Setting and Sports Romances

So I am an unabashed baseball fan. A Yankees fan, even. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and roll your eyes.

I think in a lot of ways, baseball is an ideal sport for me. It’s polite and gentlemanly in its way, but it’s tense and exciting, too. It’s orderly and statistical, but it’s also unpredictable. Fans are smart and passionate. The whole history of the sport is riddled with triumph and heartbreak, with cheating and honesty, with colorful characters, villains, and heroes.

Sounds kind of like a romance novel, doesn’t it?

I think that my writing a baseball romance was an inevitability. Beyond the obvious intersection of my interests here, a sports romance has one other key element: setting. I love a vivid setting in a novel, one that lives and breathes as much as the characters do. I want to know what everything looks like, smells like, feels like. I love nitty-gritty details. That was something I was conscious of as I wrote. The novel takes place in New York City primarily—my two heroes are both players for the same fictional MLB team—but it also takes place in stadiums, on fields, in locker rooms.

As a writer, I like to have a clear picture of the setting, so I draw maps and diagrams. I knew which parts of the stadium were where: the distance from the locker room to the field, the locations of the executive offices, the parking lot. My fictional stadium is magically located roughly where Ebbets Field once stood, which I never say in the book, but I knew which roads the characters would have to drive on to get to Manhattan. I did a ton of research, too, to get the cadence of speech right—how do baseball players talk to each other? how do sportscasters talk about baseball—and to make sure all my terminology was right. I watched documentaries, I read several books, I listened to baseball podcasts, and, of course, I watched a ton of games. (Not a hardship, by the way!) Immersing myself in the world of baseball was really key to my creating what I thought was a convincing setting. And hopefully, it’s a setting in the same way New York is a setting, so that the reader sees it as color and detail and not as an overwhelming amount of information!

Kate McMurray is a NYC-based writer, editor, and baseball fanatic. She writes m/m romances and reads lots of books. She also likes crafts and plays the violin and lives in Brooklyn in an apartment over an ice cream parlor. Kate’s baseball novel, Out in the Field, is available now.

Website: www.katemcmurray.com
Twitter: @katemcmwriter

Expanding My Horizons

Last week, I gave my first ever solo program at my local RWA meeting. Have I lost you all yet? For those of you who aren’t familiar, RWA is the Romance Writers of America and it’s a professional organization for published and aspiring romance authors. It’s a great source of information on craft and the business of writing, and it has several local and online chapters.

I’m a member of two online chapters, as well as my local one, but it’s the local one where we have monthly meetings and have people come in to speak on a variety of topics. I’ve been a member of the RWA for years, and always belonged to a local chapter, but for the first time, I thought I was qualified to speak on an aspect of craft. So I put my name in to present a program, and I was granted the opportunity to do so at the last meeting.

I spoke for an hour about point of view and characterization, and how getting to know your characters will only strengthen your ability to write in their point of view, which in turn allows your readers to more fully identify with them. All well and good, but that’s not the point.

This was the first time I planned a somewhat educational program and presented it – by myself – to a roomful of people, some I knew, some I didn’t, without freaking out. Speaking in public is terrifying, and I never thought I could come up with a unique way to present a writing topic that others hadn’t done already and done ten times as well. But I think I managed. Or at the very least, I didn’t have a mass exodus once I started talking. That’s a good start.

And I do rather enjoy telling people what to do... I lecture people I know all the time! Once I got going, it was a lot of fun. Mind you, most of the questions I got at the end had more to do with the genre I write in rather than the topic I'd been speaking on, but I'm always happy to answer those questions, from anyone. The more good publicity for m/m romance, the better, in my opinion.

A couple of chapter members suggested that I *gulp* offer it up to conferences or other chapters. We’ll see. One neurotic hurdle at a time, please!

KC Burn

How Not to Write

I don’t get writers block very often. Usually it’s a brief (or a bit longer) pause of not knowing how to describe something. As someone who outlines, I usually know where I’m going with a story. Even if that story unfolds differently than I planned, the outline always gives me a goal to write toward for each scene.

When moments of being seriously blocked happen, I try to push on through and get some ideas down so I can move on to the next part of the story where I won’t be as blocked. I can always revise later (I revise like crazy anyway), but at least I’m moving forward.

However, there are times when my creativity is blocked so badly when I’m writing an outline or a first draft that I’m staring at the blank page in terror. In those moments, I find it’s important to have a plan.

Sloan’s 20 Steps to Dealing with Writer’s Block (Do not try this at home):

1) Grab some SUGAR! Nothing gets me hyper like sugar. Hyper Sloan can type faster. Even if the words make no sense, at least I feel a sense of accomplishment as my fingers fly over the keyboard.

2) When my fingers slow again, take a break and browse Tumblr. Some of my followers post the best stuff for inspiration. But that usually leads me to writing a sex scene and I’m not often blocked when writing sex. Time to get back to the scene I want to write.

3) Have more sugar.

4) Browse Twitter. Oh, look there’s a great picture of two guys driving down the road on motorcycles, both in tuxes.

5) Start brainstorming a new story about a couple of newlyweds.

6) Damn, this is not the time for a new story. Must focus on something else.

7) Look around the house at the 56 unfinished projects I never seem to find time to complete (like that envelope of photos that need to go into an album, that pile of clothes to sort through and take in for donation, and the huge stack of papers that need filed). Pick up one of the projects that looks most appealing.

8) Five minutes later, stop working on said project once I remember why I never finished it in the first place. Writing is more fun. Even if I’m blocked.

9) Okay, more sugar and back to the story.

10) Try interviewing my characters. “What’s on your mind? What are you feeling right now? What do you want to do? What do you wish I’d write about for you?”

11) Tell them to shut the hell up when all they answer with is SEX. This is not the right time for them to have sex. Or I probably wouldn’t be blocked. Sheesh.

12) Browse through my outline for an upcoming scene that will spark my creativity and get me excited to write this story again.

13) Throw the outline across the room when my inner critique tries to tell me I suck.

14) Open my email and read a couple of the lovely messages I've received from readers who’ve enjoyed my work. Remind myself: it’s not just me that I’m writing this story for. (THANK YOU, readers!!)

15) Open the document and stare at the blank page again. Talk about pressure!

16) More sugar.

17) Pet the cat. This calms me down after too much sugar.

18) Fall into a heavy sugar-induced sleep.

19) Wake up and start again.

20) Repeat as needed.

Thank God I have more “good” writing days than “bad” ones. The bad days are exhausting.

Sloan Parker
www.sloanparker.com