I'm blogging now for Powells Books in Portland OR (read samples below), as well as at Red Room. Read Repentance at Red Room... In Defense of the HFN Ending, or Why Some Characters Simply Can't Ride Off into the Sunset By Margaret Carroll My first two novels were tender romantic comedies (The Write Match and The True Match, both from Avalon Books). The characters remind me of people I knew in my youth: they were wholesome and fun, ready to set the world on fire with a Bachelor's degree, strong work ethic and a rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan. The heroines in those books were easy to like and better still, from a writer's perspective, easy to work with. When I began writing thrillers, the gloves came off. Avon/HarperCollins released my two debut novels of suspense back-to-back this fall. I showed an early draft of Riptide to my good friend Rubin Carson, a playwright who lives in L.A. "I hate her," Rubin said of the main character, Christina. "She's a victim and she's dreary and no fun." How do you make a cheating alcoholic wife seem fun? My Riptide heroine actually has a lot in common with the heroines of my earlier romantic comedies. She's smart, still in the prime of her life, and pretty. She wants a good life, a devoted husband and beautiful home. However, she lacks any sense of adventure (this is where backstory comes into play, but I'll get to that later) and this in turn prevents her from having much of a work ethic. In my real life, I don't like victims. I roll my eyes when I see a news story about a morbidly obese person suing McDonald's for luring them to buy unhealthy food. My blood boils every time CNN interviews a homeowner who blames the bank for the fact that he is defaulting on a mortgage he had no business taking out in the first place. I want to call CNN and ask what about the rest of us working schlubs? The ones who tighten our belts, drive beater cars and never take our kids to Disney World, all so we can pay our bills on time each month, and still have enough left over to pay taxes to bail out those Wall Street bankers who got rich pushing junk mortgages on any idiot who walked through their door? But I digress. That's me the Working Schlub talking. Me the Author has trained herself to listen up when the T.V. news comes on with a shot of someone doing a 'perp walk' with a voiceover explaining that he/she has been caught fill-in-the-blank (running a Ponzi scheme, taking time away from their elected position to sleep with prostitutes, refusing to talk to investigators after plowing their Escalade into a tree, or talking their way past the Secret Service into a White House state dinner, and so on). I pay close attention and read all I can about them because if you're going to write suspense, troubled people are all you've got to work with. You need to be able to write about people who haven't seen the inside of a place of worship or a therapist's office or the working end of a food drive kitchen in their adult lives. The ones who would make you plant a wall of Arbor Vitae if they moved in next door. The weirdos, fanatics, drunks, junkies, perverts who need props for an orgasm, bullies whose biggest asset is their ability to pick a lock or test the quality of cocaine simply by dabbing some with his/her pinkie finger, and... you get the picture. These are the people who mess up their lives badly enough to warrant a starring role in one of my thrillers. So that I, the writer, can give them personal growth and a character arc of which they should be proud, or kill them off as I see fit. How do you make them likeable? To some readers, they never will be likeable. There are plenty of readers who only read books with HEA endings. I can relate. I'm like that when it comes to movies. I go to a movie theater maybe once every three years. When I do, it needs to be good and fun, not too deep, not too sappy and not too dark. Tom Cruise, vintage Arnold Schwarzenegger or Will Farrell work just fine. But there are lots of readers with varying interests. Lots of them want a story featuring a main character with many facets and who is going through tough times. I think of the artist Toulouse Lautrec, who painted prostitutes and shed a beautiful light on them through his medium, even though they were people most of us would have rushed past on a street. For me as a writer of suspense, the most interesting characters are the ones with the biggest problems. Life and death can hang in the balance. Suspense is built right in. They have the longest distance to go in terms of character development. They can do a complete 180-degree turnaround inside 400 pages in a way that someone whose life is already on track can't. It's rich fodder for a writer. The challenge is, how do you make them likeable? You find common ground. Everyone wants to live the best life possible. They want their needs to be met. Even people on Death Row don't give up