CHANGING GENRES: A Guest Post

Hello, readers and writers!

Today, I'm offering a guest post. Since I've begun to dabble in book reviews on this site, I figured, what the heck! Let's expand the horizons!
 

Robin Leigh Morgan has published her first book--and some of us know exactly how that feels...Exciting, scary and altogether NEW. The book? I Kissed a Ghost.

Paperback is available at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Kissed-Ghost-Robin-Leigh-Morgan/dp/1480030031 

And now...to the guest post!

Some of us who have chosen to write fiction come from a variety of places. And by a variety of places I'm not referring to a physical location, I'm referring to our writing experiences.

There are some of us who have enjoyed writing since we were a child, and each year by writing something in school it improved. For some of us, it continued until we graduated college and began working. Some of us entered the work force taking jobs which required us to write, whether it was procedures, handbooks/manuals, or news stories. But all of these are non-fiction, and each one has a set of "rules" which need to be followed to write something well enough to be acceptable.

As for myself, while my regular job did not require me to write, for eleven years I wrote articles [commentaries/viewpoints] of what was happening in my community and my feelings about it. When I started to write these items my writing skills were not honed, I didn’t have my ideas organized in a tight manner, although my writing had been informative.  By the time I’d written my last item, I’d become quite adept at it.

When I started to write fiction, I somehow drifted to writing a contemporary romance story with a paranormal element running through the storyline, but after almost 9 years I still hadn’t completed it. That is, until someone suggested I should write for a much younger audience; which is what I did, culminating in my first YA Paranormal/Time Travel/First Kiss romance novel, entitled “I Kissed a Ghost.”

Anyway, making the transition from non-fiction to fiction I've had to learn a new set of rules in how to write. Most of these involved dialogue, showing not telling; where before I just told. I now had to learn about the use of tags. I had to learn not to be overly descriptive of something, but allow my reader to create the image for themselves in their minds. In the beginning I found it hard to break my old writing habits. Now I'm finding myself with these habits essentially gone. The biggest issue I still have and am trying to get a good handle on, is POV [Point of View]. Regardless of what's happening or being said it has to be in one's character's perspective, and you can't flip-flop between two characters within a scene, there needs to be a transition from one character to another.

All these things have helped me mold myself into the author I’m today. I've also learned there are additional rules within a genre depending on the sub-genre you've decided to write in. These rules apply to the dialogue spoken which needs to be true to the time period you're writing in, as well as how your characters are dressed, and their titles if any, as is the case with the regencies sub-genre of romance novels.

So as you can see writing is not mere a string of words you put together, there are rules which need to be followed if you’re to be well received by your readers.  

If you have any questions, I’d love to hear from you.

***

 

Robin can be reached at: rlmorgan@51@yahoo.com 



Paperback is available at Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Kissed-Ghost-Robin-Leigh-Morgan/dp/1480030031  

 

From Amazon: 

In "I Kissed a Ghost", Mary gets a new classmate named Jonathan who’s a great baseball player and to get on the team, he needs Mary’s help to improve his grades. Six months later when she learns she’s moving, she decides to give him something special--a first kiss. Moving into her new home she soon discovers it has a ghost named George, her age, who takes her on numerous trips to the past of a hundred years ago. As she meets children her own age, everyone teases her about her house being haunted, but no one will go inside. Mary likes his help doing her math homework, writing her reports, and taking her back in time. George and Mary’s interaction grows and she eventually gives him a quick peck on his lips while they’re in the past, which is the only place George is a real boy, for having done something special for her. Can Mary kiss George again at the special date and time he needs to be kissed? What happens afterwards if she does? The answers are all in the book!

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