Ten Things a Romance Novel Hero Would Never Say

Its Monday. Time for fun and another interactive day here at the Vortex.

My theory on what women want can be summed up in two words: romance novel. Not necessarily for the hero's bulging biceps and rogue tendencies, but for all he doesn't say. By and large these stories are written by women for women. Where else can men get a comprehensive study like that--Men's Health? Yeah, right. Way off. Way.

So, we collectively offer up ten heady doses of reality, ones that chase away any notion of fantasy. I'll start.

Ten Things A Romance Novel Hero Would Never Say:

1. "I'm taking the Browns to the Superbowl." And he isn't talking football.

Who's next?

More Longmire Does Romance Covers

Mental Flow

The only psych classes I had were on the minds of children, so the idea of mental flow and how to harness it fascinates me. Defined, mental flow is that state of deep concentration when the conscious mind stops telling you why you can't do something and lets the rest of your mind and body get it done. Finding flow is essential to any creative pursuit and the secret ingredient to being a successful professional.

According to Daniel Goleman, author of The Meditative Mind, there are five key elements to mental flow:

1. Merging of action and awareness in sustained concentration on task at hand
Counting on flow to just happen is like waiting for the migration of a rare butterfly. Make a conscious effort to create an environment where flow is more likely and know what those cues are in yourself. Some walk in nature for twenty minutes. Professional race car drivers participate in elaborate rituals before taking to the asphalt at 200 miles per hour. Become a creature of habit.

2. Focus of attention in a pure involvement without concern for outcome
Goals must be clearly defined, either consciously or subconsciously, but being overly-concerned with the end product is a barrier to creativity. Extreme deadline stress can be crippling because it doesn't allow the superego, the one who controls self-criticism, to step aside.

3. Self-forgetfulness with heightened awareness of the activity
Giving yourself permission to drop away for a time is important. Flow typically happens after fifteen minutes of uninterrupted study, but can be lessened with the right techniques. If you're having trouble accessing that part of yourself or you thrive on a sense of control, try twenty or thirty minutes of meditation once or twice per week. With practice, you'll find that superego suppressed enough that you'll be able to step in and out of flow easily.

4. Skills adequate enough to meet the demand
Without knowledge for the subconscious mind to draw from, flow is impossible.

5. Clarity regarding situational cues and appropriate response
Situational cues can guide reaction. This is especially true of athletes and other professions where the physical body is the primary instrument for success.

Here are some ways to increase mental flow:

*The shorter the lag time between flow sessions, the more likely you'll be able to access that zone.
*Hunger and excessive fatigue kill flow. Power up with the right body fuel and come to the session rested.
*Phone calls and shared workspace are enemies. This is the primary reason everyone at Microsoft has their own office. Workers do not go into each other's space. Email is the primary means of communication because it's non-invasive and can be attended to when flow drops away.
*Find out the time of day when flow comes easier to you. Schedule less creative tasks during alternate times.

How do you find your flow?

Life, Reduced

I'd sat down last night with every intention to post, but as is the case with me, I need time to digest and meditate on the topic at hand. So it comes to you at 4 am after a day spent in the microcosm of a hospital. A loved one's routine, yearly it seems, outpatient trip through the medical maze. This time it netted a powerful idea.

Maybe the idea wouldn't have glistened so brightly had I not found it in the surgical waiting room, where our human experience is reduced to life and death. And The Price is Right. Where for a short burst of time, strangers come to know exact shades of expression in each other, and through the sheer intimacy of unspoken fears, the room becomes a lifeboat. Phone-liason volunteer at the helm. Enough coffee to float us and enough look-at-my-celebrity-baby magazines to carry us straight to the bottom. Life reduced.

In yesterday's USA Today, a columnist outlined his experiment with simplicity. Over the course of a year, he pared down his life. His original goal was to reduce spending, but the idea overflowed with the unintended consequences of happiness and gratitude. The rules were simple: 1. purchasing books and music are allowed. They nourish the mind. 2: purchasing gifts for others is allowed. 3: Accepting gifts is okay. 4: Never buy anything for yourself. 5: One year.

My first thought was: only a writer could pull this off. A writer could knock around the house in hole-infested briefs and find creative ways to skirt the rules. The job already lends itself to poverty and a socially-acceptable form of insanity.

