Over at Jenny Crusie’s blog, Argh Ink, she’s chatting with her friends and writing partners Anne Stuart and Lucy March (a.k.a. Lani Diane Rich) about various writing challenges.

I thought last week’s discussion and this week’s were particularly excellent — about writing the hero and writing the heroine in romance. (And then deciding which is your protagonist, which is a discussion my writing partner and I have all the time!)

Check them out if you’re interested:

The Three-Goddesses Chat: Heroines
The Three-Goddesses Chat: Heroes

She also has a great picture of Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ uber-clean writing desk! (That entry is just called “Thank God My Friends Don’ t Gloat.”)

One the hard (and, simultaneously, fun/ intimidating/ nerve-wracking) parts of writing a new book is coming up with the characters’ names.

Misnaming a character from the beginning is a difficult mistake.

I’ve written several chapters, or in one case an entire manuscript, and then gone back and changed a character’s name. And believe you me, it’s not done without angst. (Like a child you’ve named, your character begins to embody his or her name, and changing it midway through the book can make the whole story seem “wrong” somehow.)

I changed both characters’ names of my very first romance (after the first draft was completely written). Why? Because I read a blog post by a well-reputed agent making fun of the names. Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who’d thought “Emily” and “Jake” were great-sounding names in 2006. So did about 85% of other romance writers. She said if she got one more story with an “Emily,” “Jake,” “Max” (one of my supporting characters in the same story!) or “Luke,” she was tossing it out the window. 

Apparently there’s a cultural consciousness that causes us all to gravitate toward the same names, whether we’re using them to name characters or babies. Certain names just “sound right” in certain years. Or they sound handsome, cute, beautiful or successful.

But this is really silly thinking, I soon realized. Writers shouldn’t be selecting the same names (whether culturally conscious or not) as new moms. Because my character is 30 years old! Which would make “Jake” sound completely wrong for his era.

So I found an excellent baby-name book that tells when names are popular, and learned to name like this:

1. Figure out how old your character is and date the name back to the character’s “birth.” If my character is 29 in 2011, he would be born in 1982, so I’d have to look for names that were popular that year.
2. Take your character’s parents into consideration. Would your character’s parents have leaned toward a traditional name, or an unusual name? Would they have bucked trends or have followed them? What part of the country were they in when they named your character, and what influences might their hometown have had? What was your character’s last name when he was named, and did that last name change (through divorce or adoption)? What are the character’s siblings’ names? They should all sound like they came from the same parents’ ideas from that time.

Other tips I’ve learned from romance writers or editors:

1. Avoid having your hero and heroine sport similar-sounding names or – worse yet – names that start with the same letter. This is partly a visual thing for the page, as when readers scan, they have a hard time separating names like Maggie and Matthew, or Ryann and Ray.
2. Avoid initials as names. I truly love initials as names (J.R., J.T., T.J., A.J., etc.), but I had an experienced writer tell me once that most editors hate them. Again, it’s partly a visual thing, she said. While initial-names sound nice when spoken aloud, they tend to look clunky on a page, and when it’s your main character, the clunkiness will fill the page. I have to admit, as much as I love Jenny Crusie, I did find her character “C.L.” (“Tell Me Lies”) to have a terribly distracting name.

Here’s my favorite book for coming up with names: It not only lists the name and when it was popular, but it tells possible sibling names, too, that all sound right together: The Baby Name Wizard, Laura Wattenberg. (She has a great web site, too.)

What other things do you, as a reader, hate about name choice in books?

For the next project, I asked several writer/reader/romantic-heart friends if they’d help me brainstorm a good holiday romance. I’ve written about my love-hate relationship with Christmas romances before here, but the thing of it is, I really do like the concept of holiday romances. I just rarely like them in reality. (I’m reading one by Lisa Kleypas right now, though, that might be a pleasant exception – so far, so good.)

I’m excited to see what all my friends come up with! They don’t all read them, so their ideas will probably be quite out of the box. I’ve already received two e-mails back, with some fab ideas. This seems so fun to me, like writing on assignment — they can assign any characters, premise and setting, and I’ll just go to town, turning them over in my mind until they all take shape, and I can suddenly visualize the first scene (and the next, and next). … I promise I’ll thank the idea person on the first page if I can get one published!

