The Characters Are The Key

Really, they are.   Just maybe not the way you think.

When I first started writing Regency romance, I have to confess that the first book - a novella, actually - I attempted to write was just to see if I could do it with some amount of cohesion and plot. At the time, I was writing more modern works and Regency seemed...well...a genre that would be really terrifying to write in. My heroines tend to be a little bold, a little sassy, and not really all that circumspect. In short, full of behavioral problems that would not have been permitted in that era. At least not by any lady of good breeding who hoped to catch a husband some day and keep her good name.

So how could I ever create a heroine who was both true to me, true to herself, and true to an era I'd read extensively, but never even considered writing within? I had no clue, but I decided to give it a try.   And after wrestling with the era, the language style, the manner of speech, and the setting for at least a month, I was ready to give up. After all, it never takes me that long to come up with the plots and settings and characters for my novels. Then one day, just when I was getting ready to settle in for the night, along came Lucy.

Lucy Cavendish was a character that had been living in my head for some time, but I could never quite get a good feel for her. She was always sort of this misty, murky lady that hung out in the shadowy corners of my mind, never allowing me to fully see who or what she was. Like a lot of authors, to me, the characters I create are real people. It might be more accurate to say that I don't create the characters so much as they live inside my mind and dictate their stories to me when the time is right.   I'm just the conduit from their existence elsewhere to the pages of the book. Lucy was no exception.

Except that Lucy, when she finally did emerge into the full-blown light of my mind, didn't fit into my modern or paranormal worlds. She was decidedly old school. So old, in fact, that she was right out of England's Regency period, when George IV was ruling as Prince Regent in his father's stead. And I had no idea what to do with her. After all, I had tried to create a setting for her once before and I had failed miserably. I even saved all of my "bad" attempts at writing Regency in a folder so I would know what not to do the next time.

Lucy, however, like most of my characters tend to do, set up shop in my brain one day and told me her story. She also made me realize that while my first attempt at writing in the Regency romance genre might not be perfect, the pieces I had already created weren't nearly as bad as I thought they were. So, with her guidance, I sat down and started to write. And I wrote and I wrote and I wrote until I ended up with...well, not a perfect novel, but a passable novella. Since I was writing in December I had made it a Christmas-themed piece because, quite honestly, I knew from research that the holiday season was a far less restrictive time during that era. So if I made a mistake, it might be more easily forgiven.

And I made an awful lot of mistakes.

However, not too many people seemed to notice. Or if they did, they didn't seem to care. Once I put my little Christmas story online for sale, people started buying it. Much to my surprise.   Because honestly, I didn't think anyone would. I really thought the novella, priced at what I thought was an extravagant 99 whole cents, would sell a few copies and then simply die out - either from lack of marketing or because it simply wasn't that good. After all, in general, my first attempts at anything, be it writing or jewelry, usually end up in failure. To my surprise, not only did On A Cold Christmas Eve sell, but it sold well!   Yes, there were mistakes, but most people enjoyed the story enough to overlook them. And they were pretty darn kind about the whole thing, too.

Emboldened, I wrote two more Regency-era works that year, both of them full length novels. Then, as the next Christmas season approached, I was faced with a quandary. I had two very good ideas for stories, but limited time to turn them both into full-blown novels. So I wrote one novel and one novella. The novella, The Earl Who Loved Me, was written over the course of a day and a half. And then suddenly, on December 27th of that year, the novella took off. And took off in a big way. Since the novella was, and still is, free on most ebook sites, it was downloaded frequently - at its height, nearly 15,000 copies a day. I couldn't understand it, because in my mind, it was no different than my other Regency works.

So I opened my laptop, poured myself a hot drink, and sat down to read the novella from start to finish.   Not with a critical, editing eye as the author, but just for fun. Just as a reader at home would. It was only then that the light bulb finally clicked on in my mind. Finally - finally - more than a year after I first met Lucy in my mind, I understood what she had been trying to explain to me that rainy, dark and foggy night that now seemed like another lifetime ago.

The characters are truly the key to any good story. They don't have to be perfect, but they do have to be likable. Lucy and Adam, the hero of Christmas Eve, weren't perfect and neither were the scenarios I created for them. But they were likable. People felt compelled to root for the two of them to fall in love.   More than that, readers wanted more of the world I had created with Lucy's help - because they liked the people who lived within it. They wanted more of Seldon Park and the imperfect but still lovable scoundrels and ladies who inhabited its cozy confines. And I finally felt as if I was able to write those stories in a way that was authentic to me, my characters, and the era itself.

So now, with the release of One Christmas With the Earl, I have come back around to Lucy's world once again. In Christmas Eve, Lucy's first true confidante was the already married Lady Mellie, Adam's sister.   However, I had never really told Mellie's story, not even within another novel. I had simply implied that she had one. But like Lucy, Amelia, Diana, and all of the others before her, Mellie deserves to have her story told as well. Like the others, she is likeably flawed. She lives in my mind as a real person, another part of the complex world of Seldon Park. In short, she has character.

And as Lucy informed me rather tartly that first night so long ago, character really is the key.