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  cover blurb, sometimes as a tag line ("The bridesmaid and the best man"; "Caught by a tycoon"; "Their perfect divorce is falling apart!").

  What specific angle will hook readers into picking up your story rather than one of the hundreds of other new titles released in the same month?

  PLANNING THE PLANNING

  With a better understanding of the challenges you'll face in writing your story, and with at least a tentative decision on what form it's going to take, look a little more closely at your particular project and do some planning.

  But how much planning should you do?

  Some authors know their entire story before they begin to write. Some start with the main characters in mind and let the story happen as they go along. Some know all about the problem and plot but discover the characters during the writing process. Some know the ending they're writing toward but nothing much about the story up to that point.

  Some authors outline every chapter and/or every scene. Some write detailed summaries of the story, picturing every major event. Some authors keep a notebook with a page for each major scene or chapter, adding notes as they write in order to remind themselves of what needs to be brought in to the next parts of the book. Some analyze each scene with a spreadsheet. Some use a simple list of major plot twists, revising it from time to time with more details or new directions as the story progresses. Some write single ideas or incidents or lines of dialogue on slips of paper, then sort the pieces into what seems a logical order, resorting now and then as the story unfolds.

  Some authors write a very sketchy first draft and then rewrite the entire book, fleshing out characters and incidents. Some write scenes and chapters as they come to mind, in no particular order. Some start with page one and write straight through, turning out a nearly finished story.

  What's the right way? Any of the methods outlined above—or perhaps something entirely different. The right way for you is what works for you, and only by trying out a number of methods can you discover what, for you, is the most efficient, supportive, and helpful.

  Don't be surprised if you can't see your entire story at once, because envisioning the whole book before writing a single word is a talent few authors have. Very few books are fully planned in advance. That's what second drafts are for— smoothing out the rough edges, adding the necessary foreshadowing and details, and tying up the loose ends.

  Many people find that writing detailed outlines or summaries before starting a book is very difficult. Most prefer to leave their characters some latitude to develop and act in surprising ways. In addition, many authors find that planning so

  extensively eliminates a great deal of the joy of creating a story, turning writing into a mechanical process. Others feel secure in starting to write only after the story is completely outlined so they know exactly what happens in each chapter.

  Whatever your style may be, some planning is essential in order to keep the rough edges and loose ends from overwhelming the story. Without an idea of where you're going, your story is apt to meander and end up fit only for the trash pile.

  Writing a book is an enormous project, and keeping in mind from one month to the next precisely what Harry's supposed to tell John in the beach scene is nearly impossible. Worse, unless you write down the terrific idea you had about how to follow up on the beach scene, you're apt to forget it entirely when you get to that place in the story.

  So whether you use a full synopsis, notes, a sketchy outline, a time line, a spreadsheet, a notebook, or a blackboard, find a way to organize your thoughts. Otherwise you'll waste a great deal of time—paging back through chapters or searching computer files to find the detail you're looking for, waiting for inspiration to strike, or doing massive revisions.

  WAITING TO WRITE

  Planning ahead keeps you from spinning your wheels, speeds up your writing process, and eases your work in polishing after you've finished the first draft. But you can do too much planning. The biggest folly of beginning writers is waiting to start writing until they have the story completely in mind, until their research is all finished, until they have large chunks of time to devote to the process, or until they're in the mood or inspired to write.

  You'll never have your story completely planned. And if you wait to start writing until you know you've got everything just right, you're apt to hit a stone wall by page ten and never get any further.

  Doing a certain amount of research before setting up your story is both necessary and wise, because it helps ensure you don't construct your plot on an impossibility or a false assumption. But beyond that, it's difficult to predict what information you'll need, so start writing and look up facts as you need them.

  Waiting until vacation time rolls around so you can devote entire days to your writing is like staying off your bicycle for fifty weeks in a row and then spending the next fourteen days riding across the country. You'll be stiff, sore, and unhappy—and unlikely to look at the bicycle with any fondness in the future.

  Many people believe that the best writing is done in a fit of blinding inspiration, in the middle of the night and on a completely unpredictable schedule. In fact, writing is a craft, and inspiration comes most often to those who are sitting in an appropriate place, waiting for it. Readers can't tell which pieces of a story were written in a brilliant creative frenzy and which were put together one painful sentence at a time. After the book is finished, you may not remember which sections came easily and which were like pulling out your fingernails.

  If you write regularly, even for just a few minutes at a time, you'll be in practice, your story will stay fresh in your mind, and you'll be in shape to take advantage of bigger blocks of time when you find them.