Fun stuff!

Keep ‘em coming!

Well, it’s November 30, and all the NaNoWriMo writers are stepping away from their keyboards. … hopefully with 50,000 words and one long month of intense writing under their belts.

Although I didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo this year, I had my own drummed-up deadline to meet – by Dec. 2, I had to have my Golden Heart entry on the desk of the Romance Writer Association’s group in Texas. Late Sunday night, I was boxing up six copies of a 44-page partial, six copies of an 11-page synopsis, and trying to get the entire manuscript into one file and on some form of CD or flash. (It’s always those last-minute techie things that take the longest, you know?) By midnight, I was finally strapping the packing tape around the box and feeling pretty relieved. …

On to the next project. …

In addition to letting my writing go by the wayside these last several months, I’ve also let my reading go. I haven’t read anything in eons.

But in the last week, I picked up my Kindle, recharged it, and downloaded a couple of Eloisa James stories! Whoo-hoo! – I bought her new novel, a novella, and a short story. Started on the novel first, and really enjoying the (very Dr. House-like!) Piers and heroine Linnet. Eloisa James always does a great job.

What are you reading these days?

Whoo-hoo! I just found out that next year’s Romance Writers of America conference is right in my back yard!

In recent years, it’s been in Dallas, San Francisco, and New York — and I’ve always wanted to go, but never have. But next year it’s going to be in Anaheim! How convenient!

Five days of workshops, books, speakers, author signings, agents, writers, bar meet-ups, pitches, books, books, and more books! Open to the public. Expensive, but you get to meet all your favorite writers. Here’s more: RWA Conference 2012.

I’m saving my pennies, starting now. …

My critique partner Patti and I have been having long email discussions about e-pubbing.

I’m all for it. I’m all for reading e-pubbed books; I’m all for publishing e-pubbed books; and I think the future for e-publishing is just going to get more and more exciting.

But Patti, like many writers, has a part of her that already misses traditional publishing and wants to hold out for her own books to be bound and printed. She’s labored for years on these books, and she’s always dreamed of holding her books in her hands and flipping through real pages. She wants to see her name on a cover.

This is the discussion that’s been going on all over — well outside my and Patti’s inboxes. It’s been going on across the publishing world and all over the publishing blogs. Readers are embracing e-reading in rapidly increasing numbers (either on computers, laptops, or e-readers). Last January was the biggest jump, presumably because record numbers received e-readers for Christmas. Readers are simply getting used to reading books online, used to the backlit lettering, used to different column sizes. E-reader prices are coming down. It’s just becoming the norm, and people are craving their “real books” less and less.

So with more and more readers spending their money on e-books now, traditional publishers are nibbling their fingernails and trying to figure out how things are going to play out: Will we still need presses? Still need book binding? Still need cover artists? Still need bookstores/book buyers/delivery trucks/etc.? It changes everything about publishing. And everyone in publishing is just looking around, hoping they’ll still have a job.

The writers, though, are still guaranteed jobs. No matter what, you still need the storyteller. But writers have their own worries about digital publishing: it’s pricing. If some authors are willing to sell their e-books for 99 cents, or give away an electronic book or short story for free, does that devalue writing in general? Does that mean all writers will have to bring their prices down? Will writers have to labor for 3 years on a book they sell for just a dollar? 

Former agent Nathan Bransford has had some fascinating discussions about e-books and publishing on his blog for some time now, but he addressed the new pricing panic in recent fascinating posts 99 Cent E-Books and the Tragedy of the Commons and the fairly depressing How Will Authors of Tomorrow Make Money? 

Meanwhile, bestselling romance writers Jenny Crusie and Barbara Samuels had an online debate about this same topic last week in Barb and Jenny on E-Publishing Part One and Barb and Jenny on E-Publishing Part Two. Barbara Samuels was one of the authors who priced her backlist at 99 cents and made a sweep of it. And Jenny is skeptical (though curious) about how e-publishing is going to affect the new author and midlist author. 

It feels a little bit like the Wild West out there in publishing, with everyone making up rules as they go along and refusing to acknowledge any rules from the past. But overall, I’m excited about e-pubbing – both from a reader’s perspective and a writer’s. I think there are a lot of amazing possibilities there (like writing books with accompanying soundtracks, pop-up maps, pop-up pictures of the characters, accompanying videos … gah! so many possibilities!), and I think we’re all on the brink of an exciting new era.

