How To Add Interest To Your Writing With Time-travel

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Using events in another time period to advance your plotline adds interest and color to your story. Generally you achieve this with either time-travel, which is moving your present-day protagonist physically to the location, flashbacks to another time within the protagonists lifetime, or reincarnation, where they emerge as another person. Your readers really don’t care how you get there; they simply want to be there. Research carefully, find interesting tidbits about your time period, like the food, the clothing. Your reader wants to be a tourist along with having an adventure.

Travelling in time is only theory and not something you can look up in Wikipedia, but research into the possible theories, learning new things, investigating new places adds a whole new dimension to writing that makes the job of committing some 70,000 words to paper exciting. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about whaling in 1865 when I wrote Love Out of Time, and discovered a fascinating event in the Civil War called The Stone Fleet Incident. You didn’t want to know how they did laundry on a boat, but I told you anyhow.

The wildly popular, romantic “Highlander” series by Diana Gabaldon has brought back interest in this genre. She uses Scotland and the Battle of Culloden in 1746, as her historical period. Her female character passes through an energy force to get there, and back again. Her romantic interest is hauntingly memorable.

In my novel, The Haunting of Aaron House, I use flashbacks of the ghost inhabiting Samantha’s body. The main secret to this writing is a strong sense of place. Your reader wants to be there with your protagonist, so you must put yourself there to observe small details, like clothing, speech, and manners—reacting to the scene so your readers hear the sounds, smell the odors around them. Garbage? Food? Blood?  In The Haunting of Aaron House, Amalie, the ghost in Samantha, is having a flashback to the Battle of Gettysburg. She’s in the middle of Pickett’s Charge.

“Amos! Amos, my beloved, where are you?” She stopped, holding her mouth, coughing. “I can’t breathe. The smoke from the guns is choking me. Too much noise. Cannons exploding, and men crying, horses screaming in pain.” She ran farther, her hands over her ears, staggering to avoid soldiers, and fell to the ground, crying for Amos.

Love Out of Time uses time-travel, complicated by shifts to parallel universes. We go to 1865, and a whaling village in Massachusetts called New Kensington. My main character, Sara Burkhart, rents a beach house in present day New Kensington that is haunted by a sea captain, leader of a group of time travellers from the old town. Sara’s ghost, Caleb, sends her back in time to i865 New Kensington. In this brief excerpt of Sara’s first visit, she wakes in the middle of the night.

Cautiously she opened one eye at a time, afraid of what she’d find, peering through the mist. It was night. She was outdoors. The smell of salt water indicated an ocean nearby. Roughly clad male bodies shoved past her, ignoring her presence. Judging by the shadows of tall-masted sailing ships in the distance, the sounds of bells and creaking timber, and the odors of rotten fish, unwashed bodies, and wet wool, she was somewhere far removed from her time.

Looking up. She saw a sign hanging overhead, the words “Sounder Inn” painted in coarse letters around a spouting whale—a tavern. …….Cautiously, she ventured inside. A strange mix of men of all races and nationalities…..some nearly naked and covered with tattoos.

You get the idea. Try it and go places you’ll never be.
See these books on my Amazon page.  http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B005N0BVCS

How To Write Good Dialogue

                                                    

I'm a dialogue junkie. The first thing I look for when I read a novel is quotation marks.

 If I don't see any by page 2, I'm out of there. I like to be inside my characters in a scene and see, the way it looks and smells to them. You learn this by constantly describing people and scenes in your mind all day, wherever you go. When you meet someone with a characteristic you can use, describe them in your journal. When you write dialogue, you are the character, playing out the scene.

Most people use clichés when they speak, according to their culture. I live in the South, and one of my favorites is, “He’s a hard dog to keep under the porch.” “Back in the day” is used too much. I save it for people I don’t like. When teenagers are relating a conversation, they often start with, “He goes…” and then, “I go…” I like to give pet expressions to my characters. The sheriff’s wife in my book, Maddie’s Choice, is a loud, buxom woman who ends a lot of her sentences with “So to speak,” and has Maddie doing it sometimes.

