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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Hello, everybody! Welcome to our session with Samantha on romantic ex suspense, and especially expenses not romantic expenses. Romantic suspense we will get started in just a second after I give everyone a chance to join the waiting room. While we're waiting, just to make sure that everything is working. If you can see and hear me, just go ahead and let me know in the chat and let me know how your Thursday is going. I can't believe we're

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: on our final day final free day of Romance week. It's so exciting. Hi, Lou! Good to see you again. Hi, element! Sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. Hi, Linda. Yes, I always love Samantha's classes as well.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Awesome. Great to see everyone. Amy good to see you. Hi, Claire! Hi, Lindsay, okay. Looks like we are working. And so, as always, I'm just going to run through some of our housekeeping before we get started, just in case we have anyone new here, and then we will get started with the session. And so, if you would like to access the replays, if there's something you want to watch again, or if you missed a session, the replays are added to our hub page as soon as they're done processing on zoom, this can take a bit of time. So if it's not

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up tonight, it'll be up by tomorrow morning.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and then replays are available for everybody for actually it's 2 weeks after the event until March first, and then after that date replays are available for premium and premium pro members only. So speaking of that, tomorrow is premium day. Today and

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday. We're all for free for everyone to attend. But tomorrow sessions are limited only to premium and premium pro users. You can upgrade your account by tomorrow morning to access so you can upgrade for just a monthly fee, or you can do the yearly or the lifetime in order to get access to that. Those sessions, we have 3 sessions plus a networking event. Tomorrow they're going to be pretty interactive. I'm gonna be leading an initial session

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where we're practicing writing our romance pitches. And then we have an interview with Alexis Darius. It's gonna be really great. And as long as you upgrade by to or excuse me. By tomorrow morning you will get access to that.

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and if you're already a premium or premium pro member, don't worry. You will have access at that time, and yes, Friday sessions are available to watch back for premium writers

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: or people users. Excuse me. and again. If you would like to upgrade, we're doing 25% off yearly premium or pro so please go to the hub and find that discount. If you want to upgrade for tomorrow, that will be great.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and for everybody asking. We we do do fantasy writers week. That will be next up in April. So just keep an eye out for those dates coming soon. And if you'd like to stay in touch with providing aid, or just keep talking about the conversations that we've had here. Best way to do that is, in our community. The link is here as well as on our hub. That will have you, you know, be able to kind of continue talking. Stay up to date with when we we release fantasy writers week and just again continue the conversation about romance writing

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: and just a couple of quick reminders for this session. Please use the QA. Box if you have questions for Samantha that's going to help me keep track of them, so that when we get to the QA. Portion of this event we can talk to. Go back to all the questions and then feel free to use the chat as you have been doing, to talk to other users.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: So, with all that being said, I am about to turn this over to Samantha Skull, who is an author, accelerator, certified book, coach, and agent and author, who specializes in coaching mystery, thriller and romantic suspense, authors from novel planning all the way through, agent pitching, and Sam especially loves twist brainstorming, figuring out pacing issues, and the hell that is revision I know we were talking about suspense yesterday with, so I think it was Cameron, and

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: with or Karen yesterday on our call with Suzanne Park. So it'd be good to talk a little bit more about romantic suspense. Samantha is the co-executive director of thriller, fest international thriller writers, annual writing Conference and a frequent volunteer man Mentor for the Women Fiction Writers Association. She's also an enthusiast of homemade Sourdough, and she's of all kinds, just like me. And the door scary stories that keep her up at night as well as

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good red wine. Samantha, it is great to have you here, and I will stop sharing my screen and turn it over to you.

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Samantha Skal: Excellent! Thank you so so much, Haley. I am so excited to be here, and let me just pull up, which, of course, I close when I needed to.

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Samantha Skal: where'd you go? So sorry, guys? Alright, I am going to share my screen and

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Samantha Skal: get going on this.

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Samantha Skal: Okay, Haley, can you give me a thumbs up if you you are all good. Yeah, okay, okay. Great. So Hi, everybody. I'm so excited to be back here talking about romantic suspense. Heads up. I nicknamed this ROM Sess while it was making this deck, so I apologize in advance. I know it's really annoying. But I'm gonna keep using it. And we are gonna be talking today about creating satisfying twists when you know how the how the story ends, which

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Samantha Skal: as it turns out, can be a little confusing and a little challenging. So who? I'm talking to you because you're here. But this is any fiction writer looking to increase suspense in their story. Increased reader, engagement. We're going to be talking a lot about pacing and twists my most favorite topic. Whether you are a discovery writer or a plotter, you are more than welcome. If you have a full manuscript. If you're just ideating. All of that is very, very welcome. And obviously, we're going to be focusing on romantic suspense as a genre.

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Samantha Skal: So in the next 45 min we're gonna cover. What suspense is and why it's so important. If you've heard me talk before, this will sound familiar. But it is a topic that I love. And it's very, very important for moving through romantic suspense and understanding what the genre expectations are. I'm also gonna talk about. Why twists are key for satisfying happy ever after endings how to ideate and execute them, and then tips for self-identifying, pacing

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in your manuscript, and I'll leave some time at the end for the QA. As Haley side. Pop your questions in the QA. She's going to line them up for me, and I'm going to get through as many as I can. If you probably noticed I'm a fast talker. So I'm gonna go do my best to get through everything and leave us ample time at the end for questions.

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Samantha Skal: This deck is available in the hub, so don't worry about trying to keep up with me and take notes. If that's something that you do. I know I always like to hear that upfront we're also gonna cover best practices for how and when to use beta readers. So, as Hailey said, my name is Samantha Skull. I go by Sam, I'm she her and I'm an author accelerator, certified book coach. There's been a few of us during romance week this week, so I hope you enjoyed all these presentations.