on this. It is why, in my opinion, almost all of them make a statement during their final moments of life. They can't fulfill any need at that point other than to try once more to be understood. So, if you're me and you've set out to tell the tale of a scheming, ambitious, alcoholic, two-timing wife who may have hired someone to kill her husband, how do you make her worth reading about? Start by showing the reader that all she really wants is the same things they want: love, respect, honor and security. She just goes about it the wrong way. Why? This is where backstory enters into it. I really love using backstory. I agree with popular wisdom that backstory does not belong early in the novel, nor should it take up page after page of the book. Of course you can name a number of awesome writers who break the rules (Anita Shreve comes to mind, mostly because I'm a rabid fan who has read just about everything she has published and she is always top of mind when I think about the craft of writing suspense). Used judiciously (for those of us who are not Anita Shreve), backstory clarifies motive for your main characters. Which in turn should give a voice even to hard-drinking alcoholics (Christina Cardiff in Riptide) or wife-beating neurotics with bad skin (Dr. Porter Moross in A Dark Love). Which begs the question, where is the rainbow at the end in a book with characters like these? Do they ride off into the sunset? Fall in love with somebody who is going to drop to one knee and whip out a two-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring to replace the one they're about to hock to pay their legal bills? Um, I don't think so. The story has to be true to its main characters. The ending has to be organic to the plot (sheesh, did I just say that?). If you're going to write about troubled people (and again, these are the ones who give you a suspenseful ride along the way), then HEA for them is probably going to be HFN. A heroine who is shopping around for caskets and dealing with an inquest into the death of her (very recently) departed husband, is not likely to have a good old-fashioned rompin' stompin' lovefest in the arms of Bachelor Number Two. At least not in my books. A happy future for one of my girls is pretty much in keeping with the advice Oprah gave Rihanna: take some time on your own and get to know yourself. My heroines are likely to be brushing themselves off at the end of the book, ready to take a good hard look at themselves and start over. Maybe, for the first time, grow up. And did I mention the one element that makes HFN so much fun? The heroine in my books always has a handsome new man in her life, some great guy who can handle a strong woman and he's just waiting and hoping she'll find some time in her schedule one day soon to explore the possibilities with him. Next time around, her love interest will enhance her life, not detract from it. Call it what you want. That kind of ending, for me, is better than a rainbow. Why Every Girl Needs to Have "Her Thing" When it Comes to Dating By Margaret Carroll I've been out of the dating scene for quite a while. Writing novels of romantic suspense brings it all back. I've been remembering lately how it was to get home from a date, call one of my sisters or a friend on the phone and do a post-mortem, trying to figure out if this guy would turn out to be The One. Many times, the phone call or meeting up after with a friend was much more fun than the date. Remembering that time is like looking back on a roller coaster ride, filled with excitement and laughter and hope and yes, disappointment. As my sister Trish (who married her college sweetheart) used to say, "Don't give up. It's only going to be right one time." Which meant it would be wrong every other time. I spent my twenties and much of my thirties having One-Date Wonders with what seemed like every single man on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Until not long ago, I continued to see familiar faces turn up in photos in the weddings section of the Sunday New York Times. Lately, my work has brought memories flooding back. If you write suspense (shameless self-promotion: Publishers Weekly just named my debut thriller, A Dark Love, one of the top five mass-fiction titles of 2009), it's pretty much a requirement that your characters find themselves in dire straits. My characters are not like the people I know in real life. When was the last time you sat up late turning pages of a story about a suburban mom who cleans her own house, volunteers at school and church, recycles, winterizes her roses, and squeezes in time to bake casseroles for an elderly neighbor? Right. I thought not. My heroines want love and happiness as much as the next person. They just go about it the wrong way. Um, seriously wrong. Truth be told, my thrillers have a body count. My girls are looking for love in all the wrong places. Why do they get it so