Less is Definitely More – Making Every Word Count

Jeannie Lin writes historical romances set in Tang Dynasty China. She has completed three novels for Mills & Boon Historical and three short stories for Historical Undone! with another one currently underway. As a long time lover of short fiction, Jeannie appreciates the different mindset and skill set that goes into writing in the long and short forms. Her latest release from Undone!, The Lady's Scandalous Night, is the story of a woman trying to save her brother by seducing the man sent to kill him.

Here she gives us her tips on writing shorter length romances.

When I set out to write my first Undone!, The Taming of Mei Lin, I had a few concerns. The story I had in mind contained fight scenes, an unusual historical setting, multiple secondary characters, extensive backstory, flirtation, romantic tension, personal growth, and love scenes. Plural.

How was I going to cram ALL that into 11,000 words?

Tip 1: Research the line
Read examples from the line that you’re targeting. I read through several of the most popular Historical Undone! stories before plotting my own.

Tip 2: Careful plotting
Here were some plot tips that I took out of my research:

• The plot usually centered on a single episode or event.
• The heroine and hero need to meet early and should be together as much as possible.
• Historical detail and world-building need to have a strong presence but can’t bog down the story.

Every scene had to be pivotal and memorable. The key was to combine and interweave as many elements of the story into each scene as much as possible — without getting things confused.

Tip 3. Telling instead of showing
We get told to “show don’t tell” but telling is faster than showing and sometimes telling just fits better. Don’t be afraid of simple, powerful statements. For example, a character feeling a deep emotional pain might be very likely to think, “It hurt to think about him.” Simple. Done.

Tip 4: Romantic Development
Don’t skimp on the stages of romance. The reader still wants to feel that initial zing as well as the rising tension and conflict required for a satisfying romance.
A high stakes or crisis scenario is a great trick for bringing out a character’s true nature faster. Every scene in the story must develop the characters’ arcs as well as the romantic journey, resulting in a dynamic and rich story with a high level of tension unique to the short form which is why I love reading and writing short.

And here is fellow Undone! author, Marguerite Kaye, who also has some words of wisdom on the subject.

Hi, Marguerite Kaye here. I write historical romances but I started out my writing career with articles for magazines, which meant adhering to a very strict word count. That discipline really helped when I moved to writing short stories, where you have to pack a full story, believable characters, a beginning, a middle and an end into as little as a thousand words. And that experience really paid off when I wrote my first Undone! novella. Even in a full-length book, making every word count is vital to pace. Here are some of my tips on how to do it.

When you pick up a Mills & Boon book, you don’t expect to go on a leisurely stroll around Romanceland. No, you want an emotional roller-coaster, a whirlwind of sensations, a fast-paced journey from lovers’ meeting to lovers’ happy ever after with every traffic light at green.

Pace is vital. Every single scene you write has to earn its words on the page. No matter how lyrically you’ve described a setting or how fascinating the well-researched historical fact, if it doesn’t contribute to the overall story, you have to ask yourself if it should really be there.

Secondary characters are my downfall. I have a lot of fun with them, they’re often a bit of light relief from the intensity of writing the main romance – which is exactly what the reader doesn’t want. I wrote a whole happy ending for the eponymous Peregrine Finchley-Burke who features in both Innocent in the Sheikh’s Harem and The Governess and the Sheikh. It got majorly in the way of my hero and heroine’s HEA, so Peregrine and his plumptuous sheikha never made it into print.

Even with 70,000 words to play with in a Historical, you don’t have much room for secondary characters. With just 10-15,000 for an Undone!, they’re pretty much no-go. And yet almost every Undone! I’ve ever written has had a character that I’ve had fabulous fun creating only to have to un-create them. My ‘draft’ folders are full of best friends and diplomats and second cousins twice removed who’ve never seen the light of day. My latest Undone!, a Christmas story with a magical twist, had a whole chapter featuring a dour Scottish factor called Lachlan MacSween who, in the finished version, is reduced to a couple of one-liners.

In an effort to stop so much of my writing ending up on the cutting room floor, I started to think of my books as films. To go back to poor Peregrine, did I really want him grabbing centre stage just as my hero and heroine were about to discover their path to true love? Obviously not, any more than I wanted my heroine’s father to waltz into the last scene and take on the hero’s job of breaking down the last barriers to their marriage – another thrown-away ending, this time from Bound to the Wolf Prince.

So, every time I sit down to write a scene I ask myself if I really know what the point of it is. Am I absolutely sure that it contributes to the romantic journey? Revealing something about the hero or heroine’s past, introducing a new emotional conflict or resolving an existing one is fine. Dark moments are critical. But wasting a whole chapter showing my heroine arguing with her mother about something we already know – forget it.

Which brings me to my last point. You don’t have to show every little step of the journey. This is a lesson which writing for the Undone! imprint has forced me to learn. There’s no time to show much of the ‘middle bit’ of a romance in a novella. I have tried several times to describe it in a sort of time passed and my hero and heroine got to know each other and like each other sort of way but my editor quite rightly pointed out that this only makes the reader feel they’ve missed out on important moments. It’s much easier to skip in time and to show, just from the changes in the way your hero and heroine react to each other, that change has taken place off stage and let your reader work it out for herself.

Less is definitely more. If your story was a film, you’d want to watch it all. So ask yourself, could I go and make a cup of tea during this bit? And if the answer is yes, maybe it’s time to hit the delete button.