 Since I write women’s lit with romance, I create, first, a female and a male main protagonist, and I’ll probably write in each one’s point of view, which means I have to know the character intimately before they speak—be in tune with the emotions governing their speech, as well as their background and culture. How do they feel at that moment? Okay, here’s a for instance from my romance, Maddie’s Choice, set present day, at an Arkansas cattle ranch.

Maddie Taylor is from New York, a successful writer of romances and has inherited half of the ranch.  She’s just driven in and is greeted by a very unfriendly crowd of cowboys. Clearly she’s not welcome. We’ve already met her in New York so we know how she’s looked forward to living on a ranch, yearning for real friends. Disappointed almost to tears at their attitude she loses her temper and explodes into a rant. Feisty Maddie has a smart mouth. Her speech will reflect her background as a successful writer, educated, with a large vocabulary at her command.  She’s just been told Uncle Gid said she’s some Bimbo who just wants to take the money and leave.

Fueled by anger, she planted her bright red boots solidly, put her fists on her hips, and raged, “Whoever implied that is a sexist, judgmental, bigoted ignoramus who doesn’t have a clue, and has no business giving opinions on subjects about which he knows nothing. Where might I find this paragon of Western wisdom so that I might enlighten him?”

“Right here, ma’am. You have somethin’ to say to me?”

The deep voice came from right behind her, full of challenge, loaded with sarcasm, and entirely too close. She turned and looked into the eyes of Mister Sex, himself.

“I’m here to stay. Now, deal with it.”

“Well, hell.”

This is Gideon, the other half-owner, who has decided not to like her, although she excites him. He’s street-smart and his speech reflects his gender. When he’s at a loss for words, he often says, “Well, hell.”

The following are snippets from a conversation Gid has with Pete, the grizzled senior citizen, foreman of the ranch for years and surrogate dad to young, orphaned Gideon. By now we know that Gideon is a damaged war veteran with PTSD and although yearning for love, is afraid to get close for fear he’ll hurt someone. In this scene, Gid is sitting alone in the barn, depressed after another argument with Maddie, nearly drunk from a bottle of wine. Pete enters.

“Gid, what are you doing here? I thought you were with Maddie?”

Gideon gestured with the bottle. “Here, it’s some wine I found I the kitchen.”

Pete accepted the offer and took a drink. “Jesus,” he gasped, coughing, “what is this stuff?”

“Chardonnay. Maddie bought it for the party. She says New Yorkers drink it.”

Pete grimaced. “It wouldn’t be my poison of choice. Hell, I don’t like grapes on a bunch, why would I like ‘em in a bottle? Guess it gets the job done, though.”

Gid got to the point. “I don’t know a damned thing about women.”

“Women are different ‘n men,” Pete agreed with a nod.

“Ain’t that the damned honest truth?”

Gideon goes on to explain his latest dust-up with Maddie, his confusion, and despair. Pete tells him his problem.  “Hell, boy. You’re already half in love with that woman.”

“I don’t believe in love. People don’t have it in them to give. This man-woman thing is all about sex. There’s no such thing as love. How would you know, anyway?” He raised the bottle to his lips “You’ve been married to Bea for more’n fifty years. Do you love Bea?” It took a lot of wine for him to find the nerve to ask that. A man his age shouldn’t be ignorant of such things.

Pete thought a bit. “In the morning I wake up, in this warm place that Bea and me made, with her curled up against me, holdin’ on to me like I was the most important thing in her world. No matter how my day goes, I know she’ll be there when I come home. The thought makes the day worth living. That’s how I know.”

I could have left the tags off all Pete’s speech because his words were so different from Gideon, but they serve to pace the scene, so I left some on. 