wrong? This question always comes up for me early on in the first draft, in Act 1 or maybe the beginning of Act 2 at the latest. In fiction, the answer is easy. Give her backstory of childhood abuse or a traumatic event, even a simple miscommunication that left her wounded and desperate for security or at least confused. Real life, alas, does not have easy answers. Of all the women I've known, I can think of two whom I suspect are being battered by their husbands. Both are wealthy and come from privileged backgrounds. Neither seems to be alcoholic, addicted to crystal meth, or in recovery from an incestuous affair with her father. Both are college-educated, and married to upper-crusty men. Go figure. Only one thing is certain. Somewhere along the way both of these women, just like the characters in my books, let their standards drop. They spun the Dating Wheel of Wow and sat back, content to accept whatever they got. In short, they no longer honored "Their Thing." The Thing that every single girl has, or should have. That line in the sand they will not cross. No way, no how, no matter if pigs can fly, or it snows in July. For my wonderful Aunt Dore, it was shoes. "Never date a guy who wears cheap shoes," she warned. (Remember, we lived in Manhattan at the time, so there was no justifiable reason for a man to show up wearing something on his feet that looked like he got it at a Village People yard sale. I've since lived in rural areas, and got to find work boots and even motorcycle boots sexy, but that's a different story.) Aunt Dore's strategy worked for her. She married my Uncle Jim, after all, and more than twenty-five years later, they're still two of the happiest people I know. For my sister Trish, she wanted a Good Guy. I doubt she spent much time looking at her future husband's shoes when they met, and she once gazed at me in real wonder when I said I would never go on a second date with a man who didn't hold doors open for me. "Even in the pouring rain, if his side of the car is closer?," she asked. "Yes," I replied. "Even if it's thunder and lightning and the parking lot is flooded and it would make more sense if he just used the remote to unlock your door?" "Yes," I said, my stubborn streak coming out. "Because when you're dating, little things matter." "Wow," she said reflectively. I need to stop here and tell you that Trish is coming up on her twentieth wedding anniversary with Rai, a man I love like a brother, with a life that anyone would envy and three of the most wonderful children that were ever born. But I digress. "So that's Your Thing," Trish said. "Yup," I replied. "Manners are My Thing." And by manners, I suppose I mean I just wanted to be with a man who had some sense of Savoir Faire, something I couldn't put my finger on until I saw it up close. I once got set up with a man who headed the New York Stock Exchange at the time. I rushed home from work, breathlessly applied my 'nighttime glam look' for makeup (back in the day when I had a nighttime look, vs. now, when I have no 'look' at all) and cut the tags off a pencil skirt and silk blouse I'd just bought at Bloomingdale's. I was hoping to like this guy. I practically saw myself canning preserves at our Connecticut estate, organizing the private jet to take us to Sanibel each February. Oh, I hoped he'd turn out to be Mr. Right. It was pouring out, so when the doorman finally buzzed to say my visitor had arrived and was downstairs in the lobby, I slipped into (non-suede) slingbacks and a belted designer trenchcoat and made for the elevator. My mood plummeted when I saw him. There he was, on a Friday night in midtown Manhattan, dressed in jeans, a windbreaker and Topsiders (no socks). He was holding a large golf umbrella (big enough for two, as he pointed out). "It's raining cats and dogs," he observed. "We'll never get a cab in this weather. Is there a pizza place nearby?" We were three seconds in, and already I regretted having cut the tags off the stuff from Bloomingdale's. Maybe somebody else would have seen him as a real down-to-earth guy. Don't get me wrong, I like pizza-by-the-slice as much as anybody. But I thought he was rude to think this was okay for a Friday night dinner date. Not to mention, Aunt Dore would have hated his footwear. Maybe I missed out on getting to know a great man. I doubt it. Because the way he came across put him on a collision course with My Thing. Which is another way of saying I had my standards for dating, a line in the sand I would not cross. (The irony is, the man I eventually married could have shown up barefoot and I wouldn't have noticed, but once again, I digress). The important thing is every woman has to have Her Thing. Her standards. Her line in the sand. If she abandons her standards, bad things will happen. She will have a series of dates from Hell, wind up with an ugly engagement ring and this in turn will lead to her transformation into