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Samantha Skal: I'm really glad to be on this fourth day, and excited to be here. I focus on mystery, thriller and romantic suspense, novel planning through agent pitching with my coaching practice. I'm also a writer. I write scary stuff, and I love talking about murder which ties in well with my co-executive directorship with thrillerfest. If you don't know what that is, go to thrillerfest. Com. It's an amazing conference that happens in New York every year.

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Obviously I'm biased. But I really love it. And then my big new thing is that I am the co-founder of shadows and secrets, which is a retreat for mystery and thriller writers. I do that with my very good friend and fellow book, coach, Carrie Savage, and we are just absolutely stoked to have this be the inaugural year, so I'll talk a little bit more about that at the very end.

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Samantha Skal: All right. What is suspense? And why is it so important? So first, I'm going to dive into genre expectations. I know you've been hearing a lot about that all week. So I'm not going to belabor this, but we all know happy ever after, for now, in some form or other, is an expectation

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Samantha Skal: for the romance genre and you can think of genre as a contract with your reader. It's a promise, and if you break that promise they will never trust you ever, ever again. So it's very important to understand what the genre expectations are for whatever genre you're writing in. Obviously, we're focusing on romance today. So that's what I'm gonna be talking about. The story question is, how do these 2 people get together? We know they're going to end up

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together at the end. So we're reading to figure out how it actually happens. There's varying levels of spice. You can go anything from like light kiss all the way to Erotica. It kind of depends on on what you're writing and what the genre expectations are within all of that. That subgenre. And then sexual attention will be resolved by the end. It's not going to be left open, ended

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Samantha Skal: with romantic suspense. You have all of that, plus you have Life and Death Stakes, and a third party that prevents this happy ever after from happening. So you know, Hub, you know there's going to be a happy ever after. But there's going to be this other person. Who's going to be involved and who's going to be causing havoc, being a wrecking ball. However, you want to think about it.

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Samantha Skal: The story question then becomes about how these 2 people get together and also solving this mystery. Mystery is sort of a blanket term there, this could be somebody trying to do harm to somebody else. This could be someone trying to actively stop them. This could be.

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Samantha Skal: I don't know more like a thriller element but it, you know there's going to be some sleuthing to solve it, and everything's going to be explained at the end. Readers of ROM says also, have a lot of fear throughout, that's what they expect. They want there to be some some dips where, you know. Possibly there's a great sex scene, or something, or these 2 people are together. But there's also going to be this other thing that we need to solve, and that is where the chaos to order thing comes in.

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Samantha Skal: This is a very common thing with mystery thriller and suspense. As we have this expectation that we're going to be taking something that is very chaotic and bringing it to order by the end. So, characters in ramesses, I'm going to throw. Just by the way, I'm going to throw a bunch of stuff at you up front here, and then we're going to go into the details of all of it. So if it feels like a lot, you're not alone, it is. But I just love talking about this stuff, and this is, it's helpful to have a common language as I move into it. So in romantic suspense we have our protagonists, that's character a.

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Samantha Skal: And then we have their love interest, which is character. B. There is always going to be only one protagonist, even if you have kind of this, these 2 very important people. Maybe they both have Povs that's pretty common, but only one of them is going to be the person that we're truly following their story. Both of them have to overcome something to be together. This can be an emotional block. It can be external stuff. It's really great if it's both

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Samantha Skal: because that's how you end up engaging the reader even further. And they have an emotional block against being together. That's going to be something that's very, very common in romance, and I would say, I would say, is absolutely expected in the genre. And then character. C is our villain, our outside force. And that's this expectation and romantic suspense that we're going to be talking about in depth today.

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Samantha Skal: So what is suspense? I like to think of suspense as stickiness for the reader. So readers are read romantic suspense. Read all kinds of suspense because we want to get sucked in to find out how it all goes down. We know how it ends in romantic suspense. We know there's gonna be a happier ever after, just as we know how it ends with a mystery. Right? We're reading mysteries because we want to understand how this person solves mystery. We know it's gonna end up okay in the end.

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Samantha Skal: So we are here for the journey. We are here to not stop turning our pages. We want to sit down and then stay awake until 4 Am. Until we've stayed up way past our bedtime, and we have to go to work the next day, and everything's terrible. But we've had the just the very best time with this book. And a big part of that is twists and turns in the story. Right? You can think of the journey like this.

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Samantha Skal: So what are twists, and why are they so important in romantic suspense? I'm going to leave this up for just a minute, because this is a very important concept, and I'm going to go into it a lot during this presentation. So in mystery to learn suspense, the villain's journey is experienced by the protagonist, I will repeat that the protagonist is the one who is experiencing what's going on with the villain because they are our translator

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Samantha Skal: and our guide through the story. So if you think of your story like a piece of paper like this, you have your villain down here doing all kinds of stuff. It's usually gonna be bad news and dastardly deeds, and all of that right. And then you have your protagonist moving to the story up at the top, and they're gonna be walking through. They're gonna be experiencing what's going on. But the villain is the one who's really, really driving the story. It's really you can think about it as almost like

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Samantha Skal: their story. But our protagonist is the one who's receiving it and experiencing it as they move through up until the point that the villain like busts through the paper. If we're going with this metaphor and faces the protagonist in the climactic scene. And so you can imagine if you have a piece of paper like this. The villain's journey is these little like PIN prick moments that poke up through. Hold on to that in your head. We're going to go into it more. But I just wanted to get this piece of paper metaphor out there, so that everything I say makes a lot more sense.

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So what do I mean by the villain's journey? This is what the villain is actually doing. Typically, this is off screen. So if you think about. Here's the screen the villain is down here. They're doing a bunch of stuff, but we probably don't see very much of it. I'm gonna caveat here, that of course there. There are exceptions to this. We obviously can think of many, many books where we have a villain, Pov, or we even see the villain?

