized, too late, that her happily ever after wasn’t going to work out exactly like she had planned. Going back to revisit it was painful. And tough.
THE LEFTOVER CLUB was so not a Nano project, and in fact took me about six months to finish, with a two-month break right in the middle so I could write another project in another genre altogether. I had the material. I had the outline and the plot. I just lost my nerve. It took me months to get back into it and finagle it into something I felt was worth publishing.
It ain’t always pretty, but it’s 100% me.
Even my first “Rubenesque” romance, or romance novel starring a woman who is heavier than what was considered the norm, had me all over it. It had to, that was the reason I planted my ass to write it in the first place. There was a particular kind of book I wanted to read, and in 2007, it was pretty damned hard to come by.
This left me only one choice. I had to write it.
I was beyond done reading about all the thin, beautiful girls who found love by virtue of being so beautiful. Is it really that hard for a man to fall in love with a beautiful girl? From the books I’ve read to the movies and TV shows I’ve watched, that’s kind of happening all the time. Isn’t that the ideal in our world?
While it’s a story, it’s not the story, as proven by the fact that I myself had been romanced, wood, married and loved, even though I was *gasp* a double-digit size. What else could I do but put myself and my experiences right smack dab in the middle of LOVE PLUS ONE, which mixed “best friends,” “fish-out-of-water,” “fame/celebrity,” with a splash of “cowboy” thrown in for good measure.
I even made my heroine a writer. Sometimes I’m not even all that subtle how much Ginger I add to the plot cocktail, which in this case centered completely around an atypical beauty who had to compete for love in a public forum where everyone, including her, assumed she'd lose.
Even this book has my specific fingerprint all over it. Countless writers write writing books, but only I can write a book about my personal journey, which features Nano prominently in my growth as a writer, which established the foundation for my career as an indie. This isn't just about getting you through the month of November. This is giving you the tools you'll need to navigate the waters I've already sailed across, which will hopefully make the ride a little less choppy for you.
It it also serves to document my career as well, which further establishes my brand. That is why this book has what no other book on the subject will. Me.
They tell you to write what you know, but trick of getting that advice right is knowing which word to emphasize. Write what you know. Write what you think. Write what you feel. Write what you’ve experienced.
You… do you.
Trust me, the second you do that, the words will fly as long as you’re brave enough to let them.
This is your job as an artist. The reason that your story is different is that it comes from you. It’s shaded in with your own personal palette of experiences and perspectives that no one else can convey but you. Your stories are your opportunities to do that. If you’re looking for inspiration, you needn’t look any further than your own life. Work through the crappiest stuff and immortalize those little nuggets of truth that will shade in your manuscript with hues of authenticity only you can provide.
If you’re stuck right now, staring into the abyss of Act II, then turn your focus inward. Figure out how you can relate to your characters, and how your own life experiences might have crafted them to be the way they are. Use those experiences. Put your characters through some of these same paces. Watch what they do when you have the courage to insert a little bit of yourself into them. This will make them real and three-dimensional, which will make them more appealing for a general audience once you’re ready for one.
Now, we can’t really talk about individuality here without addressing the tendency for writers to chase trends. Like I mentioned above, every now and then a book will blow up in the marketplace and an avalanche of copycat books will flood the market as a result as everyone races to cash in on the gravy train before it zooms on past.
This is particularly true in romance, where readers are more attached to trope than to your personal experiences. “Hey, do you guys know where I can get a book where [fill in trope here].” Or, “Hey, I really love books about [fill in trope here.] Know where I can find one?”
Individuality is still highly regarded, but there’s a comfort in reading books that satisfy an itch left behind some crazy wild ride the reader never even knew they wanted. They can't get enough. They never want that feeling to end. Hence why trends exist in the first place.
Maybe you can make money from this. Maybe you can’t. It still depends on you and what you bring to the table. If you're a brand new writer or an unknown, I don't know if it's all that much, since bigger names often ride trends as well.
I once picked up a book from a bestselling writer that had all the people in my particular corner of the book world going absolutely bugshit over the release of its sequel. I decided to read the book to find out what all the fuss was about, but gave up on it fairly early in. When I was telling my best friend about it later, and told him about what had happened until the spot I stopped, he told me that it was almost identical to another popular book, a much bigger seller than the one I had abandoned. (And I knew it was a bigger seller, because I had heard of that book and that author outside of the romance world.)
It floored me to think that two such identical books could not only be released, but sell as much as they did.
This might suggest to new writers that all you need to do to become a successful, bestselling writer is to follow trends that are already on the market.
Anyone can do that. People do it all the time. Some are successful. Most are forgettable.
I challenge you not to follow trends, but to set them. It’s not the easier road, not by a long shot. But if you want a career of any importance, it is what you have to do. Otherwise your book falls into the stack with all the other wannabes that may sell some copies, it may even sell a lot of copies, but you will always be considered second to the book that started the trend in the first place. It’s up to you whether you want to win a gold medal, or if you’d be happy coming in second, third, fifth, twentieth down the list. Of the two books I mentioned, I only knew the author of one, who was light years more successful than the second simply because her book broke ground. She used her own personal fantasy and preferences to drive the story. As luck would have it, this turned out to be a latent fantasy for millions of readers worldwide. They ate it up. It changed the book world as a result.
The second one? It sold books, usually to an audience that would have bought/read them anyway. The first book was such a juggernaut that people who didn’t read at all were grabbing a copy. I'll let you figure out which one was the first (and so far only) one to make it to the screen for an even wider audience.
That is the power of individuality.
“But Ginger, how am I supposed to predict a trend?”
That is the question, isn’t it? The sad truth is that no one can. No one knows what will work until it does. Every single release is a gamble. Remember the stats on show business? Out of ten movies, only one is a blockbuster. But all ten are pitched, written, produced, filmed, distributed and marketed as if they’re going to be “the one.” You don’t know which is which and won’t know until it lands in front of the audience and they decide your winner for you.
The audience alone decides for itself what will soar and what will fall flat. The only thing you control is writing the strongest book you can, that only you can.
Take control of the only thing you can. Do what other writers can’t do. Do you.
Started First Draft: November 9, 2015 10:15am PST
Completed First draft: November 9, 2015 12:41pm PST
Word Count of first draft: 3,638
Began first revisions: November 9, 2015 01:35pm PST
Completed first revisions: November 9, 2015 2:12pm PST
Began second revisions: November 9, 2015 04:46pm PST
Completed second revisions: November 9, 2015 6:01pm PST
Updated WC: 5,329/35,724
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