Bridezilla, and a sad married life will follow. If things go from bad to worse, she may wind up with a starring role in one of my books. Why I'm Afraid I'm Turning into Gladys Kravitz By Margaret Carroll 9/1/09 Blog item for Powells Books, Portland, Oregon Author of A Dark Love (Avon/September 2009) and Riptide (Avon/October 2009) One of my earliest memories is eating Fudgsicles while hanging upside down on our basement couch with my sister Kate, watching "Dark Shadows." The Good Humor truck came down our street in Queens every afternoon just before the vampire soap started. It was one of those aspects of life that was sheer perfection for me, like rolling sixes several times in a row in the endless games of Trouble we played all summer, or getting to stay up late when we had company for dinner. We had a black-and-white T.V. upstairs in the living room, one that took up more space than my father's easy chair and required five minutes to warm up. It had rabbit ears on top that needed constant adjusting, and sat inside a wood frame covered in some sort of heavy-duty nylon shot through with metallic gold thread that was worn through in the spot where my sister Kate propped her bunny slippers. "Bewitched" was another one of my favorite shows. I loved it, loved Samantha, loved her mother, loved her husband and wanted to be Tabitha. I still remember Samantha trying to teach baby Tabitha the ins and outs of keeping her witchdom secret: "Mustn't twitch," Samantha warned, over and over, with a twinkle in her eye, fighting to hide a mother's prideful smile. It was a heckuva lot cuter than watching my mother discipline us (I was a middle kid in our family of siblings, plus two parents, one beagle and various visiting in-laws, all crammed into one row house in Bayside). But I digress. The one person who wasn't very attractive in that show IMO was Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor. True confession time: she's the one I relate to most. At first I blamed it on the fact that I work from home. I live in a small town on a corner lot. So it's only natural that I notice things, right? I mean, you try sitting in front of a computer screen all day, every day, and tell me you wouldn't notice stuff going on around you. So what if I happen to take a stretch break near the window, just after the UPS truck rolls up with a delivery for the house next door? Or if I saunter outside to water my geraniums just as a squad car pulls over one of my neighbors for speeding. Maybe I did start dusting the blinds in the front of the house as the moving van unloaded the new neighbors' furniture. It's no big deal, I tell myself, and not taking up even half the time I used to spend chatting with my fellow cubicle-mates when I worked for a large corporation. All well and good. Nosy Parker or no, I still managed to write and sell two romantic comedies that way. Things took a darker turn, however, when I started writing suspense. I needed to write about villains then. I didn't want some cardboard bogeyman to play the bad guy for A Dark Love. I wanted a real man, one who wanted the same things out of life that I did. He just went about getting them the wrong way. Enter, Dr. Porter Moross. He needed a full-fledged personality with backstory and a childhood that made him who he is. I gave him a skin condition that got worse in times of stress, filling his face with nodules and postules that itched and stung (blech!). I worked really hard and really long on Dr. Moross, so readers could understand his motivations for doing the things he did. Put another way, I built my villain with all his weaknesses and demons and evil thoughts, from the inside out. On the outside, he was a successful world-renowned Freudian psychoanalyst. On the inside, he was a seething bubbling cauldron of negative emotion. Oh, how I loved him. No problem, right? A writer is supposed to love her characters - - the good, the bad, the ugly and even those with skin problems, right? The problem is, now I find myself looking at people I don't know and wondering if their little personality quirks are built to protect their backstory, and if so, what are they? For instance, those new neighbors who moved in, the ones who keep to themselves... the ones who barely said hello and didn't gush over how cute my dog is or tell me how nice my roses look. They don't bother with anyone. Just people who enjoy their privacy is the most likely explanation. But the suspense writer in me sees another, darker side to it all. They're in the federal witness protection program, relocated here to escape their past. They're having an extramarital affair, and meet here for lover's trysts. They're running an illegal business from inside the tidy Colonial. Or maybe... See what I mean? Maybe now that I have written and sold two thrillers (currently working on a third), my suspense writer's brain is always in overdrive. Or maybe I'm just becoming