"Writing Romance: Creativity Seminars" has been created from the wealth of popular seminars Vanessa Grant has given to writers in Canada and the United States. This 8 tape audiocassette album covers much of the material from which Vanessa wrote her popular classic, "Writing Romance", and contains the following seminars: Writing Womens Fiction (2 tapes) How to get best-selling plot ideas from your fears, dreams, and hang-ups. Components of successful women's fiction. Plotting and characterization tricks used by professional writers. Timeless story themes and powerful archetypes. Your home town, an exotic setting? Finding time to write. Getting from idea to finished novel. Characters, motivation, conflict, tension, and plot. Keeping track. What if you get stuck? How to find a mentor.
Character Driven Plotting Vanessa explains the difference between writer driven and character driven plots. Examples of how to create realistic characters, how to develop character relationships and behavior patterns. How to develop backstory. How character personality plus backstory drive plotting for realistic character-driven plots.
Conflict for Writers How to create believable conflict in your fiction. Want/cant have as the conflict driver. The relationship between conflict and emotional intensity. Archetypal situations with inherent conflict.
Territory: From Character to Conflict Knowing your characters is the single most important preparation for writing a good book, but how do you move from character to conflict? Vanessa describes how to develop conflict by discovering when characters will behave irrationally, and when they will instinctively defend territory. Using Vanessas concept of territory, writers can readily determine characters territorial boundaries and predict situations that will create realistic conflict every reader can relate to.
Brain Sex - about Men and Women Do your men talk and act like men? Are your women believable modern women? Drawing from her writing experience, and studies of differences between men and women, Vanessa discusses how to write about the sexes.
Pacing to Maintain Tension Vanessa makes this complex technical subject clear with graphic examples. Topics include: Time and the writer: story time, reader time, and writer time. The simple rule that covers it all. How pacing relates to viewpont and narrative style.
From Spark to Finish This popular lecture describes the process of writing a novel, using Vanessas Yesterdays Vows as an example. Topics include: Original concept or story spark. Development of characterization, backstory, and conflict, with examples of how to move a stuck idea. Development of plot. How to keep track of timelines and continuity details. (Complete book notes for Yesterdays Vows are available in Vanessas book, Writing Romance.)
The writer sits at her desk, her auburn hair catching the late-afternoon sun, her chocolate-brown eyes focused far, far away. For as long as she could remember, she'd spent Sundays at the beach, wearing the same bikini she'd worn in high school and looking even better now than she did then. Each of her companions was more compelling than the last one; her life was an ever-changing cast of ... romance novels. The stories were exciting and alluring, each fulfilling its promise to whisk her away. After having read so many romances, then, why was she having so much trouble writing her own? Because she didn't have Vanessa Grant, published by Harlequin 25 times over, to attend to her queries about plot, conflict, character development, and love (not sex, please) scenes. As luck would have it, now anyone can benefit from Grant's romance-writing know-how. In Writing Romance she coaches you on everything from naming your characters to getting an editor to read your finished manuscripts. She's got ideas about story development ("Try dumping your character into your worst nightmare"), setting ("If you're not an expert on your setting, it's wise to have your character new to the setting as well"), suspense (it's created by unanswered questions), and more. If you find that your characters are running amuck, try out Grant's garbage-can test. Pretend to throw out your novel. Then, Grant says, ask yourself what one part of the story you would pick out of the garbage, if you could pick out just one. You might be surprised by what you hold on to. Grant peppers her text with helpful examples from the pages (and preparations) of her own books.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
From J. Kaye's Book Blog:
My belief system is there is no such thing as a bad how-to write book. Anything that will get an aspiring moving in a positive direction is good. To back this belief system up, I have a shelf full of them. I even had Vanessa Grant's previous addition to this book on my shelf until a year or so ago. Remember the red one? I was curious to see how much had been added and the answer is quite a lot. If you've read books by Victoria Lynn Schmidt, Ph. D., Jordan E. Rosenfeld, and Karen S. Wiesner, this one... more info
Learning to Write Romance:
The cover of the book says it all:
Create a romance bestseller, write romantic scenes from start to finish, and get in on the big business of writing romance! Writing Romance gives you all the ingredients for a successful romance novel, from writing powerful characters to opening the story with a question that stirs the reader's mind. The book is divided into several different sections:
--Planning and plotting your book
--Researching
--Setting goals
--Selling your... more info
Writing Romance worked for me!:
When I first received this book as a gift, I sat down immediately and read it cover to cover. Being an avid writer of romance fiction, it was the book I had been looking for. Writing Romance is a great source for writers just venturing out into the world of romance fiction, but offers all writers great tips and techniques. Not only does Vanessa explain her techniques in this book, but she also offers examples of how she used the techniques within excerpts of her own published novels, giving the reader a... more info
but Vanessa Grant can't write!:
This book was entertaining, but pretty useless. Most of the "advice" consists of personal accounts of Ms. Grant's own writing experiences, with very specific details as to how she came up with all her plots (and very minor attempts to translate this into beneficial knowledge for the reader). It could serve as a decent catalog if you were shopping for her books. She manages to make some useful points about designing characters to produce conflict, but she misuses vocabulary words on more than one occasion,... more info
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