April 26, 2008

Speaker: Judy Duarte

The Romance Writer's Paradox: Carving careers out of conflict Writing a romance would be so easy if we could just create sympathetic, attractive heroes and heroines who meet and immediately fall in love, wouldn't it? But no, that's not our job. According to Judy Duarte, our April speaker, our job is to create two wounded characters who couldn't be worse for each other—at least, in their own minds. Then we need to force them to spend time together, pump up the sexual tension between them, and torture them until they are forced to change into two people who are perfect for each other.

Judy says, “It's not the set-up that produces a happy couple, it's the journey they must take.” In her talk, “Matchmaking 101: Creating, Sustaining and Overcoming Conflict in a Romance,” Judy will show us how to choose just the right couple, one guaranteed to have plenty of conflict. Judy will also share her method of creating character sketches and back story. Her hands-on exercises will jumpstart your plot and provide you with the beginning of a solid synopsis.

All her life Judy has been spinning stories—telling tales to her children as they grew up, plotting stories and creating characters to fill the time during carpool days and all those commutes when she returned to college as a single mother—and she never stopped dreaming of putting those stories on paper. Determined to follow her yearnings, she joined Romance Writers of America, worked hard and became a double Golden Heart finalist in 2001. Since her first Silhouette Special Edition came out in March 2002, Harlequin-Silhouette has published 24 more of Judy's novels. Mulberry Park, Judy's first women's fiction novel, will be released in trade paperback by Kensington in April.

Since Judy is coming from San Diego to speak to us, we want to “pick her brain” as much as possible, so she's also presenting our morning Nuts & Bolts talk, “How to Make a Career Writing Category Romance.”

“The nice thing about writing category,” Judy says, “is that you have an opportunity to write several books a year. If you can produce the stories their readers want to read, and produce them well, they will publish them.” In this talk, Judy will offer us tips for writing a successful category novel as well as how to build a career in category.

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