  If you write just one page a day, you'll have a novel-length manuscript at the end of the year. Plan ahead so you can avoid the obvious pitfalls, but don't wait to start writing your story. Planning is a great way to not write.

  RESEARCHING YOUR STORY

  "Write what you know" is good advice. When you stray too far from the familiar, you become more likely to incorporate errors into your stories—and most of the time you won't even know it, because you won't have the background to recognize where you've gone wrong. So it's important—without going overboard—to familiarize yourself with some specifics of your story's setting, culture, jobs, ethics, etc. before you start to write. You can't always write what you know, so you have to know what you write.

  But what about science fiction? Or time travel? How can anyone know about worlds and beings that don't exist or concepts that are only theoretical? What about historical periods? You can't go back to the Wild West to watch what happened, though you can read firsthand accounts written by people who were there. But for more distant times, for which there are few or no records, how can you know how people lived, what they thought, what they ate, what they wore? Wrhat if your heroine is the princess of a fictional country? Can only a princess write that story?

  Readers pick up romance primarily to experience the love story, but most of them also want to learn something about a place or a job or a time period. What they learn, they expect to be accurate.

  And readers come to the story with knowledge and experiences of their own. If what you say disagrees with what they know to be true, you'll lose credibility—and you'll probably lose the readers as well. Once readers catch an author in an error, they find it difficult to trust anything else the author tells them.

  That's true whether the author gets something wrong (like calling Chicago's North Michigan Avenue the Golden Mile, when the natives refer to it as the Magnificent Mile) or just misses the obvious (like setting her story right under an elevated train track, calling attention to the proximity of the El, but never having a train rumble by and rattle the windows).

  Your firefighter hero would know the difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide—so if you get it wrong, your readers will know that you couldn't be bothered to get your facts right. If you don't take the time to le
arn

  the distinction between a duke and a baron, between Lord Lancashire and Lord Hobert Lancashire, then the readers of your Regency will think you're not smart enough to know the difference—or worse, that you think they're not smart enough to know the difference. Your millionaire rancher can distinguish between cows and heifers, bulls and steers, geldings and stallions—so if you have him mixing them up, your readers won't trust anything else you say about ranching.

  Accurate research isn't important just for credibility. A few years ago I spent a couple of days in a medical library looking up case studies on carbon monoxide, so I could strand my hero and heroine and have them realistically sickened, but not permanently damaged. Not long after the book was published, I got a letter from a reader who had thought she was suffering from the flu until she read the story, recognized my hero's and heroine's symptoms in herself, and got treatment—just in time. Two days in a medical library was a peanut-size price to pay for saving a life.

  In other words, do your research.

  But where do you look, and what are you looking for? When you're drafting your book, you usually need two types of information—general facts you can use to shape your characters and story events when you're in the early planning phase, and more specialized information to ensure believability when you're in the writing phase. Let's take a close look at the various research options associated with each phase.

  General Research Strategies

  When you're planning your story, your first goal is to gather broad, sweeping, general knowledge about a place or a profession. This type of basic information helps you decide what your characters will do for a living, what events the story will involve, and—equally important—what sort of jobs the characters can't do and what couldn't happen in the story.

  This general information typically comes from multiple sources, including many of the following:

  Personal Experiences: The best kind of research is personal experience. There's no substitute for being there—and, of course, observing carefully. Obviously, if you want to write a Civil War novel, you can't go back and live in that time period. But you can go to Gettysburg and walk the battlefield, getting a sense of distance and direction and the way the ground lies.

  If you're using your own experience, make sure it's both accurate and comprehensive. Jacqui Bianchi, editorial director of Mills & Boon during the 1980s, once (old of an American author who was so enamored of London during a tourist visit that she set a book there. Her heroine met the hero by tripping over a fire

  hydrant and tailing into his arms; however, in her single week in the city, the author hadn't noticed that London fire hydrants are below ground, with the covers flush to the pavement. Though that's a fairly simple fix—the heroine could fall over any number of things instead, if she absolutely has to fall—some problems are a lot harder to repair after the book is written.

  When it comes to using events from your personal experience—or, for that matter, factual material gleaned from primary sources, case studies, and interviews—it's safe, within certain limits, to have those same events happen to your characters. Just keep in mind that truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Real life isn't required to be logical, but fiction has to make sense.

  Other People's Experiences: The next best source, after your own experiences, is someone else's personal experiences. Find out what your friends are good at, where they've lived, and what they've done. What jobs have they held? Where have they traveled?

  Cultivate sources like your lawyer and your doctor, the cop who lives down the street, the fireman who wants to sell you tickets to the annual ball. When you have a question for one of these professionals, you'll be able to phone and ask.