Then, I considered the families who checked out of society and went back to live for six months in nineteenth century conditions for the PBS series. The idea always appealed to me. I couldn't help wondering if I had the strength to shed my pest-controlled, central air-dependent life. Always, the families re-entered the present time closer for the experience, their souls richer.

I don't want for anything, save the love and health of those around me. Everything on my cork board cannot be bought. I am blessed beyond belief that I have the time and luxury to lament over rejection slips while others can't make their next house payment. So, what if a family could learn to want for nothing in the climate of excess we live in? What if at the beginning of that year, we pared down to the essentials and material things with meaning and memories--the basics of everything we loved and entered into the experiment with garage sales and charity donations? What if we spent the year recapturing the joy of giving, the art of thankfulness? Is it possible? Would my family detest me or would we emerge on the heels of one of those life-lessons that would forever change our fabric?

Life reduced. Without the bling of a showcase showdown or the misguided beacon of those celebrity magazines. A lifeboat to find our true selves.

Could you do it?

A Challenge

"Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." ~Henry Rod

I have a cork board in sight. Little more than the size of a boot box, but littered with visual representations of my aspirations. I'd cluttered my monitor with post-its once upon a time, but time decayed the adhesive and some became lost. Some call it a goal board, but that's hardly magical. Maybe it's some incantation of The Secret, an experiment to convince myself there is a force at work for or against us greater than anything we can understand. The cork board required effort. The purchase, the great hunt for thumb tacks in my desk's jungle drawer, the seeking out of images and words to capture a future reality that fills daydreams. Minimal effort, compared to the road traveled to get there, but something more than thought. The permanence of words and actions.

One of the most powerful forces we harness in life is belief. In others, yes. In ourselves, more. It takes a quiet mind to dig down and find our definition of success. What a tremendous leap of faith to take that definition and own it. Shout it from the rooftop. Tell our family. Post it on a board. It makes our dreams vulnerable, a bullseye for cynics. Most importantly, it stands as a monument to ourselves. A Pavlovian reenforcement we will someday come to know as truth.

I can't tell you what's on my board. The contents are too raw, too familiar. Nor do I want to know what's on yours. I do want to share the process. I challenge each of you to begin gathering symbols, ideas, photographs and find a place for them you see each day. If a board doesn't work for you, try one of those travel coffee mugs that are a fillable blank canvas for decoration and drink from it each day. Try the inside of your closet door or a bookmark. Anything goes, as long as you lay eyes on it each day. Add other ideas here. Together we'll find out if there is magic.

Most artistic feat today: paper monsters

The Master of Suspense

"Drama is life with the dull bits cut out."
~Alfred Hitchcock

Last night, I watched director's commentary on a DVD from one of my favorite movies, Somewhere in Time, and Jeannot Szwarc referenced a technique used by Alfred Hitchcock to increase the tension. According to Hitchcock, the audience must earn the right to the character's first meet, an idea that seems to be grounded more in romance than murder thrillers. When Richard Collier is finally transported back to 1912, he must endure being caught in the wrong room, ignored by the play's cast at large, barked at by the director and must dodge the advances of an amorous cast member before the audience is rewarded with the moment he first meets Elise McKenna. The technique, so simple and effective, made me wonder which of Hitchcock's other tricks might translate into the author's relationship with the reader. Here are a few tidbits:

1. The Mind of a Reader
According to Hitchcock, nothing is more important than how each scene engages an audience. Every aspect must reel them in. Characters tease and pull them along, leaving them desperately wanting more. Readers come to our pages because we provide them a safe element of danger, much like riding a rollercoaster. At the final page, a writer's greatest achievement is when the reader comes screaming into the station, smiles with delight and heads straight for the nearest bookstore to devour anything else the author has written.

2. Emotional Framing
Hitchcock often played with the audience using the "theory of proximity." His shots zoomed in on details and relaxed in far away angles, every movement a calculated control of the audience's intensity. When staging scenes, writers can use the reader's physical proximity to the characters and the character's proximity to each other to tap into that intensity.

3. Visual Storytelling
This one could be a stretch from screen to page, almost counterintuitive, but Hitchcock preferred using a succession of images or details to tell the story rather than relying on dialogue. The element of reveal, an art in itself, captured the audience far better than a hoodwinked detective laying out the pieces. In a publishing climate where the white spaces of dialogue are king, visual storytelling can give the narrative that does remain on the page greater impact.

