The Romantic Thriller, A New Subgenre? by H. L. Wegley

As a political thriller writer, H. L. Wegley decided he needed to make sure his books were good reads for women. Today, he tells us how he went about it. -- Sandy

H. L.: 2016 was still a year away and the state of our nation deeply saddened me. The idea of writing a political thriller that exposed some of America's problems consumed me. But was I driven more by anger rather than pure motives? Yes, but I still wanted to write a book, because story has power. In addition, as authors we can illustrate the world’s brokenness, then we get to fix it … at least we can fix it inside our story world.

I tried to shove my anger aside and define my goals. To accomplish them, my book had to be a political thriller. There was no way around that. Many women tend to shy away from thrillers and many do not read politically oriented books. Strike two, before I even started!

What I needed to reach a mixed audience was a romantic thriller, but I feared this story would fall flat on its face unless it was equal parts romance and thriller. Furthermore, neither part could seem forced, or just an add-on, the two threads needed to be synergistic. How does a writer do that?

With a rough plot in mind, and two millennials playing the hero and heroine, I approached Susan May Warren at a writer’s conference and pitched my idea for Voice in the Wilderness. She loved the idea, especially the part where the two young people have a deep childhood friendship that grows into something much more. Our meeting also grew. It grew into coaching sessions, where she helped me splice the romance thread into the thriller plot so tightly that neither could exist without the other. And there it was … a true romantic thriller.

The key for me was to make the two threads, romance and political thriller plot, inseparable by the way the I defined the main characters. Giving the characters a common backstory was important for my book. And relationship must permeate the story. My hero and heroine were childhood soulmates, a relationship ripped apart by an overprotective father, a US Senator who thought the boy wasn’t good enough for his daughter after she became a teenager. I looked for ways to make the relationship between the two be both front and center and serve as a driving force even in the scenes having thriller-level intensity.

That’s the gist of what I did. I would reveal more details, but that would probably result in a big spoiler.

I'm a bit biased, but the resulting story was action-filled and breathtaking. Early reviews confirm that both men and women love the story and the characters. And the political, philosophical, and spiritual aspects and asides have caught and exposed several of the problems causing some of our current national crises.

This story has become a three-book series, being released across the election year, a series designed first to entertain, then to inform. Maybe it will also help to create a new official subgenre, the romantic thriller.