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Samantha Skal:  you know, doing what they're doing because we're seeing everything through their perspective or somebody close to them's perspective. I'm talking about in romantic suspense. Typically, we're going to have character A and character. B have dual Pov, and the villains going to be sort of this unknown scary outside force that only really gets revealed in the climactic scene, or possibly in the final scene. When we find out the total truth.

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And so again, think about your protagonist moving through the story and translating and experiencing the story for the reader. They're going to have all kinds of filters. They're going to have all kinds of assumptions about the villain. They're going to misdirect the reader because we are the, as the author are in charge of doing that, and leading our reader through this story.

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Samantha Skal: So what is a twist? A twist is this? Reveal this PIN prick moment of the villain's truth? It's when the villain's truth actually pops up into the story. The protagonist sees it.

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Samantha Skal: and it's twisty because the truth is unexpected to the protagonist, and therefore the reader and this is because the protagonist has made all kinds of incorrect but logical assumptions about what is truly going on.

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Hopefully, that all makes sense. We're going to keep going into it.

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Samantha Skal: Okay? So in suspense, in mystery, thriller and suspense. And this definitely applies to romantic suspense. And honestly, you can apply it to pretty much all genre fiction, I think, but we have this midpoint turn. It's oftentimes called a midpoint. Turn not a midpoint twist, but if it helps to think of it like a twist. This is where the story we have the protagonist moving through the story, and they learn something.

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or they

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Samantha Skal: come across some new information or something that proves their previous assumptions to be incorrect. And it basically means that they can't go back. They've got to keep going. They've got to keep moving through the story through their journey, whatever it is, in Roman romantic suspense, this could be a shift to a new prime suspect. This could be something where they learn this new thing, and it proves everything that they previously assumed incorrect. So they have to come up with somebody new to think about. Who is the person doing the bad things, and why

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Samantha Skal: we have this climactic twist which we all know. The climactic scene is incredibly important, and this is going to be the 80 to 85% mark. And these percentages, y'all are wild. If you watch any kind of thriller or mystery or suspense movie, and you pause it right? When you have, like, you know, the midpoint, it's going to be right around 50%, like within a percentage. The climactic scene somewhere between 80 and 85. And then there's this final

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that happens at the end at like 98 it's the same thing in books. If you look at where you are when you have the midpoint turn. It's it's honestly pretty fun. I really highly recommend doing this. Just warn your partners and your friends ahead of time that you're going to be pausing it to look at how far you are through the movie? So in the climactic scene, we're tied to the emotional Aha! Moment from for the happy ever after from

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Samantha Skal: I have either A or B here. Sometimes it can be both. It's definitely going to be at least your protagonist, right? So they're going to enter this climactic scene with an Aha moment, and I know that we've had a ton of other presentations this week about what that all looks like. So I'm not going to really go into the emotional journey for everybody but just except to say that it needs to be there.

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Samantha Skal: Ideally, they're gonna have a sacrifice or a rock in a hard place, moment that they have to decide. And then the mystery is gonna be solved mostly in this climactic scene. So obviously a lot going on there, we're gonna go into this a little bit more later as well.

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Samantha Skal: and then the final twist. This is the reveal of the true villain. Another term I will define very shortly. The happy everafter is well established, the mystery is wrapped up, and chaos is brought to order. And again, the reason this is twisty is because there will have been some assumptions up until this point that made sense were logical for the protagonist, and they then encounter this like Punch through moment with the true villain.

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Samantha Skal: and understand what was actually going on the whole time, which gives your reader the chance to look back through what they've already read and think like. All the clues were on the page. I saw them. I just didn't think of what this, what actually was going on.

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Samantha Skal: So all of this means we have to know our villains, logic, motivations, their goals, their journey, all of this in order to create twists. And so, in conclusion, for this little part of the presentation in romantic suspense. Villains are incredibly important, and I believe, key to

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Samantha Skal: guiding you through creating your story in a way that will make it feel a lot less confusing and a lot less overwhelming, which sometimes it can in mystery. You can think of these stories like a puzzle, right? And if you look at it from different perspectives. Sometimes it can unlock everything. If you come at it from, you know, just the protagonist standpoint. It can feel really, really

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Samantha Skal: really overwhelming. It can feel you can get lost and lose your way in writing, which we never want. We want to make this easy and fun.

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Samantha Skal: Okay. So the villain in romantic suspense is character. C, like, I said, they prevent A and B from being together. They are tied to A or B personally, there's going to be some kind of like past

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Samantha Skal: in interaction. Maybe somebody wrong somebody else. Maybe somebody saw somebody else do something. And they're going to be pivotal to Arb's emotional block, but not the core reason for it. Generally speaking, right? This is good. The emotional block comes from within. It's it's a misbelief. If you heard me talk before I talk about major malfunctions, because I'm a kid from the nineties. But this person, this outside character is going

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Samantha Skal: going to be somebody that can show character, a. How they move through it by facing them in the climax. And then A and or B have to face and stop them in the climactic scene. So all of these things need to be true. This gets into genre expectations as well. Readers expect this, and if you don't do it. Have good reasons for it, and know why you're breaking what you're breaking.

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Samantha Skal: So a true villain. I like to call this the mastermind villain, just because it makes more sense in my head. But this you can also think of this as like the person who's really doing the bad thing, and not someone who has been hired or framed, or whatever. This is the person behind the curtain, you know, kind of pulling the strings, the Machiavelli

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Samantha Skal: this person will not stop at anything to achieve their goals similar to the protagonist right? They also have logical reasons for doing what they're doing similar to the protagonist. And it's you know, you can think of the villain as the antagonist. There are going to be exceptions to that. Sometimes you can have an antagonist, and romance and romantic suspense. That is not the villain for the stand. From the standpoint of this presentation we're going to assume. They're one and the same. And so they want opposites

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Samantha Skal: things. And so if character A, your protagonist, wants character B, and also wants to stop the murdering. Your villain is going to be the person who's going to get in the way. In the most, in the biggest way possible for them.