4. Dialogue Means Nothing
"People don't always express their inner thoughts to one another," said Hitchcock. "A conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs." He accessed this through the actor's eyes. Writers access this through subtext. The focus of a scene should never be on what the characters are actually saying. The power lies in drawing the reader's attention to everything else that shows truth.

5. Characters Break Cliche
Hitchcock always gave audiences the opposite of what they expected. Dumb blondes who were smart. Cubans with French accents. Rich criminals. Unexpected personalities cemented the bond between character and audience.

6. Two Things At Once
Another technique Hitchcock used to build tension was to have two contrasting or unrelated situations playing out simultaneously. While the reader is focused on the momentum of one, they are diverted by another. Jack Bickham cautions that while it is an effective technique to increase dramatic tension, the writer must use it sparingly to avoid frustrating the reader.

7. Exploit Trivial Character Traits
Hitchcock observed that in moments of crisis, people invariably do something trivial. Light a cigarette. Make a cup of tea. One small detail can add considerable tension and offer insight into character. The more awkward and fresh the detail, the better. Hitchcock often looked to exploit elements connected to a character's location.

8. Sunlight Abounds
Hitchcock loved the juxtaposition of the norm. He contrasted the darkness and drama of his story with settings of brightness and apparent happiness. In North by Northwest, he drops his protagonist on a sun-drenched field of wheat only to be hunted by a crop dusting plane. In this way, the drama is even more vivid and the writer avoids cliched settings.

9. Surprise and Twists
Hitchcock's rule: The story must never end the way the audience expects. Never. Lead them in one direction, then pull the rug out.

10. Humor Adds Tension
The delicious irony Hitchcock often put his characters in is his own form of humor coming through. He envisioned the worst possible thing that could go wrong for the character and built his stories from that irony.

As writers, we know most of these things, both intuitively and through the learning curve we've traveled. For me, reminders of those tiny little nuances that lay at the bottom of my bag of tricks are like a shiny, forgotten penny. Okay, maybe something that spends better, but priceless nevertheless.

"I am scared easily, here is a list of my adrenaline - production: 1: small children, 2: policemen, 3: high places, 4: that my next movie will not be as good as the last one." ~ Alfred Hitchcock

Nice to know even the greats shared that fear.

What's your favorite Hitchcock moment and why?

The Migration of a Love Scene

Day 1: Starbucks, downtown. 9 am

I know what you’re thinking. Is it possible to write sex in a Starbucks? Contrary to what many believe about romance writers, we don’t have satin-covered chaise lounges in our offices. Our crystal goblets are filled with java to fuel the energy for the endurance marathon that is the love scene. We don’t slip into something more comfortable unless it’s the stained Parks and Rec shirt we got when we signed up for Pilates. Maybe some do, but they probably live on some planet in the Nora galaxy.

It’s true, the whirring espresso machines and baristas hollering out stranger’s names shifts the muse into a diesel engine. Slow to warm into the character’s heads, their motivations, the emotional journey necessary for this one scene. I watched two grown men fight over a stained, upholstered chair. I took in a nearby conversation (You know writers do this don’t you? Eavesdropping with a bionic ear fuels our creativity) between two men. One laid out enough laptop computer gadgets to put Best Buy to shame. The other laid out the male-version of his tragic “I’m happily divorced, my wife is a stalker” love story, complete with metaphors to lifeboats and Carole King.

Character’s state of undress: nowhere near first base

Day 2: Barnes and Noble, downtown (I was stuck for a week, okay?). 9 am

Those periphery desks? My next attempt. The man at the next table sat opposite, more intent on people watching than thumbing through his business journal. Normally, a past-time I identify with. On this day it was the equivalent of an audience. How can I be inspired to write the precise shade of flesh when all I have to go on is a glossy Pete Rose biography in the Sports section and Wall Street Boy with roman chimes for a cell ring? An added bonus to this day: a visiting surgeon from the nearby hospital in a chance meeting with said business boy discussing Apple stocks. The visual impact of the doctor’s powder blue scrubs turned every phrase clinical.

Character’s state of undress: first base

Day 3: Kitchen Table, home. 9pm

Yes, by this time, I was thinking that, too. Eliminate all factors out of the realm of control. And it was dark. That should help, right? But the guide channel from earlier that day flashed through my brain. Brokeback on Bravo. What would be cut, exactly? Would it be a study in tight storytelling? After all, Jake is the inspiration for my hero, who by this time was, no doubt, getting frustrated at the slow turn of events. So Jake is wearing thermals the whole time. The face, focus on the face. Twenty minutes, that’s all.

