Newlyweds Of Convenience

Publisher: Harlequin Mills & Boon

Pam Hartshorne's (alias Jessica Hart) course at the watermill is:

"Writing romance"

Saturday 25 April to Saturday 2 May 2009

‘RITA® award-winning author Jessica Hart never disappoints her readers with her spellbinding and sophisticated stories, brimming with warmth, wit, drama and romance.’ - CataRomance

'Old-school romance at its finest, with a lovely modern edge and sizzle'
- Romantic Times

Jessica’s earliest dreams were about sitting on a sand dune in the Sahara, working in the Outback, hacking her way through a jungle or bouncing along a dusty track in a battered old Land Rover rather than writing a book. Her itchy feet took her from Afghanistan to Australia, from Algeria to Belize, and Cameroon to Indonesia, with various stops en route, and she loved it all.

Because she was always thinking about where she wanted to go next, she never quite managed a proper career. Instead she had a haphazard series of jobs around the world. Her last ‘proper’ job was on the foreign newsdesk of a national newspaper. Before that, she was on expedition in West Africa, cooked on an outback cattle station, taught English as a foreign language, was production assistant for a theatre company and research assistant for a publisher of restaurant guides and filled in the gaps between by working as a secretary, waitress, chambermaid and dishwasher. Regular readers will probably recognize how often she has drawn on her wide but lowly working experience for inspiration when it comes to setting and plot!

Now Jessica leads a rather more staid existence in York, an historic city in the north of England. After nine years of research, she finally completed a Ph.D. on York’s later medieval and early modern streets in 2004, but still never seems to have enough time to get everything done. When she’s not writing romance, she is usually busy doing something connected with food (cooking, meeting friends for a drink, eating, gossiping over coffee etc) or walking her Westie, Mungo, but she also loves history and gardening and reading and travelling, and there are still times, too, when she yearns for wider horizons.

Jessica has written over 50 books for Harlequin Romance, and won the Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA award for the best traditional romance in 2005. In 2006, she was awarded the Romance Prize for the best category romance by the UK’s Romantic Novelists’ Association, and is short-listed for the same award in 2007. You can find out more about Jessica at her website: www.jessicahart.co.uk

If you have a work in progress, I’ll ask you to send me a chapter and/or a synopsis so that I can read it in advance, and there will be an opportunity to discuss your work on a one-to-one basis during the week.

The outline below is by no means set in stone. It’s intended to give you an idea of the kind of issues we’ll be discussing, as the focus will be primarily on a practical approach to structuring a romance and investing your story with the emotional tension that is so key to its success. No matter how beautifully you write, if you can’t give your story the emotional punch it needs, it won’t grab an editor’s attention, so I’ll be concentrating on that, but of course we can also consider any other aspects of writing that you as a group want to discuss.

Writing romance is fun! There will be a mixture of discussion, presentations, individual and group work, and I hope you’ll find it enjoyable as well as useful.

Saturday
Arrive and settle in at mill.

Sunday am

Emotional tension – what is it and why is it so important? – 3 steps to plotting a successful romance

Sunday pm

Step 1 – hooks and setting

Monday

Step 2 – character – heroes and heroines - the importance of conflict and change

Tuesday

Step 3 – plot – internal vs external conflict
Plotting a romance together – the bare bones – writing an effective synopsis

Wednesday - excursion day to Lucca
(transport there is included in the price of your course)

Thursday

Getting intimate (author and characters)
Getting intimate (hero and heroine)

Friday am

Dialogue
Presentation

‘RITA® award-winning author Jessica Hart never disappoints her readers with her spellbinding and sophisticated stories, brimming with warmth, wit, drama and romance.’ - CataRomance

'Old-school romance at its finest, with a lovely modern edge and sizzle'
- Romantic Times

More to follow....