Don’t be afraid of making your men human. There is a film I watch every time it is on TV that does this to perfection. As Good As It Gets, with Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, and Greg Kinnear. The men bare their souls to each other in a heartfelt way that makes them no less men. The realization that men speak differently when they are among their own was pioneered by Paddy Chayefsky, a brilliant playwright of the 1950’s and his breakthrough play Marty (1955). His style was termed “kitchen realism.”

In this book Gideon’s army buddy shows up with the DEA when Maddie is kidnapped, right before a gun battle with the local drug-smuggling motorcycle gang. Gideon’s army friend is Australian. That needed a lot of research into Australian slang. At the end of the last scene, after the gun battle, when Maddie’s life has been saved by an Angus bull, he remarks, “If the bikey comes good, he’ll need a new set of knackers. That bull made a mess of him.”

You can read a sample of Maddie's Choice at http://www.amazon.com/Maddies-Choice-Joyce-Zeller-ebook/dp/B00EW1LOP8/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449868219&sr=1-5&keywords=Books+by+Joyce+Zeller

I Want To Write A Book, or....Where do ideas come from?

So you want to write a book. What should you write about? How do you find an idea?

I've published two books, appeared in one anthology, have a western romance coming out later this year and have two more finished novels and a novella to sell. Where did the ideas come from?
You've been told, "Write what you know," but what if you don't know anything? You're not an expert on anything and you don't know anyone who is. You just want to write a good, entertaining story.

Ignore this  advice. Being smart is not about what you know; it is how fast you can find out. Research is half the fun of writing fiction. My new book, Maddie's Choice, due in October, is about modern day cattle rustling in the Midwest, Angus bulls, motorcycle gangs, methamphetamine dealers and PTSD--all of which I knew almost nothing. Once i had the idea I had to research everything and met a lot of interesting people in the process. It is part of writing. I discovered people love to answer questions. So where did the idea for this book originate?

I live in a tourist town in Arkansas, and one weekend members of a large motorcycle gang known as Hell's Angels came to town to celebrate an event. Yeah, the gang Marlon Brando made a movie about. This group is from California and the East coast. There is another gang, called the Bandidos, out of Texas who consider this their private territory, and they arrived to throw the others out. A knife fight ensued. Paramedics were called, along with police and the FBI, who happened to be in town, because the meth trade in this country is controlled by motorcycle gangs and the Feds had been watching them. I didn't know anything about drug trafficking, biker gangs, and the FBI, but I knew a story idea when I heard it.

About that time the newspapers were reporting several cases of cattle rustling at the small ranches in the area. That's when the "what if" question that is the start of every novel, hit me. What if there's a drug dealing motorcycle gang in the area--let's call them The Red Hand--and  they're about to get a big delivery from Mexico? To keep the local police too busy to notice they start rustling cattle from these small ranches who can't afford the loss. The book could end with a big gun battle.

So far, so good, but this is a romance. Besides a small cattle ranch right outside Peachville, Arkansas, I need a man and a woman, who must live together on the ranch, in unlikely circumstances, who can't stand each other but have to get along.
Okay. Let's suppose the woman, Maddie a romance novelist with a thriving career, from New York who's never been near a cow, has writer's block and desperately needs a change of scene.

The guy will be moody, and rough-edged. He's Gideon, the ranch boss--big, handsome and hostile to women, especially New York Bimbos. He clearly needs the love of a good woman but he's afraid to get near because he's suffering from PTSD, a result of ten years in combat in Special Forces. Oh yeah, he's guardian of two orphaned nephews yearning for the love of their uncle. Throw in an Angus bull addicted to chocolate, a barn cat named Deuteronomy, and we're on our way.

I had a lot of fun and pulled out all the stops writing this book. I added some evil dirty guys, some eccentric small town residents, a lot of romantic dialogue, passionate sex, and some really good fights between Maddie and Gideon before they finally get together. The final kicker: Twenty thousand dollars worth of Angus cattle were rustled in Southern Missouri last week.
 Maddie's Choice, to be published by Coffeetown Press this fall thanks to my agent Jeanie Loiacono.