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Samantha Skal: The assumed villain is somebody that could pop up and be a part of your subplot. It could be a red herring plot. This could be somebody that the mastermind villain has framed, or hired, or otherwise made, everyone think is really the person doing the bad things so that they can continue getting away with what they want to be doing.

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Samantha Skal: And often you can play with this for like a midpoint, or even a climactic twist, because the protagonists will have made assumptions about

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Samantha Skal: what is going on. And they have logically walked their way through. Why, this makes the most sense. And again, the more logical you make the protagonist view what's going on in the story the twist year it's going to feel to readers because it's going to make sense to them, right? Just checking the time we're doing. Great.

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Alright. So the villain's identity. This masterminds identity is not going to be revealed until the climactic and not before, or sometimes even the final twist. And I'll talk a little bit more about this in just a second. But this is incredibly important to sort of internalize as you're writing because it's going to get confusing, because you, as the author, are going to know what all the secrets are, and what the villains actually doing.

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Samantha Skal: Your protagonist is going to be bopping along through the story on top of the piece of paper, right and encountering things that are true about the villain. But they're going to make all kinds of assumptions about what's actually going on that are going to be incorrect, and in order to create maximum, you know twistiness for your reader, the masterminds identity is not going to be revealed until the moment we decide it is as authors. And so.

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Samantha Skal: if you want to play with the idea that

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Samantha Skal: the assumed villain could be the climactic villain, the person that the protagonist faces off. The protagonist is going to realize, after they sort of conquer that threat, that the threat still exists. And that's how you end up with these books where you get through the climax. And you're like, Oh, my God, it keeps going! This is amazing. I can't put it down now, that's what we want to invoke with people, and this is one way to do that is to save the masterminds identity to be revealed at the very very end. There is a book.

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Samantha Skal: Oh, my, gosh, okay, I'm gonna think of it, and I will. I will do it in the QA. That I just talked through with somebody. And they did this amazingly. Well.

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Samantha Skal: okay, so ideating and executing twists that work. What makes a twist satisfying. We're gonna start there. And I'm gonna talk about what makes it unsatisfying, so that we understand both sides of this. So twists are unexpected but logical. And the way you do that is the P. The point of view character, your protagonist, or your your B character with the Pov was dead sure of another logical answer. What I mean by logical is that they have looked at something, and they have,

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Samantha Skal: decided that the most logical explanation for it is this thing over here, but they will have seen it on the page right. They viewed that there's an open window in the house downstairs, and made the assumption that their neighbor did it, instead of the evil mastermind. Villain! Twists are are satisfying when they are earned and not out of nowhere. And what I mean by that is these on screen clues. So again, think of this piece of paper.

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Samantha Skal: Your villains down here doing all kinds of stuff trying to get, you know, do the terrible thing that they're trying to get to and their little truths they're gonna be popping up through as the protagonist sort of encounters them in these intersection points. Right? These are tiny, tiny reveals of what's actually going on. But they will be misinterpreted by your pov character.

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Samantha Skal: This misdirects the reader. And again these little clues are on the page for the reader to see and so, you know, if you have a character looking around a room, let's take this downstairs window example, which I

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Samantha Skal: truly hope is not actually open. It's very cold in Seattle today. so say I go downstairs, and I see that there's a window open, you know my husband's not here, whatever it is, and so I make the assumption that, like oh, the wind blew it open, or maybe I forgot to shut it.

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Samantha Skal: I have seen this, and I have encountered it on the page, because I'm thinking about this interior, you know via interiority about what's going on, and II convinced myself that I have done this right, or I've forgotten, or whatever

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Samantha Skal: in actuality the villain has opened the window and is sneaking around inside my house again. This is hopefully never gonna happen. But you can imagine how scary that is right. And so the reader is going to see that the window is open, and is going to understand that me, the protagonist, is making a logical assumption about something that totally could have happened.

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Samantha Skal: But and and taking action on that, which is that I should be looking throughout the house, and I'm not but if they, if these clues are not on the page, the reader to see the logical twists won't work because the reader can't make their own assumptions about what's going on. They can't clock, but the window is open, and then remember it when they look back, and they're like, oh, that was the moment when the villain snuck in and planted whatever right.

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Samantha Skal: So what makes a twist unsatisfying is when things are not earned via these on screen clues. If we never see on the page what's actually going on with the villain? The reader, it's gonna feel super unsatisfying. We're gonna feel kind of cheated out of the guessing game and the puzzle solving that people pick up romantic suspense and mysteries. For

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Samantha Skal: of course, the flip side of this is that if we have too many clues on the page. The reader's gonna guess it right away. And this is where Beta readers come in, and it just is a balancing act. There's not really an easy way to avoid this, except to just do it your best, and then see how it's being received from an outside source.

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Samantha Skal: We want to avoid predictable tropes. These also make twists unsatisfying because we can predict what's going to happen.

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Samantha Skal: Right? So if you have a trope where you have. The ex partner is the evil, angry, jealous one, and they're the ones doing all the things we're gonna see that coming from 10 miles away as we read, because we're expecting that's going to be them and so one way around that is to freshen with new motivations or assumptions, right? So you can have your protagonists look and think like, Oh, it's definitely the ex partner, and then realize that the ex partner in the end was actually trying to save them all along. Right, all of a sudden that becomes fresh and less predictable.