How do you feel about e-books and e-publishing? What do you think will become of authors in the future? What do you think the landscape is going to look like once the dust settles?

 So this weekend I was able to steal a little time to force myself into a desk chair and write the synopsis for Adam and Simone’s story, Earning Wings. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t pretty. But it had to be done.

So what’s a synopsis? For my non-writer friends, a synopsis is a 5- to 10-page summary of your book, which you send to prospective editors and/or agents so they don’t have to read the whole thing. It describes the main characters, tells all the conflicts, how the conflicts are resolved, and explains how your book ends.

And it’s painful to write.

The reason it’s so hard to write is that you’ve just spent a year or two (or three!) wrestling with every single word of this 300-page story, so to write it again — in some kind of abbreviated format — is a little excruciating. Especially because you don’t know what to leave in or take out. You know you need to stick to “bare bones” to keep it to 10 pages or less, but you also wish you could include that great scene that has all the flavor of the book, and omg, I have to include the dialogue where they first fall in love, and what about that funny secondary character when he does xyz, etc., etc. … It’s killer.

Plus it always ends up sounding terribly simplistic: then this happens, then this happens, then he says this, then she says that. The reason we became writers is because we don’t tell stories that way — we love to weave in the setting, the dialogue, the descriptions — so to tell a “summary,” or synopsis, goes against every writer bone in your body.

Anyway, I never had a synopsis for any of my works in progress. (Or good synopses, anyway — I’d made an attempt to write one or two, but they just went on and on and on …)

But I definitely need one at this juncture for Adam and Simone — it’s critical if you want to find an agent — so I’m kind of stuck now.

So I started one this weekend.

Between the time I made my first attempt to write one and this weekend, however, I took a great writing course from Judy Duarte called “Matchmaker 101.” The focus of the class was not on synopsis writing — it was how to come up with two great characters for a romance who could be diametrically opposed for great conflict but who could also conceivably fall in love — but part of this exercise was to write a synopsis for a future book.

Whaaa? A synopsis for a future book?

It had never occurred to me to write the synopsis first. But Judy insisted this was the way to go. After your first sale, you’re not writing on spec anymore — you send in your idea, with your synopsis, and your editor tells you yeah, go write that one. You don’t write the whole book and then say, how’s this? (No one would have time for that!) So she said we should all learn how to write the synopsis first.

I couldn’t quite imagine how this would work. I’m a “pantser,” after all, writing by the seat of my pants. (The writing world is made up of “plotters” and “pantsers,” about a 50-50 split.) Pantsers never know what’s going to happen to their characters next — part of the joy of writing for us. But that approach has also gotten me into hot water, so I was willing to give Judy’s approach a try.

What I found was that it was kind of fun writing a synopsis first, and I really liked her layout for writing one. She suggested this for romance:

• One page describing your hero’s history, what brought him to page 1 of your book — include his general personality, a little of his romantic/sexual history, and his wound from his past that’s made him who he is.
• One page describing your heroine’s history, what brought her to page 1 of your book — include her general personality, a little of her romantic/sexual history, and her wound from her past that’s made her who she is.
• Then launch into “Our story begins when. …”

Now I have to admit, for the future book, I didn’t get much past the two character descriptions, but I can see how this could work beautifully. The reason it works is that you’ve already told enough about your characters that the conflicts now are completely obvious (or will be to the editor/agent), so you can expend very few words to list all the conflicts that are going to arise, without having to explain all the backstory. Then you just have to summarize your ending and how you’ll wrap up the conflicts.

Voila!

(Well … er … it’s a lot easier said than done, but I’m getting there. …)

The other joy of this approach, for me, was discovering that my imagination runs just as wild while writing these one-page character descriptions for characters I haven’t “met” yet. That surprised me. It was fun. It was as fun as writing the actual pages, so the joy of discovery was still there.

And — biggest bonus with this approach — is that when I finish a new book, I won’t have the “dreaded synopsis” looming. It’ll already be done. Hallelulah.