Gladys Kravitz, in need of Abner to come home, lead me gently by the elbow away from the window and back to work... Do I Look Fat? Why Sister-Friends Will Save Your Life and My Heroines are Loners By Margaret Carroll 10/1/09 blog item for Powells Books, Portland, Oregon Author of A Dark Love (Avon/September 2009) and Riptide (Avon/October 2009) "Are these Capris okay?" They are not. My sister and I are preparing to head out to a meeting of her book club, and I need to find a way to stop her from leaving the house In Those Pants. I channel Tim Gunn from Project Runway, arranging my face into a concerned frown. I try to insert a note of bright optimism into my voice. "What other options do we have to work with?" My sister mutters an expletive in my direction (rhymes with rich) and stomps upstairs in search of pants that will do a better job of camouflaging the Mommy Box that has edged out the sexy curves that once made up our mid sections. Finding a pair of pants that hide this Mommy Box is like searching for the Holy Grail, and probably deserves its own Dan Brown book to chronicle the quest. My sister returns ten minutes later, frazzled now because we are running late. "Are these okay?" They are much better, and I tell her so. "Thank God," she says with a sigh. We gather up our Weight Watchers dip, kiss our kids goodbye and head out. It would have been easier to lie. But I'm a middle sister and I can't bring myself to do that. It's not in my DNA. I've been told I'm a very down-to-earth person. I would also say that honesty is a quality I value more than just about anything when choosing my friends. So I decided it was worth blogging about after I noticed that honesty is an element that is almost entirely M.I.A. from my two latest books. A Dark Love (Avon/September 2009) and Riptide (Avon/October 2009) both feature a cast of characters who lie to each other all the time. About everything. Don't get me wrong - when you're writing thrillers, it's good to have characters that lie, scheme, cheat and steal. The critics agree. The October issue of Romantic Times issued a 3.5 star review to Riptide, saying "Carroll is a strong writer whose ability to construct a scene and weave a tale rivals the best in the business." But I noticed something all my main characters have in common. They live in a vacuum. No siblings. No moms calling to see how the first week at school went for the grandkids. No cousins sending funny little emails. No sidekicks appearing over the cubicle wall at work asking if they cried during the season premier of The Biggest Loser. Nope, my main characters live their lives in isolation. Christina Cardiff (Riptide) is an orphan, far from where she grew up and anyone that knew her when she was little. Caroline Hughes (A Dark Love) is not an orphan, but she might as well be. Neither of them has a sister, a friend or even a neighbor they can confide in. Well, I take that back. They both have some really great neighbors! These girls are just trapped in their downward spiral and refuse to open up to the people who might be able to help. I do it on purpose. I write about troubled women who are faced with problems. In order for the struggle to be interesting, they need to be alone with their problems (at least in the beginning) and lonely. If my main characters had even one good friend they could confide in, how could I put her inside an abusive marriage? Send her down in a tailspin of alcoholism, domestic violence and extramarital affairs? (I know my plots get ugly, but when was the last time you sat up late turning pages of a book about wives who volunteer to run fundraisers for their kids' school?). The basic element of all thrillers is a main character with problems. Serious problems. Your main character has to have a hole so she can dig her way out. So, dig that hole! Make it really deep. Make the sides slippery and steep so it seems there's no way out. Don't leave any rope lying around. Then toss her in. The great thing is watching her rescue herself as the story unfolds. That's the fun part of my job. If you're going to throw your heroines down a hole, you need to take away all their resources first: No friends. No sisters. No one to tell them their caboose looks bad in those jeans. So, don't look for any middle sisters to star in any of my books any time soon. Or women who are members of book clubs, or Reiki Circles, or 12-step support groups, or moms who organize Brownie troops or 5-K races, or.... you get the picture. Friends and sisters are the best antidote to domestic violence, in my opinion. We need to surround ourselves with people who love us and support us and who will call us on our you-know-what, so we can live the best lives possible and be the best women we know how to be. We need to cherish our friends and sisters. Please remind me of that next time I try to leave the house in pants I have no business squeezing myself into... |