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Samantha Skal: Another thing to mention here is that the truth, the villains truth is going to change over time. And so again, you know, in similar, to have revealing the masterminds identity and saving that until the moment that it needs to be said. But you know, making something very sure of the exact opposite. Up until that point.

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Samantha Skal: we this is how you create twisty twists right, and so have your protagonist be a hundred percent sure and not really be questioning anything right up until the point that the villain is really revealed. And this applies to all those twists. Right? This can be the midpoint twist, although you're not gonna reveal anything that's actually true. In the midpoint, it's going to be a red herring or a subplot of some kind or something, or just something that makes it so that their initial assumptions are incorrect.

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Samantha Skal: The only time that the truth actually has to be. The truth is, in the final twist, when all is revealed, and we look back and we see what's actually going on? What your villains doing underneath the surface?

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Samantha Skal: Okay? So when we're thinking about ideating a twist, don't ideate a twist. This is this thing I was talking about earlier, where it can become really, really overwhelming and sort of not fun when you, when you approach a mystery like this, because you're just gonna get lost in circles. There are probably people who can do this. I shouldn't say that maybe your magical unicorn is super easy for you. It is not for me. I have to approach it in this way that I'm gonna be talking about today, and that is to come up with what the villain is doing, and then ideate the misdirection

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Samantha Skal: right? So if you put the turn the piece of paper this way, when we you know we're taught in when we write a story like, write a story right? Come at it from the protagonist perspective. Know your protagonists know all those things that is very important, but in the mystery and suspense and thrillers we have to know what's going on with the villain so that we can ideate how we're going to misdirect the reader throughout the story up until the point that we reveal the actual truth.

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Samantha Skal: And remember, your protagonist is your guide. What the protagonist thinks the reader is going to think, and so there is ample opportunity to mislead the reader as you move through your story. One thing I notice in my coaching clients and in myself. Actually, when I'm ideating a new story is that once I figure out the villain, I often sort of feel like I've lost the

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Samantha Skal: the magic a little bit. Because I know what happens. But where it comes back is when you start thinking about how you're gonna mislead the reader. What your protagonist is going to do when they encounter this clue and this clue and this clue, what action are they gonna take up until the point that they have to actually face off with the villain or the person they think is the villain, and and then finally face everything at the very, very end

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Samantha Skal: it can feel it gets really boring. Kind of. Once you figure out the villain, and then it gets really exciting again, because you get to brainstorm all of these opportunities for misleading people.

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Samantha Skal: Alright. So when we are executing and ideating, just doing a time check, we're still good twists. The first step 0, like your base level is, know your story right? So know your protagonists know their love interest, know? Like these big story beats. And I'm not gonna go into these at all, because there are a ton of other people this week that talked about the importance of what these are and what they look like. And they did an amazing job. So

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Samantha Skal: know your beats know what the expectation is for the genre, and hit those kind of in like a high level. You can write it down. You can keep it in your mind whatever works for you, but just know how you get from the beginning to the end. Know where those emotional arcs are, where we're sort of coming up against misbeliefs where these Aha! Moments are those big sex scenes, you know? Like, when do you have the first conversion, and when? Why does it happen? Then? Why isn't it later earlier?

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Samantha Skal: Have a framework for romantic suspense, and then add the evil.

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and so step one in ideating and executing twists is to know your mastermind villain deeply. And these questions that I have here I have created a worksheet for you that I'm gonna I'll link to it at the end. That has the list of all these questions that'll help you ideate who your villain is, and really do a deep dive into them. But the biggest thing is we want to know. We, as the author, want to know why these villains want what they want?

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Samantha Skal: What motivates them to want this thing? Why do they not just stop when that is more often than not the easy way out, right? So like what keeps them going and you know, to get, you know, pretty dark on you for a second, like in romantic suspense. Again, it's Life and Death Stakes, which means that we have someone who wants to do somebody else harm.

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Samantha Skal: And when you start thinking about the motivations. For this it can get very dark and very scary, and so I recommend doing like 10 min little chunks of time where you sort of think through like, why would somebody wanna do these things? What's what's their psychology like? What drives them? And then take a break and go do something lovely like, pet your dog, or whatever so that you don't get bogged down in the depression that can sometimes chase you when you write this stuff all the time.

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Samantha Skal: Okay, step 2 is to write down the logical progression of your villain's actions. So this is once you know, your villain. You know what they want. You know kind of what? Where they start and then where they end and where they end, is always gonna be facing character a

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Samantha Skal: and you're gonna write down like 10 bullet points of you know, this happened. And because of that, this happened. And because of that, this happened hat tip to Jenny Nash and Lisa Cron here. These 2 books you can see they're heavily marked up are 2 of my favorite storycraft books. Of all time. They both do a stellar job with diving into character, motivation, and understanding your characters, and why that's so important.

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Samantha Skal: So I won't paraphrase them here. But just know that these are wonderful. This is also based on the Pixar story spine method, which is this concept of, you know, if you look at a fairy tale we start with once upon a time every day somebody was doing something one day inciting incident, and then, because of that, a bunch of stuff happened right? There's like

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Samantha Skal: 10 bullet points, and because of that, until finally, which is your climactic scene, and then every day, which is sort of this wrap-up moment. And so, if you use this very, very high level, 10,000 foot view of what your villain is doing throughout the story, you're going to both establish the logic of what they're doing, which is a big problem. If you don't think about this until the end.

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Samantha Skal: Sometimes we can have a villain who's here. And then all of a sudden, they're like 3,000 miles away over here, and it doesn't really make sense. And we need to understand what the villain's logic is before we can figure out what these little poke through moments are.