Have you ever sought the advice of a mentor author when writing your book? 

~~~~~~

H. L. Wegley served as an Air Force Intelligence Analyst and a Weather Officer. In civilian life, he worked as a research scientist, publishing in the scientific literature, then developed Boeing computing systems for 20 years before retiring near Seattle. He is a multi-published author with a 4-book inspirational thriller series, 2 nonfiction books, and 4 more novels on the way.

Here's a video interview that gives some background into this new book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQVz7iTaqhs

Infusing Dark Subjects with Light by H. L. Wegley

H. L. Wegley

When I hear the words child trafficking, words associated with darkness and evil come to mind, words like abduction, sexual abuse, slavery, and prostitution. How does one expose this evil without giving the readers a dark story? The short answer is infusing the story with light.

To accomplish this, I tried to follow a couple of simple, logical principles when constructing the plot. The first principle is, light obliterates darkness. So infuse the story with light. But what does one do during the darker moments of the story? They cannot be completely avoided, hence the second principle. Hope is the precursor to light — i.e. it opens the door for light to enter. When the story must grow darker, infuse the situation with hope.

Using the principles of hope and light, I started plotting On the Pineapple Express. During plot construction, the author has a lot of freedom. She/he can place the ugly events on stage, make them happen offstage, or prevent them from happening. I constructed my story so that the most evil aspect of human trafficking, sexual abuse, wouldn’t happen until the captive girls were sold. Instead of the evil, I created an imminent threat of evil. This worked well, heightening the suspense by providing a ticking clock against which my protagonists must work to locate the girls before they were sold.

Creating the threat of evil, and substituting it for graphic evil and violence, is a great alternative. When creating the threat of something evil, like sexual abuse, the author can choose words that paint a partial picture allowing readers to complete it with their imaginations. This is preferable to spoon-feeding horrifying, R-rated images to readers.

One way that I inject hope is to put a person of faith in the scene, a person who shares applicable truths from God’s word. Mild spoiler alert — in On the Pineapple Express, my heroine shares scripture with the captive girls showing God’s heart for the oppressed.

In the end, light must win. Goodness and justice must prevail, defeating the darkness. My heroine summed this up by saying her role became clear to her, woven into the tapestry of a story only a good God could write. I believe that’s where all of us, readers and writers, want our stories to end.

The details and statistics on human trafficking, I relegated to the epilogue, where my heroine gives a speech to concerned students and parents.

Treating the dark subject in this way, I have no reservations about giving this book to my 14-year-old granddaughter to read. She would profit from it far more than from a book filled with graphic descriptions of sex trafficking.

About the Author

About H. L. Wegley

On the Pineapple Express
by H. L. Wegley

H. L. Wegley served in the USAF as an Intelligence Analyst and a Weather Officer. In civilian life, he was a weather forecaster and a research scientist in atmospheric physics. After earning an MS in Computer Science, he developed computing systems for Boeing before retiring in the Seattle area, where he and his wife of 47 years enjoy small-group ministry, grandchildren, hiking Olympic Peninsula beaches, snorkeling Maui whenever they can, and where he writes inspirational thrillers and romantic-suspense novels.

On the Pineapple Express

In one of the most beautiful places on earth the ugliest of crimes holds young, innocent lives in its evil grip. An intercepted cell-phone call from a remote area on the Olympic Peninsula tells beautiful, brilliant NSA researcher, Jennifer Akihara, a group of girls will soon be sold into slavery by human traffickers. She enlists her fiancé, Lee Brandt, to help find the holding location and convince the FBI to intervene. With the clock ticking off the last few hours before both the sale of the girls and the arrival of a deadly storm, and with international criminals pursuing them, can Jennifer and Lee save the girls, or will their wedding plans be cancelled ... permanently?

My Journey to Publication by H.L. Wegley

H.L. Wegley

Recently, author H.L. Wegley shared his experience with us on trying to write in a woman’s point of view. If you missed it, you’ll want to check out “A Man’s Perspective on Writing Romance. I’m so glad he agreed to make a return visit to Seriously Write today so we could learn about his personal journey to publication and what he gleaned along the way.

 ~ Dawn

My Journey to Publication

by H.L. Wegley

Computing security. There's an oxymoron—an area where there are more jobs than people qualified to fill them. When I retired from my 50-hour-a-week job in the cubicles of corporate America, I’d accumulated enough work experiences to write a techno-thriller on computing security.

But my left brain taunted me. You can't write a novel. Eventually my right brain threw a right cross, KO’d the left side, and I wrote a ten-page outline. When my wife and I decided to skip the dreary Seattle spring weather, in seven sunny days at Lake Havasu I turned my outline into three spiral notebooks filled with pencil lead.

Nothing to it. Seven days in the sun and voila, a manuscript. But I knew nothing about plot points, character arcs, point-of-view, or how to write dialogue. I had a manuscript, a romantic thriller. But was it any good?

An ad in Writer’s Digest for a novel-writing workshop caught my attention. I signed up. When the instructor critiqued 50,000 words of my MSS, it became apparent I needed to learn the craft. After buying several books, including James Scott Bell's Plot & Structure, and rewriting my story, naming it Network of Terror, I submitted it to an agent. He rejected it.

About this time, I discovered American Christian Fiction Writers and took their novel-editing track, submitting each chapter to their critique group. There I learned more in three months than all my previous efforts combined.

I rewrote my rewritten story, renaming it Hide and Seek. When I pitched it at a conference, it drew interest, but no contract. By this time I’d written a sequel and started a third book in the series, a series that appeared destined to die in three-ring binders on my bookshelf.

Just before giving up on Hide and Seek, I submitted a mini-proposal to an OCW conference. An acquisitions editor requested a full book proposal. I submitted and waited. After 6 weeks, an email arrived stating that, if I agreed to a few changes, I’d be offered a contract. I declined … just kidding. ☺

Eighteen months and 2 rewrites after drafting my first novel, I had a contract. Since then I've received contracts for two more books in the series.

What have I learned?

First, learn the craft. I’ll never master it all, but if I hadn't started learning it, my stories would remain unpublished.

