Story Sensei

There was a question on the writer’s Discord server that I’m on where someone asked how to write a kiss. They weren’t specifically asking me, but I was able to give a short answer for how I write kisses. I write and read traditional romances, so my kiss scenes tend to be heavily influenced by the genre and by how my editors critiqued my manuscripts. You basically want to focus on the emotion of the kiss and how the kiss makes the point of view character feel, as opposed to going deep into physical detail. Ideally, the description will show that the kiss is something special and not just them macking. For example the kiss made her feel ___. Or the kiss was ___ which made it seem that he felt ___ for her. “The kiss made her feel as if she were incredibly precious to him.” “His lips were gentle and almost tentative, as if he were afraid of frightening her.” “The kiss surprised her and yet felt as familiar as if they’d kissed a thousand times before. The kiss felt like home.” I...

Forgive me if I gush but this is one of the best articles I've read in a long time, and I promise it's not because he quoted my book in it. His list of Rewards Per Page is absolutely stellar, because it's a very concise list of things I point out to my clients when I critique manuscripts. In future, I intend to point them to this article since it's so comprehensive and well written. How Rewarding is the ‘Reading Experience’ Provided by Your Writing? Measuring “Rewards-Per-Page” Can Give You an Indication of this Important Success Factor. Click here for the rest of the article

I was over at Kaye Dacus's blog, where she asked me to write about writing Asian American novels .

I love romances—I write them and read them—and so I tend to be picky about how romance develops between characters. I got two tips from a workshop given by Jennifer Crusie: Trigger pleasant childhood sensory memories. Early in childhood, we develop sensory memories tied to pleasant events. The cottony smell of Mama’s sewing room, or the buzzing sound of Dad running the saw in his workshop. Happy times linked to smell, sound, touch, taste, or specific visual cues. When two people start to fall in love, one person will trigger one of those pleasant sensory memories in the other. For example, Jenny Crusie gave a scene from her book where the heroine fried eggs in butter for the hero for breakfast. The smell of the butter brought back happy memories of the hero’s mother cooking for him. Another example was when the heroine first glimpses the hero, and he reminds her of the one person she trusts in the world, an old mobster named Joey—the visual cue triggered pleasant memories for her becau...