But, alas, I didn’t do this for Adam-Simone and Fin-Giselle, so I’m back to the dreaded approach of summarizing a book already written. (Or in Fin-Giselle’s case, 80% written.) But Judy’s approach works rather well for a book already written, too. I wrote one page about Adam and his history and wound, one page about Simone and her wound, then launched into “Our story begins when…” It hasn’t been quite as excruciating, I must admit.

But it’s still dreaded. …

I’ll let you know when I emerge.

Whew! This weekend I got over a big writing obstacle that was keeping me crazed for the last several months.

(Well, really, I haven’t been writing over the last several months because it’s been the holidays, and my focus is quite usually elsewhere from Thanksgiving to New Year’s.)

But anyway, my Fin and Giselle story STILL has no ending, and has been sitting sort of stagnant on my computer because there was something about it I didn’t like. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was, but I knew it was contributing to my inability to end it properly. I finally decided that the problem showed up around Chapter 14 — about at the 40% mark. I rewrote Chapter 14 once in October, another time in November, but still wasn’t happy.

But over the weekend, I reread a previous part and had a sort of light-bulb moment. I went back to the original copy (grrr. Hate it when that happens. But I save all my cut scenes in a “Deleted Scenes” file, just in case. Someday I may make short stories out of all that stuff!) And then I rewrote parts of the original scene with some greater internal monologue that I think made the story better. I’ve also introduced two new characters in this second draft that are causing me a bit of grief now, but I think they work better, too. They brought some extra conflict into this middle portion of the book — and more conflict in the traditionally “sagging middle” is always welcome, right?

So … onward toward the ending!

And sorry to ramble in a way that probably makes no sense. I feel like I’m speaking in code. But, as I’ve mentioned before, that’s the problem with writing – you get a little lost in a world that makes sense only to you. But this weekend felt like a great breakthrough — I just wanted to share!

For those of you who are writers out there, how do you get over writing obstacles?

So I was writing over at Popculture Divas last week (new URL, by the way: thepopculturedivas.com). I wrote about favorite first lines of novels, which is a topic I covered here, too, but it’s a topic I never tire of. (If you never tire of it either, please go over to Popculture Divas and leave me a comment!)

Anyway, it’s particularly on my mind lately because I’m studying my own first lines of the manuscripts I’ve written — studying first five pages, really.

The first five pages are of huge importance to a novel. Noah Lukeman even wrote about this in a how-to book called The First Five Pages, which I read (although I found it almost too basic. I guess I wanted something more).

The reason the first five pages are of such importance to writers is two-fold: for one, they’re important to your reader. Publishers say that readers often open a book in a book store, scan the first page or two, then make their buying decision. With Amazon, readers do the same thing with a click of a button, scanning the first few pages, then deciding if they like the style enough to read the whole thing.

But the first five pages are also of enormous importance when a writer is trying to sell a manuscript. Often, it’s all you get to show a prospective agent or editor — you’ve got to really make your mark there, or you’ll get no further. (Sometimes you don’t even get this much — you only get a query letter, which is about a paragraph.)

I’d often thought — when I’d heard tales of this quick-fire decision on the part of agents — that the claim was exaggerated. I’d thought, surely, agents give you more chance than five pages, don’t they?

But then I participated in a bit of a contest judging, and saw hundreds and hundreds of entries go by (much like an average day must feel to an agent), and honestly, I was starting to get it — When you see THAT much material on a daily basis, you really DO make a snap judgment in the first five pages. For me, the snap was based less on plot and more on writing style and rhythm. If the writer had a lyrical way with words, I was kind of hooked, regardless of what he or she was talking about. But plot did play into my first-page assessments as well — I wanted the conflict to seem obvious almost right away. Although I wanted to be grounded in the protagonists’ “regular life” (the usual function of the first five pages), I also wanted very clear hints at what the conflict was going to be, and I was surprised at how impatient I grew after reading about 30 of these in a row.

So now I’m thinking again about my own manuscripts. The Simone/Adam book starts out kind of slow (and many people told me I should have started in his point of view rather than hers). And the new Fin/Giselle book starts out rather mellow also, although that at least matches the heroine’s personality before she gets hit by her first drama. But I’m still rethinking it. …

(Grrr. I think I could keep editing these forever.)

How about you? Can you think of books you’ve read that started out with a bang and made you love them? Do you read the first few pages before making a buying decision?