A Beauty So Rare

Just finished best selling author Tamera Alexander's latest release, A BEAUTY SO RARE, her second Belmont Estate novel (476 pages). What a wonderful read—historically accurate, romantically inclined, international intrigue, scientific discoveries ... and the struggle of post-bellum Nashville.

The book lives up to its name.

I had the opportunity to work with Tamera a number of times early in the story's development -- character arcs, metaphors, and plot. So, I knew the story pretty well, at least in broad strokes. But reading her masterful writing is a joy unto itself. And knowing what's going to happen is like reading the story a second time because I could concentrate more on how she pulls off the suspense, the secrets, the beats, the bumps, and the resolution.

One of the great things about historical fiction are the real-to-life characters authors like Tamera weave into the fictional tapestry. In A BEAUTY SO RARE she involves the following real life people, and maintains their identities: Adelicia Cheatham and her Belmont Estate  (perhaps the richest woman in America at the time), The European House of Habsburg, Luther Burbank (botanist who invented the Russet potato), Gregor Mendel (father of genetics), Dorothea Dix (American activist for the indigent insane), the work of Joseph Mozier, and others. There are some great YouTube videos about the mansion and Tamera's inspiration for the story via her website link above.

A funny "secret" about the books creation and publication is how Tamera wanted to write about a woman who was smart, generous, took initiative, had nerves of steel, but wasn't so pretty...she was plain to put it mildly. Her beauty was hidden beneath the surface. The story is how that blossoms into real beauty of character such that a handsome Archduke of European royalty who has moved to Nashville to escape the arrangement of his life, falls in love with her.  Tamera uses multiple and rich metaphors including the Selenicereus grandiflorus (The Queen of the Night that blossoms only once a year at midnight - see video below).

So when the publisher showed Tamera the cover (above), Tamera had a fit. She didn't picture the protagonist, Eleanor Braddock as anything like the beautiful model and never wearing anything so pretty as a huge, beautiful PINK dress. But the publisher was insistent on using the cover, which is a doctored photo of a shoot of a real model and a real greenhouse. What to do? So I suggested Tamera put Eleanor in a situation where she was given a dress that she had to wear and it was big and pink ...and she hated it, just like the author. And that's just what Tamera did with excellence, both at the beginning and (LOL!) at the end of the story. It was a wonderful surprise for me and perfectly demonstrated Eleanor's arc. In fact, on the back of the book...sort of a way around the beautiful cover, Tamera wrote this, and the publisher's used it:

"PINK is not what Eleanor Braddock ordered, but maybe it would soften the tempered steel of a woman who came through a war—and still had one to fight. Plain, practical Eleanor Braddock knows she will never marry, but..."

Great job, Tamera. I loved it all.

stan

"The Story Diamond Won't Work For Me"

I have had the pleasure of working as a story consultant with celebrated historical romance writer TAMERA ALEXANDER over the past few years. She's mentioned in a couple earlier posts.

This week she's going over the galleys to her latest book, A BEAUTY SO RARE, which will come out in April, 2014 from Bethany House Publishers.  Tamera has a couple of book series she writing this decade, turns out about one a year, alternating between Bethany and Zondervan (Harper Collins), both Grand Rapids, MI publishers. ABSR is for Bethany and is book 2 of the Belmont mansion series. Zondervan gets the series about the Belle Meade plantation. Both estates are real places, with real historical people, in postbellum Nashville, which is where Tamera calls home.

In a couple of emails we exchanged over the last 24 hours, and then a telephone conversation, Tamera shared the following:

ABSR was, by far, the hardest book I’ve ever written...Thanks again for the brainstorming we did on the front end. One thing I learned this go round…do not work from the white board (story diamond) when trying to write. The left brain and right brain do not mix. Nearly drove me to drink. Which actually might have helped, come to think of it. : )... I was trying to follow the story diamond, filling it in, trying to figure out the Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 thing, and it did not work for me. Doesn’t mean the story diamond won’t ultimately work for me, but doing that while creating is a killer for me. Just can’t mix the two at all.

Now why would I post this criticism of something I promote—The Story Diamond, pictured at left in its recent permutation. Posts about which can be found HERE, and the actual working tool HERE?

