Time for Nice Girls to Be Bad

Donis here. After spending more than a decade writing about a family in Oklahoma in the 1910s, I've started a new series set in Hollywood in the 1920s, featuring a glamorous, young, up-to-date woman named Bianca LaBelle. I'm in a whole new world, and in trying to portray a realistic picture of what Bianca's life is like, I find myself doing research on the strangest and most interesting things.

Bianca is a silent movie actress, so I had to learn about movie makeup as well as the daily makeup routine of a modern young twenties-era woman. In the age of the Flapper, even nice girls wore makeup on the street, and young women were very much influenced by the glamorous ladies in the movies – pale complexions, dark red “bee stung” lips, and a ton of kohl eyeshadow.

There was a reason that movie queens sported that particular look, and it had more to do with lighting and film quality in the early silents than any particular idea of female pulchritude. In the 1910s and early part of the 1920s, film was orthochromatic, or blue-sensitive. Red appeared to be black and light blue filmed as white. In fact, blue-eyed actors had trouble finding work because their eyes basically disappeared. Imagine a movie full of characters as blank-eyed as Little Orphan Annie. Actors’ skin would appear dark gray, and their facial features tended to disappear and look fuzzy. Flaws were magnified tenfold. Studio lighting was harsh. Special makeup was necessary to make actors look like real people with eyes and mouths.

In the 1920s, makeup artists like Helena Rubinstein and Max Factor began creating different tones of greasepaint and powders especially designed for film, making it easier for actors to look natural. White chalk was sometimes added to hands to match the whitened faces. Eyes were nearly always lined with kohl and darkened with grey or purple eyeshadow to help them stand out.

By 1923, the movie industry started using better studio lighting and panchromatic film, which registered colors more naturally. Actors could cultivate a much more natural look on film. But by that time, all the smart young things were sporting mascara and bow lips.
________________
The Wrong Girl: The Adventures of Bianca Dangereuse, Episode 1, now available for pre-order on Amazon

She Needs a Dog

My work in progress is beginning to take shape. This is a relief, because the WIP is the first book in what may become a new series for me. Over the past 13 years, I have written ten books in the Alafair Tucker series, which is set in the 1910s and features a woman with ten children. The first book, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, took place in 1912 and the most recent, Forty Dead Men, took place in 1919 and dealt with the aftermath of World War I. I’ve reached 1920. Most of the children are grown by now, and for some time I’ve been wondering about how their adult lives turned out.

So...in order to satisfy my own curiosity and shake things up a bit, I decided to follow one of the children into the Roaring Twenties and see what became of her. As it turns out, she left Oklahoma altogether and had a really exciting life.

A new series set in a new location and era means lots of research, and it also means that I have to get to know a whole bunch of new characters. As my blogmates have been so ably discussing over the past week, a good plot is an excellent thing, but memorable characters are the most important thing if you want your readers to keep coming back for more.

When I started out on the new book, I had what I though was a complete cast of characters ready to go, but as I write, new characters keep suggesting themselves. It’s interesting to see how every new character’s very presence affects the tale, just as the insertion of a real person into a group changes its entire chemistry and dynamic. Adding a new character into a book that is well underway gives me a jolt of writing energy. It’s amazing how little it takes to make big changes in the way a story unfolds.

This is not the first time added a new character in the middle of the process. Whenever I have done such a thing, it has been as though the character was on the sidelines the whole time, like a relief quarterback, just waiting to jump into the game and throw the winning pass. Usually it’s a person, but sometimes it’s an animal. I was busily typing along on the MS when it struck me like lighting that my heroine needs a dog, and that dog is going do something that saves the day. In my fourth book, The Sky Took Him, I added Ike the cat after the entire story was written. I had to go back and sprinkle Ike’s presence through the novel and it was a lot of trouble. And yet, I don’t know he did it, but that cat tied the action together with a big red bow. He was a magic character. I can only hope that my new guy has the same juju.

When you create new characters, either for a series or a stand-alone, you may feel a bit like God, making people behave like this or that and causing all sorts of unpleasant things to happen to them.  But no matter how much you think you’re in control, eventually some miracle happens and the characters develop wills of their own and don't listen to you any more.  I think this is not an uncommon experience for writers.  After a while, you can't force characters to respond to the action in the way you want them to any more than you could force a real person to do what you want.  When this happens, you know you've succeeded.  If your character behaves like a living person, then your readers are going to care about her like they would a living person.