RomanceEverAfter

The Writing Craft

Alina Adams

www.AlinaAdams.com
and
www.figureskatingmystery.com

Topics Discussed 

*Real life experiences and creating characters

*Conveying a "message" in your story while
maintaining the entertainment element

*Selecting names for characters

Photo courtesy of www.AlinaAdams.com

Do authors use real life experiences and people to create a story or character?

Absolutely not. Doesn’t it say so, right there on the first page? Any resemblance to anyone living or dead is purely coincidental? Which is why, even though I worked for several years as a television skating researcher working with World and Olympic champions, and now write a Figure Skating Mystery series starring a television skating researcher working with World and Olympic champions, I never, ever use real life experiences or people in my stories.

Okay… now that the lawyers are out of the room: You betcha!

I have so many terrific, funny, moving, and downright scandalous stories from my TV skating days, that the only way I could possibly get them into print without a lawsuit is to change names, genders and nationalities… and then tell them, anyway!

If you want to know what really goes on behind the glitz and glamour of big time skating, check out "Murder on Ice," "On Thin Ice" and "Axel of Evil." Then write to me at Asivorinov@aol.com with your guesses about who is supposed to be whom. (I may even tell you if you’re right!)

How does a writer balance highlighting a "message" in a story yet maintain the entertainment element?

While not technically a "message" in the way that most people think of a "message" story, my first Figure Skating Mystery, "Murder on Ice," does deal at length with my belief that the media has long ago stopped merely reporting the news and gotten into the business of creating it. (My second, "On Thin Ice," also ponders the implications of media turning people into "stories").

I hope that I was able to make my message entertaining by actually going ahead and making it the story – but showing, not telling it. At no point in the book does anyone stand up and announce, "The media is manipulating information and putting into innocent people’s private lives and that’s probably not a good thing." Instead, the reader sees them doing just that – without commentary or judgment – and then sees the consequences of those actions (in both case, a murder), so that readers can make up their own minds about whether or not this is something they are happy with.

How do you go about selecting the name of your characters?

Okay. You’ve got me. I am a name freak, a fanatic. Not only can I not begin writing a story until every character has been named, but, if I, for some reason, have to change a name midway through, it often ends up off-putting me so much from the character that I have to change them as well, in order to keep going.

I love the sound of names, I love the meaning of names, I love the ethnic/historic/cultural implications/conflicts of names.

In my second Regency romance, "Thieves at Heart," I named the female lead, Lark, because I’d read that young, destitute girls who stand ankle deep in the river, sifting for items they can sell are called "mudlarks." And since my character was a young woman who’d come from desperate poverty with no idea of even who her parents were, I thought that Lark would probably be the only name she could ever remember.

For my first contemporary romance, "Annie’s Wild Ride," I chose Anne because I thought it had a strong, solid sound for a heroine who is an Air Force pilot, but also offered the diminutive, softer "Annie." The hero’s last name, Gaasbeck, was from a friend of my brother’s. I just loved the two A’s. I thought it made it look distinctive and memorable.

For "When a Man Loves a Woman," I was faced with a unique situation. The male and female leads had been best friends since medical school, and I wanted to demonstrate that by having them call each other, collegiate-style, by their last names. However, picking those names was tricky, since it’s not very romantic to have characters refer to each other as say, "Lang-Johnson" and "Subarsky." I didn’t want the constant use of last names to be jarring or awkward. So, for the hero, I went with "Elliot," which could be both a first and last name, and had an intellectual connotation (the hero is a surgeon) as well as a poetic one. For my heroine, it was even trickier, since most last names are masculine, and I didn’t want a heroine named "Thomas" or "Miller." I finally decided on Brody, which, with its vowel ending, could be feminine, too.

Alina's January 2006 release is the third novel in her Figure Skating Mystery, "Axel of Evil".

When it came to my figure skating mystery series, I really had a lot of fun. My heroine is called Bex, short for Rebecca. It’s spunky, youthful – and not too tedious to spell out several hundred times a book, over three books and counting. In "Murder on Ice," I have a Russian skater called Xenia. The average reader may not be able to pronounce it (it’s Zeh-knee-ah), but it’s so distinctive that they are unlikely to confuse her with anyone else. In "On Thin Ice," it’s an ethnic name that provides some misdirection during the hunt for a kidnapped young boy, and in my latest, "Axel of Evil," (exclusive scoop coming up!) a nickname plays a key role in figuring out who killed a famous skating coach defector on his first visit back home to Russia!

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