Because Tamera's observation is instructive, and allows me to reinforce why we call writing aids like The Story Diamond an "aid" and not a "rule". Indeed, Chapter 4 of The Moral Premise, "Storytelling's Natural Law and Processes" attempts to explain how every successful writer, while they may end up at the same place, cannot use the same method. Just as every protagonist is different in terms of psychological makeup and action, so is every writer in how they must listen to their muse and get the work done.  I remind writers in my workshops that if they follow my "secrets" and suggested rules of successful writing literally, they will marginalize the story's natural dynamic, and output will be a dud. One of the reasons well-written stories connect with human beings so well is that they are all different—meaning both the stories and the humans. The Story Diamond is meant as an invisible guide, to give the writer an underlying structure, not a step-by-step rule.

FREE WILL PANTSING

Tamera Alexander on Moral Premise Coaching

Tamera Alexander is a best sellling Historical Romance Fiction novelist whose recent novels center on postbellum (Civil War) Nashville. Although she's consulted with The Moral Premise on her work before we met, I've had the opportunity to help Tamera directly on her last two projects. Below is a link to our coaching page on which is a 3.5 min audio snippet from a recent radio interview where she plugs the Moral Premise and how I've helped her in the early stages of her writing.

Tamera's Audio Endorsement is on our Coaching Page.

But as much as she says I help her, I must say that Tamera is very resourceful and comes up with wonderful character ideas, how the character's generally interact and how the story ends. Before she comes to me she's done a ton or historical research. All of that research along with her initial ideas gives me wonderful fodder to help her envision and construct the story's turning points and metaphors.  

In my own fiction writing, I'm a plotter -- and I see metaphors abundantly and clearly. Thus, it is very easy for me to outline scene-by-scene, and establish most of my turning points and twists before I start writing. However, when I write the freshness of the prose suffers from knowing way too much about where the story is going. Thus, I need help keeping the prose spontaneous.

Tamera, on the other hand, is a pantser—she likes to write by the seat of her pants. As a result she says, massive rewrites have been required to fix the novel''s structure and to integrate a consistent conflict of values and the consistent use of metaphors. She claims that as the result of The Moral Premise and our coaching sessions the rewrite process has been dramatically reduced, the metaphors are richer and the plots and subplots more tightly interwoven. Thus, the meaning of the story is richer. On her last book, To Whisper Her Name, her editor at Zondervan wrote this to her.... followed by a comment to me from Tamra:

Dear Tamera,
I have never struggled so much to add value to a manuscript.  To Whisper Her Name is a beautiful love story set against the backdrop of a healing nation.  I loved the characters and couldn’t find a single one that I thought we could do without!  You have captured Belle Meade and its rich history perfectly. 

Tamera here: Thank you again, Stan, for your contribution to plotting this novel. You helped me tremendously in "seeing" more of the story than I've ever seen before. Ready to plot another one? : )

Later, Tamera explained that her editors could not find any story threads to shorten or eliminate because the subplots were so closely interwoven to the main story. They published a book that had many more words in it that they had planned. And all her fans cheered.

Tamera is a very skilled writer. There are times when I will re-read a paragraph several times to enjoy the language. And when we talk about her plot and the metaphors to weave, she gets it quickly.  I'm thrilled to help her see what she's obviously and subconsciously already knows deep in her writer's heart. She is one of my proofs that a good understanding and execution of the story's moral premise, deftly applied to each character's arc, and the attending metaphors reinforce the story's emotional heart and dramatic core. I'm proud to have helped her do that, and it's always fun to read scenes that we devised a year earlier.

TMP at Seekerville

I spent yesterday contributing to the com box at Seekerville, an active blog site managed by a group of novelists. As I was two years ago this time, I was invited to guest blog and answer questions about The Moral Premise.

It was a long post, especially as friend, client, and best selling author Tamera Alexander agreed to let me interview her. Tamera also went beyond the calling and embedded a YouTube video about how she uses TMP in her writing, of which I'm most grateful.

As of a few minutes ago there were 109 comments, which are viewable at the bottom of the post.

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I'm sorry I haven't posted in a long time. I've been exec. producing a short film for my teen Story Symposium students (which occupied most of August), and in mid-July I shot a television series, that now I am editing, probably through October.