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Samantha Skal: So ask yourself, you know, once character, a. The protagonist enters the story. How is the villain's plan sorted? What do they do about it? Did they? Did the protagonists come in and ruin everything? Or did they see something? Or is this something where the villain has planned something for 2 decades and is coming in at this point to start messing things up. Maybe they just got out of jail. Maybe they just recently found the protagonist again.

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Samantha Skal: That's gonna be the moment that your story actually starts right. And so we're going to be playing with how character A and the villain interact, even though character A doesn't really know that they're interacting with the villain. Sometimes hopefully, that makes sense. But again, think about this piece of paper. This is your story. Protagonists bopping along and falling in love and not falling in love and having sex, and thinking about having sex or whatever. And then they're also gonna have this villain who wants to do them harm or wants to do something that the protagonist really doesn't want them to do whatever it ends up being

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Samantha Skal: so does your villain plant fake clues? Do they actively mislead people. What are they up to? And then this climactic action, this is super important to figure out as well and often is where I actually recommend people start once you know your villain, if you're not sure what the story actually looks like. But you know

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Samantha Skal: how far this villain's going to go. Figure out what the climactic scene looks like. And so all these things that we had that I mentioned for the protagonist having in the climactic scene this rock, hard place, the next bad choice, a sacrifice. All this applies to your villain as well. The difference is that your villain's probably not going to have some like

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Samantha Skal: huge Aha moment, where they decide to just stop doing the bad thing. You certainly can do that. And they've read books so that works beautifully. But typically the villains going to just lean into it right? They're just going to keep going. And but there's going to make it there, going to be a choice there. There's going to be something hugely at stake for them. Maybe they feel like they don't have a choice, but really they are choosing to continue to do the bad thing.

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Samantha Skal: And so again, that gets back into motive motivation. Why? Why do they care so much about this? This is also the explanation. The climactic explanation is another place where you can sort of like

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Samantha Skal: dive in if you're struggling with what happens with the villain's story and figure out, and when they, from the standpoint of looking back at the stories it's already written what the villain has done, and figure out from this perspective toward the end what all the on-screen clues were that led the protagonist actually, and the reader to understand that this is the truth. And again, lots of misdirection along the way. The protagonist is going to be making all kinds of assumptions that are incorrect.

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Samantha Skal: But if you look at it from the villains perspective of looking back, the villains going to have done things right. They're going to have misdirected. They're gonna frame this person. They're gonna break in through the window. They're gonna be hiding in the closet like whatever it is, right. But those on screen clues are going to be there, so the reader can see them

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Samantha Skal: and reference them and understand them when we have this explanation. And I will note here that this like villain protagonist, talk about what actually happened. It feels cheesy, but it's expected, and it's also necessary for mysteries and thrillers and suspense. We have to know this explanation because we care about not what happened, but also why?

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Samantha Skal: So when you're ideating this, ask yourself, what if you know, spend 10 min and answer, what if

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Samantha Skal: what if these 10 things happened? Probably some of them are not gonna be things you use. But this can get your brainstorming brain going. And villains are not flat, depthless characters. And I think this is a very common misconception, especially with Scary books. Is that the villains just like oh, they're a scary serial killer, which, of course, is terrifying.

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Samantha Skal: but we, in the modern, and like the way genre, is going right now in general, with suspense and mystery and thriller and romantic suspense. We want to understand why these people are doing this, which means we have to deeply understand them as authors, so that we again understand why they keep going, and why they don't just take the easy way out. Readers love to know this stuff. We want to have this explanation happen in the climactic scene.

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Samantha Skal: but and that that means that this climactic scene becomes incredibly important, right? Even though it's only maybe a couple of pages long where you have just this is why I was doing this thing. And you know, here's what this looked like. And here's the reference to all these clues. And this is how I got away with that, whatever it looks like.

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Samantha Skal: it's it's not going to be very long, but it's incredibly important to the construct of the entire story. So hopefully. I have drilled this into you. Enough that villains are important. They're also fun. They're also scary, but they they believe they're going to succeed, and their actions make sense to them. And so it takes. It takes some effort to really understand who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing.

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Samantha Skal: And then, once you have all that kind of figured out, I want you to overlay your protagonist journey on the villains journey. So whether you think of the piece of paper like this, or like this. Whatever it is, we've done the villains journey right. We understand their little on-screen moments. Now we're going to go from the protagonist journey, and we take our, you know, our overall. Happy ever after journey that we already figured out.

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Samantha Skal: And we're gonna kind of sandwich it on top. And then these moments that poke through these are the intersection points. And this is where you can have this misinterpretation. So think of the tiny holes as the on-screen moment, and then ripping through in the climactic scene, or the final scene, whatever that ends up being

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Samantha Skal: and then play with it. Iterate. Ask yourself, what if this is really fun? And the reason it's fun is because you are only looking at like a page and a half at this point. So there's a lot of brainstorming that can happen. If you get stuck, go on a walk, go. Do whatever you need to do fold laundry. I have a shocking number of clients who have breakthroughs folding laundry. I wish it happened to me it doesn't. Mine happens to be doing dishes. But I think this like mindless things with our hands.

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Samantha Skal: Can really help in this. But think about other logical explanations, for on-screen truths. Can it be a full red herring subplot? Do you have, you know, another person who can possibly be the villain? Sometimes that happens too, but always think about the fact that character A is going to interpret and character B, and then take action, and that action is suspenseful, because we, the reader, don't know the outcome.

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Samantha Skal: Some additional considerations for this document. Again, think about the on-screen clue tracking. Really use bullet points, or whatever you need to to track like what really happened. I do this quite a bit, because my brain has trouble holding like what the reader knows, and the protagonist knows, and what's actually going on with the villain. And so, if I have these 10 bullet points of what? What the villains doing, and then I overlay the protagonist journey. I'll often have like in italics, or like comments, or something like what's really going on.