  Keep track of what you hear at cocktail parties or the water cooler. Your coworker's reminiscences about his year in the Peace Corps may not fit into a story right now, but there'll come a day when you need specifics, and then you'll know who to call. (And if the person you need to ask already knows who you are, you won't face the problem one writer did when she phoned local drug investigators and asked how much cocaine would fit in a standard adult casket and what the street value of that amount would be.)

  Most people are flattered by requests for information and eager to help, especially when you say you're asking because you want to portray their profession or experience correctly.

  Often the most helpful information pops up when you give your sources a basic scenario you'd like to use, because they'll do their best to tell you what's possible and not possible, and how to bend that specific event to make it work in your story.

  Primary Sources: If you don't know anybody who's been there and done that, look for primary sources—materials written by the people who actually lived through the experience. The best written sources are both original (written by the people who had the experience) and contemporaneous (written at or close to the time of the event, rather than as a memoir years later, when memory has faded).

  But primary sources are useful not only for researching historical novels but for creating contemporary settings. For instance, autobiographies can shed light on today's professions. When a person writes about how he learned to do his

  job, he doesn't just detail his successes; he talks about the pitfalls and pratfalls as well—the most challenging classes, the tricks played on him by his co-workers. Those details offer fertile ground for the writer's mind.

  Look for accounts of direct personal experience, not speculation by an outsider, interpretation after the fact, or self-serving memoir.

  Case Studies and Interviews: Case studies and interviews, like primary sources, arc accounts of real events and real people, though they usually aren't written by the people who actually lived through the events. A case study includes interretation by an authority or expert. While conducting an interview, a reporter or oilier interviewer guides the interview subject to share the most interesting bits of information about his experience.

  Case studies can be particularly helpful when you need medical details. If you want your hero or heroine to come down with a disease, look in the library of a nursing school or medical college. You'll find volumes detailing real patients' symptoms, how they were diagnosed, what the treatment was, whether there were complications, and how the cases turned out.

  Textbooks, Guidebooks, How-To Books, and Instruction Manuals: Textbooks can give you a quick survey of an enormous field of study and direct your further research efforts. Browsing through a textbook will give you ideas about what a character who specializes in that field would be good at—or not be good at. New textbooks are expensive, but you can often read them in college libraries or buy fairly recent textbooks at charity used-book sales, where they often go for a dollar or less.

  Guidebooks give elaborate details about geographical locations—how likely it is to rain there in October, how hard it is to get a cab, what political stance is held by the local newspaper, what strange things you might run across in a local museum.

  How-to books can be a great source of ideas for creating action for your char-acters. If your hero is fixing a faucet while talking to the heroine, a how-to book can give you specific details that make the picture realistic for the readers.

  Instruction manuals give information about a product, which may or may not be useful—but the troubleshooting section is full of ways to complicate your character's life.

  A particularly helpful resource for most romance writers is an old etiquette hook. Editions from the 1920s and earlier go into elaborate detail about things like running a big household, giving dinner parties, following courtship rituals, and training servants. That information can be useful not only for authors of historical novels but for those writing contemporary romances that involve wealth, glitz, and glamour.

  Children's Nonfiction Books: If you're looking for a quick way to familiarize yourself with a subject, look in the children's or young adult section of the library.

  Nonfiction books written for young read
ers tend to be well organized, specific, and factual, giving the main points without drowning readers in details. If you want to set your book during the Revolutionary War but you're not sure exactly when and where, the children's section of the library is a good way to get an overview.

  The children's section won't offer all the depth you need, but you can find out the basics in a short time. Once you figure out which direction you want to take, it will be easier to locate the specific materials you'll require.

  Fiction: Some authors of fiction are so meticulous with detail that they could write the handbook for their subject or historical period. Others aren't nearly so reliable. If you've picked up some general knowledge from reading fiction, don't count on the author being correct—check everything out yourself.

  Other Media: Details from audiotape and film can give your readers a realistic, I-am-there feeling that can increase the emotional impact of your story. Remember, though, that video and film are only as good as their source material and editing. Whenever possible, go the extra step to check that the producers got the facts right and that they reported the entire story.

  One problem with using tape and film is that, without elaborate editing equipment, it's more difficult and time-consuming to find a particular moment, picture, or quotation on tape than to simply look something up in a book index.

  The Internet: The Internet is a phenomenal resource, one that can be overwhelming to the researcher. Unless you strictly limit your searches, you're apt to be buried in references. Most of the references will be less than useful, and all will tempt you to surf instead of working. But if your search terms are precise, the Internet can be the best place to find arcane, specific detail. It's less useful, however, for the sort of general exploratory research you need to do before starting a story.