Ahoy matey! Welcome to my adventures on the Carnival Fun Ship Paradise.
I’ve just returned from a weekend at sea attending the Break into Fiction workshop taught by the fantastic team of Mary Buckham and Dianna Love, or as we lovingly referred to them as, The Punisher and the Evil Queen.
My voyage began with a few hours of me time relaxing by the pool with a book in one hand and the drink special of the day in the other. If I had only know about the arduous metamorphosis that awaited me the next day, I would have relished that time a lot more.
My roommate was the lovely Susan from Canada. Although she wrote YA and I paranormal, and we came from different backgrounds and were born in different decades, we had similar life experiences which gave us plenty to talk about.
There were sixteen of us on this maiden excursion of Write at Sea. Most of us wrote romance and there were several of my GSRWA mates in attendance. We had a few thriller and suspense writers as well. The class was geared towards commercial fiction, so there was plenty of opportunity for everyone to learn.
The project I brought to the workshop was the second installment in my superhero series, or as it’s called in my world, The Shape shifter and the Nurse. The reason I chose this novel over the first in the series was because I’m pretty much married to Max and Crystal’s storyline. In the second I knew who the H/H were, the first chapter, and a vague idea of the villain, or villains. After that I was opened to all ideas. I had the first chapter written. It had danger in it, angst, sexual tension and snappy dialogue. I thought I was off to a fantastic start.
Then I talked to Mary and the torture began.
She pointed out that while the concept and characters were good, there wasn’t enough conflict in the beginning to sustain throughout the book. They needed to collide sooner. I needed more.
Ah! Well crap. Now, I needed something new. Something spectacular. What followed next was thirty minutes of me staring at the wall, swaying to the rhythm of the rocking ship. My pre-cruise fear of not being able to come up with ideas quickly came to fruition as I sat and sat. Then I discovered that my brain is a ticking time bomb.
Think, think, think, think, think- BOOM!
Two ideas pop into my head, and each had three or four possible outcomes that splintered into several directions. My desk is now covered in creativity carnage.
Being suddenly smacked with multiple ideas is both a blessing and a curse. I have something to work with. Yay! But where do I place the focus? More staring at the wall. Unless I find a direction, I cannot go forward in the process.
So I do what anyone else does when they hit a wall whilst on a cruise ship. I went to the pool.
Laying out under the sunny rays off the coast of Mexico I let my mind wander. Tropical drink near by, I close my eyes as the pool band launches into a reggae version of Hugh Lewis’s The Heart of Rock N’ Roll.
She needs to witness something. Something bad. Of course. A murder? No. Drug runners? Been done to death. Human trafficking? Hard sell. Terrorism? Even harder sell.
My front starts to burn, so I flip over, mind still working.
Ooo, that could work. It’s different and definitely plausible. I can work with this.
I pop up in my lounge chair. “Susan, I’ve got a plan.”
She blinks at me in surprise over the top of her book. “Wow. You were brainstorming. I thought you were asleep. Good for you.”
“Thanks.”
Even through dinner, a comedy show and an Indian kid howling his way through Bohemian Rhapsody, my concept is percolating, grow
ing, solidifying. My brain is working so much, I’m up at 5:30 in the morning writing on the Lido deck.
I feel like a fighter knocked down in the first round, struggling to their feet. I’m hurt, disorientated, but the will to fight flows through me. This will be a stronger story. A better story, A story that will sell.