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Samantha Skal: And this can really help sort of reduce confusion.

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Samantha Skal: Last thing I'll say about this is, you can plan all you want, but be flexible. It's totally okay to pivot, like I just said, unexpected villains can happen. You can have new fake villains, new mastermind, villains, new subplots. I, in my first book that I wrote I've told this story before, so those of you who heard me talk before we'll recognize it. But II wrote over, wrote by like 300,000 words, and I needed to do that to understand who these people were, and I was learning how to write a novel. And

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Samantha Skal: it's all work that I'm proud of, and I'm happy to have done it because I learned a lot about what not to do. And one of those things that turned out to be really fun is that I got to this climactic scene.

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Samantha Skal: and realized that the villain was not at all who I was planning the villain to be. And of course this actually ended up working out quite well, because my readers also didn't expect this, because I, as the author, was not expecting it, I had to go back in, and, you know, make some adjustments about the on-screen clues and everything.

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Samantha Skal: But this can work. I don't recommend doing it the way I did it. 300,000 words is a lot to overwrite, and this will work better if you do do some planning. But the most important thing to remember is your on screen clues. And so, if you do come up with a new fake villain, or a new mastermind, villain, or new subplots, or whatever.

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Samantha Skal: take a look once you've finished writing. and make sure the reader can actually track all of this as well.

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Samantha Skal: Because the protagonist has seen it on the screen. And so that leads nicely into the best way to increase suspense, and the best way to sort of execute these twists is to use interiority in our thought and reaction and translation. So when I look at the window, the open window downstairs, I am thinking through on the page via interiority, what I think is actually going on, and as that changes over, time is, once I get to the climactic scene where I'm

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facing and winning this villain. I'm going to look back and think like, Oh, my gosh! They'll open window. That was when this happened. And that's again part of this reader. Satisfaction. So lead the reader via the Pov character. Put those assumptions on the page, and always make sure the logic is there, so that we see what's going on. And then we have a logical interpretation that leads us somewhere else.

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Samantha Skal: Just a note on tension ramping. I am so guilty of this. I see it all the time in my clients work. We, as writers, have a tendency to sort of write right? Right? Right? Right? Right? And then start the story. And I think this is really common because we have to know who our QR. Who our people are, and that's discovery writing. And that is wonderful. However, when you're actually getting into starting a story, start as close as possible to the action. And typically in romantic suspense is going to be something where the villain is having an on screen moment where they're poking through.

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Samantha Skal: But the protagonist doesn't know what's actually going on.

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Samantha Skal: And so another of my favorite craft authors, Rachel Erin. She wrote this delightful book. That is very data driven. If you wanna increase your word, count. I'm butchering her quote here. So apologies, Rachel, but she says something like, put your characters in a tree and light it on fire. So make it complicated, you know, if you're kind of feeling like

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Samantha Skal: the tension is is waning. Add a new on screen clue. Make something scarier for your people. Avoid those coincidences. They feel unearned for readers, and we want to avoid any logical outs, you know. Like, if they just like turned left instead of right, then everything would be solved.

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Samantha Skal: Okay, let me go quickly through this cause. I am running out of time, despite my talking really quickly. But selfing self identifying pacing issues in your manuscript.

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Samantha Skal: is difficult, because we can't see what we can't see right? We know our work really, really well, and particularly once you've done all this work to figure out who the villain is who again, probably is not on the page very much. It's gonna be a lot harder for you to be able to look at it with an objective point of view. And so I'm gonna give you some tips here about using your, you know, taking a step back and doing what you can to understand this.

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Samantha Skal: and then when all else fails, use beta readers, this is what they're there for, and I'll talk about that in just a second. So when you're looking at this document, you have this page and a half document, kind of what happens. Scene by scene.

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Samantha Skal: chunk by chunk. Whatever you want to do, take a highlighter and use like red and blue, red is high suspense moments. This includes sex scenes. By the way, right? Because that's very tension filled until it's resolved. And then you have a low moment where they might be, you know, talking in bed after or whatever you're also going to have high suspense moments where someone's breaking in or doing something awful, or the villain is doing their horrible things.

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and the low moments going to be like, well, what do we think is going on

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Samantha Skal: highlight those, and get as granular as you need to. You know you can use shorthand, or whatever this document is, just for you, but once you're done. look at where these colors flow, and if you have a ton of red all in a row at a recap scene. If you have a ton of low, think about adding some more suspense, so that you end up doing this

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Samantha Skal: kind of rollercoaster thing for the reader, because if we have too much low or too much high, the reader's gonna get bored. I had this screenwriter friend. Her name is Ann Hamilton. She's amazing. And she talked about entering a scene with high tension with me once, and then leaving it with low. And then the next scene starts with low and

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Samantha Skal: goes to high. So you end up with like this. That's another way of thinking about it. And then think about your twists. You know these do these villain truth reveals have the maximum impact that they can? Can they be changed to a slightly different place, so that we end up with some really high pacing in a moment where it's a bunch of low

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Samantha Skal: something to ask yourself.

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if it's boring if you look through it, and you're like yawning to yourself, usually a good indication that you need some more stuff going on. So think of your villain like a wrecking ball.

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Samantha Skal: Think of your protagonist as somebody who's going to interpret, make a decision on the page again, interiority, and then take action from it. If either the villain or the protagonist are too perfect. It's going to be boring. And it's kind of fun when villains are really really good at what they do, you know, because they think they're going to get away with everything up until the moment that they don't.

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Samantha Skal: But if we can sort of sense a crack in their veneer. It's going to be much more interesting for the reader. And again, tropes are very predictable, and there's nothing I mean tropes. Romantic tropes are there for a reason. We love these like friends to lovers, or, you know, the like

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Samantha Skal: fake date turning into real love, like all of that stuff, is really really fun. And what makes it interesting is that even though we know how it's gonna end, the path is going to be different than what we expect, and so know the tropes, and then kind of turn them on their head.