Second, find people to critique your work. For 20 years I developed software. This requires a testing group, people who can wring out the bugs. We need the same thing in our writing, a critique group.

Third, create characters readers care about. A good plot is necessary, but that alone won't keep most readers turning pages for 6 to 8 hours.

Fourth, honor God in your writing. There’s a redemption story inside each of my stories. I'm not saying everyone should do that, but hold tightly to the Christian worldview. Without it, as Randy singer says, you’ve got “… a great escape to nowhere.”

 

Click to reach Amazon.

H. L. Wegley served in the USAF as an Intelligence Analyst and a Weather Officer. He is a Meteorologist who worked as a Research Scientist in Atmospheric Physics at Pacific Northwest Laboratories. After earning an MS in Computer Science, he worked more than two decades as a Systems Programmer at Boeing before retiring in the Seattle area, where he and his wife of 46 years enjoy small-group ministry, their seven grandchildren, and where he pursues his love of writing. His publisher recently released Book 1 of a contracted 3-book romantic thriller series.

 To learn more, please visit:

Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/H.L.-Wegley/e/B00B1XMR56/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Author web site: http://HLWegley.com

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/HLWegley

Blog: http://weatherscribe.blogspot.com

Publisher, Pelican Book Group: http://www.pelicanbookgroup.com/ec/hide-and-seek-softcover

A Man's Perspective on Writing Romance by H. L. Wegley

H. L. Wegley

When I started drafting my first novel, Hide and Seek, I ran headlong into a big problem. My heroine was a woman. Showing what was going on inside her head, and her resultant reactions, would be difficult. And showing romance from a woman’s perspective, well … my wife just laughed when she heard I was taking on that challenge.

My initial approach was to minimize the problem, make my heroine very unusual, not a typical woman. I opted for a woman, let’s call her Jennifer, with a 200 IQ and one so beautiful that her beauty gave Jennifer another whole set of problems, stalkers and other sorts of unwanted attention. This created a yet another problem. Most women could not identify with Jennifer. While they might put up with her for one book with an interesting plot, minimalism was something I could not continue using if I wanted to have women readers.

It was time to learn to think like a woman. So how does a man do that, particularly where there is a lot of romance in the story?

The answer starts with acknowledging not only the basic differences between men and women, but also the extent of those differences. In my first draft of Hide and Seek I wrote a scene where my hero meets my heroine for the first time. I split the scene showing half in his POV and half in hers. My women test readers thought the guy was either immature and silly or perhaps even immoral. They thought the woman was neurotic or, at a minimum, overreacting. What an inauspicious beginning!

So my problem of writing romance became a double-edged sword. On one sharp edge, I had to portray my male protagonist in a way that appealed to women. On the other side, the woman had to seem real, likeable, a person women enjoyed identifying with.

From my test readers and my understanding of men, I learned that the strong male responses of my hero must be toned down, only showing a subset of his thoughts, the ones women want to see. The bare truth here is that most women handle the fully exposed male mind about as well as a 25-year-old man handles re-runs of the Golden Girls. The good stuff women want to see is present in his mind, but the other things residing there can cause a lot of misunderstanding.

The other side of the sword, showing what happens in a woman's mind and how she reacts to words, actions, and situations, was an intractable problem for me. I needed help, transcending what a test reader can provide.

I was polishing my fourth book. More than half of this story comes from the heroine’s point of view. It was time for me to learn to write a woman's thoughts, actions, and emotions, including a lot of romance. Again, my wife rolled her eyes and laughed. I understood why.

The way I saw it, I had two choices. 

One was to read a lot of books written by women and study the heroine’s point of view—a long process. But I had taken up writing fiction after retiring. My years of writing are limited, and I certainly didn’t plan to get a PhD in women’s psychology before writing a romantic novel. I needed a short cut, a really short one.

I met an author-editor, a woman, at a writing conference and scheduled a session with her to help me through a couple of problem pages in my WIP. Immediately, I saw that she was a person who could help me. 

I hired her to do a thorough, in-depth critique of the entire manuscript, with special emphasis on the romance scenes. When she sent my MSS back to me, it had detailed comments throughout, explaining what my heroine should do, feel, and think, and explaining how I had made her sound neurotic or immature at times. I learned more in the month of rewriting this manuscript than I would have learned in five years of reading other people’s novels.

The editor who helped me is Christina Berry Tarabochia.

For the writers who may be reading this article, if you struggle with writing romance, especially characters of the opposite sex, my recommendation is to find someone who will critique your book deeply enough to show you the problems in the way you portray the opposite sex. Pay them—it’s well worth it. You can learn a lot in a short period of time.

It would've been interesting to put in this post some of the before-and-after scenes from my heroine’s POV, but it would've simply become far too long. I’m sure it would have gotten some laughs.

Dora here. What about you?

Have you encountered a particular challenge in your writing?

How did you overcome that challenge?

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A computer security breach within a US defense contractor’s firewalls leads investigators, Lee Brandt and beautiful, brilliant Jennifer Akihara, onto the cyber-turf of terrorists, where they are detected and targeted for elimination. Lee leads them on a desperate and prayer-filled flight for survival into the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. Will Jennifer’s pursuit of truth about the conspiracy, and the deepest issues of life, lead her into the clutches of terrorists, into the arms of Lee Brandt, or into the arms of the God she deems untrustworthy? 

H. L. Wegley served in the USAF as an Intelligence Analyst and a Weather Officer. He is a Meteorologist who worked as a Research Scientist in Atmospheric Physics at Pacific Northwest Laboratories. After earning an MS in Computer Science, he worked more than two decades as a Systems Programmer at Boeing before retiring in the Seattle area, where he and his wife of 46 years enjoy small-group ministry, their seven grandchildren, and where he pursues his love of writing. 

HLWegley.com

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The Weather Scribe

A climate of suspense and a forecast of stormy weather