An hour and a half later: the cat is giving me his one-eyed stare. I’m back at the table trying to get that cruel earwig of dialogue out of my brain: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Does mine wank like that line?

Character’s state of undress: past second

Day 4: Coffee Shop Three, less than 1 mile from home. 7 am

One detail I left out of my previous rant about this place is that it contains a flowing water fireplace-like room partition. I’d drunk enough limeade the previous night to float an arc. Add that to the perfection that was just-brewed iced tea, and I was b-lining it to the ladies room between heavy pettings.

Right about the time my hero’s internal dialogue was screaming “Finally!” a bible study group assembled at the next table, roundtabling and dissecting the moments each had been saved. At that point, the only deliverance I needed was from this *!@# scene.

Character’s state of undress: enough to go to confession

Day 4: writing desk, home. Midnight

Tissue box. I couldn’t be sure if the tears were because my characters had just been mercilessly ripped apart or because I’d championed over Debbie Downer love stories, nosy strangers and decidedly non-inspirational input and typed the scene’s ending punctuation. Is it satisfying for the reader? I’m too close to tell.

I do know it wouldn’t be the same without that precise shade of green from the Pete Rose cover. The exact contour of a stubbled jaw line on a Wyoming hillside. The fire and passion with which the saved had spoken. For writers, input is output, and I remain grateful for what life shows me.

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While we’re on the topic, I recently stumbled across this brilliant post by Libba Bray detailing how writing a novel is like falling in love. Enjoy!

My Awareness, Raised in a Barn

I'm working on a post called The Migration of a Love Scene; but, since the entirety of the scene has yet to be fully realized-read into that what you will-a thoughtful perspective will have to wait. I offer you something to consider until then.

Last week, I wandered into a Pottery Barn store, a place I almost never go because charging the equivalent of a car's down payment for a giraffe-print pillow that would become ground zero for hairballs around here is absurd. I had eighteen minutes to kill and hundred degree temperatures to escape, so I strapped on all the pretentiousness I could muster and entered the foreign land of glossy, lime green "&" sign bookends and stark white vases that looked more like Charmin rolls than haute decor. At minute fifteen, I saw it.

An hourglass.

A dwarf to its magnificent, Oz-like shelf partner, the gravity of its symbolism spoke to me in the way only someone obsessed with time can appreciate. Its simplicity and smooth lines, the purity of its contents, made me forget all about my disdain for trinkets. Its cold, air-conditioned glass brought relief to my heated palms. The promise of inspiration a worthy trade for a lunch out that day.

Treasure in hand, I navigated the potpourried landscape of diagonal beds and blue-haired, botoxed grannies to the register. A man desperately trying to recapture his Gap-like youth took one look and strapped on a visible why-don't-you-just-buy-a-toothpick-and-waste-my-time expression, quickly ebbed by the task at hand.

"Five minutes. That's all they get, huh?"

"No more," I said. Until that moment, the precise functionality of the piece hadn't occurred to me. Was it true? Was his snarky remark some kind of divine message? Had I really been shortchanging those around me in an effort to finish this book?

"Did you see the other one? Huge."

"How much time does that one give?"

"Not sure. An hour, maybe. Is this a gift?"

"Yes." A lie, so fleet from the tongue. Could I not own its importance? Had it been an attempt to diffuse my compulsiveness to have it, a subconscious safety net of potential re-gifting? Or was the hourglass everything I intended it to be? A gift of time to myself. Five minutes more to chase a dream.

I watched the Gap-offender painstakingly wrap the fragile contents in layer after layer of skin-colored tissue and bury it in a lined box worthy of something a hundred times its value. Gift receipt in place, a handled, textured bag shaken out to welcome the presentation, I left the man, the store of excess and an aggressive octogenarian debating the precise word to describe an orange shade of ick and became part of the oppressive heat once again.

I haven't timed a thing with it. Maybe the falling sand is just too precise. Too limiting. Gone is the deep-freeze sensation in hand, a sacrifice to the energy bill. It occupies a writing corner filled with a Victorian house, a slick blue angel on a rocking horse and enough spiritual awakening crystals to make me a D (something my CPs should collectively confess on Post Secret). For now, it's the perfect reminder of five minutes. Five for them, five for me, both part of the quest for balance I'm forever seeking.

How do you find balance?