The latest from a super-prolific author (Jove).
Within the romance genre, Nora Roberts is virtually sui generis. Berkley's reprint of River's End debuted at the top spot on PW's May 15 mass market bestseller list, and on the June 15 roster, Roberts novels claimed the second, third and fourth slots. From her first romance, Irish Thoroughbred (Silhouette, 1981), to her latest, Tears of the Moon (out this month from Jove), Roberts has scarcely paused in her prodigious output. When asked how many novels she has published over the past 19 years, she responds, "Ummmm. Over 130. I'm a little vague on the exact number."
With such unbridled vigor at work, Nora Roberts is perhaps the best writer of romances to ask bluntly: How do you keep your books fresh?
"I don't have gambits or tricks or little bits of business," she declares. "For me, each book is the first book. I've never written this one yet, with these particular people in this particular situation on this particular canvas. So it's all new for me every time. There are so many different types of people in the world, and creating characters as people, mixing those people together, builds a different dynamic, a different conflict each time. There are 88 keys on a piano. Think of the music made from them."
What about devising new and interesting plots? "Character is plot," she states. "At least in my books, which are character-driven, the people create the action. What happens is no more important than who it happens to. I often use unusual professions simply because I find them interesting to research. It also goes to character. The motivation for what someone does for a living is every bit as essential, often more for me, than the profession itself."
Roberts asserts that research is fundamental. "It's just part of the job," she notes. "I do all my own research--settings, professions and so on because the process gives me other springboards for plot angles. I can't put readers inside a marine archeologist's head and heart unless I know just what a marine archeologist does and thinks. I can't put them into a small town in South Carolina unless I know what a small town in South Carolina looks like, sounds like, feels like."
Above all, she reiterates, the sure-fire element in a successful romance is the introduction of "interesting, fully realized characters who involve the reader. Pacing, a good, solid narrative, a compelling conflict are all vital, but without flesh and blood characters, the writer--and the reader--care about, you've got nothing but words on a page." Nor is it sufficient merely to conjure up fascinating individuals. "Within each book, the characters, for me, must grow and change," says Roberts, "just as the relationships between them must grow and flex and change."
Where, then, do her characters come from? "I rarely know for sure," she admits. "Primarily my storylines and the people in them are straight out of my head. Now and then something I see or hear or read may be the springboard." The inspiration does not, however, emerge from her own experiences. "I just don't lead that exciting a life," she says.
Roberts has been able to write in a variety of subgenres, which includes the J.D. Robb romantic suspense/police procedurals set in the near future, and of course, her byline is a familiar one under a number of imprints. "I imagine my basic style or voice remains pretty similar throughout," she says, "but what I write for Silhouette is in a different lane of the highway than the trilogies I do for Jove, and they differ from the hardcover romantic suspense I do for Putnam, and from the In Death books I do for Berkley. It's challenging and endlessly fascinating for me to start the drive down one of those lanes."
Roberts treasures the romance genre because of its fluidity and its ability to absorb elements from all other areas of fiction. She also relishes the act of creating it, to which she brings a mighty dose of vitality. "For that high level of energy--well, I could use more vitamins," she jokes. "But the fact is, I'm a writing junkie. I just love the work. Once I'm into a story, it drives me as much as I drive it. A lot of the energy in the work comes, I'd think, from my own need to know what happens next. I don't outline, so each day I wonder just what's going to happen. Hopefully this translates to the reader wanting to turn the page in the finished book to find out, too."
--Robert Dahlin |