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and if you're still stuck, consider hiring help. There were a ton of people this week who were in our incredible editors and developmental editors and writing coaches, etc.

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Samantha Skal: We all love doing this work. We're obsessed with it. It's why we talk with pro writing aid, and we do these presentations. And the most important thing when you, as a writer, are looking for someone to help you with your manuscript find someone you vibe with, who gets what you're trying to do. It is the most important thing you want, someone who's going to be your true leader and excited about this project and understand help. You bring your vision to life.

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Samantha Skal: I have my own book coach, because I can't see what's wrong with my manuscript. We all have a blind spot when it comes to our own work, and that is a okay and completely normal. And this is why editors exist.

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Samantha Skal: Okay? So using beta readers and critique partners, I am going to be on time, Haley. We're gonna make it so the pros and cons of this Beta. Readers and critique partners are a precious resource, because, especially in romantic suspense, roms us. You only get the first read right? Because then, once they do, once they read through everything, they're going to understand who the villain is, and

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Samantha Skal: it's gonna be really, really hard to have them look at it with objective eyeballs for the next time. So they are one pair of eyeballs, and you get to use them once. And so in this way you need to be very, very careful about when you send something out to somebody. When you choose to use someone, etc.

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Samantha Skal: The cons of them are going to get conflicting feedback. It's very, very common. And sometimes you're going to have differing levels of experience. Everybody has their own filter. So, you know, if somebody is working on their own craft, and they're trying to avoid passive voice or something that's going to be the filter that they apply to your work as well, and that may be all they see. And so I have some tips about how to get around that. But first I want to answer this question that I get every single time, which is, how do you know what to listen to?

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Samantha Skal: The most important thing is to only listen to what resonates with your vision for your story. This is your story, nobody else's. However, if you have a group of people or a couple of people who aren't getting it. And that seems to be this consistent feedback. It's an opportunity for reader clarity. And this is where interiority can come in. And so if you want, if you want the reader to walk away with, you know this particular way of viewing what's going on.

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Samantha Skal: add some more interiority. Lead us there. But again, remember, everybody has a grain of salt, or you re take all this feedback with a grain of salt because everybody has their own filters.

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Samantha Skal: Okay? So when you're actually using data, readers send to genre lovers. Do not send a romantic suspense novel to somebody who only loves literary fiction. They're not gonna love. It. Same thing goes for somebody who's super into horror. And you're sending them something that like where nothing terrible happens. Right? They're not going to love it, and so find your people that love ROM romantic suspense. Inhale this these stories for breakfast.

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Samantha Skal: and send it to 2 or 3 at a time. Maximum. I made this mistake with my first novel. I sent it out to like 10 different friends, and they were all wonderful, and gave me lots of wonderful feedback. None of it matched, and it ranged from like somebody doing a copy edit on the first chapter all the way through to some really really excellent, like high-level advice, and how something was being received.

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Samantha Skal: Little flag here. Do a Polish edit. Your friends that are not trained as editors are, gonna have a really hard time. If something has a ton of typos or

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Samantha Skal: you know, like you're missing words or whatever. And we all have typos. We all do this, but reading it out loud before you send it, can really really help.

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Samantha Skal: And then what I say when I mean, be intentional with your goals is to ask specific questions. So these 4 questions are ones that I use with my betas every single time I tell them to give me the page number when they have done these things. So when did you stop reading?

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Samantha Skal: Not not including like how to take the dog out, pick up the kids, whatever it is. But when did you fall asleep? Because you were so bored? When were you confused? Give me the page number. So I can take a look and figure out what I need to change through getting it, having the helping them get it right, adding more interiority.

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Samantha Skal: At what point were you hooked? Ideally. This is page one. And everybody tells you this sometimes this consistently can be like page 50, which is how you know that you maybe need to start the story in a different place. And then when did you figure out who did it? This is your mastermind villain! When when did your reader figure out who this mastermind villain was, and what they were really about ideally? This is when exactly when you planned it to be so, either right before the climactic scene or right before the final twist.

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Samantha Skal: And remember comparing your work in progress to something in the bookstore is just

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Samantha Skal: so unhelpful. I'm guilty of it. We all are guilty of it. It's hard not to be, but I just like to remind people just every single time I give a presentation is like it's just not worth it. The books in the bookstore went through 37 pairs of different eyeballs. They went through revision after revision. They spent

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Samantha Skal: years and someone's brain before they actually kind of popped out on the page. And comparing what you're doing to what's over here is just just try to do. Do do your best not to do it, and just keep pushing away at your own work, because we are all here because we're writers. We love to write. We love to create story and so find that joy and ignore what's going on and around you, and just try to write the best story that you can.

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Samantha Skal: And then here is my plug for my retreat that I am hosting with.

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Samantha Skal: I'm so sorry that, says Body in the middle, that must have been a canva thing apologies. This is the retreat for mystery and thriller writers that's happening at Salem, Massachusetts, most haunted Hotel, September 20, fifth to 20 ninth. We are just absolutely thrilled. We're going to be accepting 12 writers this year, and we cannot wait. So if you're curious, that is the website and applications open.

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Samantha Skal: April first. And this is my link to the landing page I made for you all that has this questions to ask. If you're villain handout I am asking you for your email, but you can unsubscribe right away. Ii just want you to have these questions. So that is there for you. I have the link to everything I've linked to in this presentation. You can send it for a free checkout. Call with me. I love talking to people. If it's about book coaching or

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Samantha Skal: coaching in general, or writing, or whatever I, just II love this community. And then I have a list of further reading. I recommend, including a list of the links in this presentation, and that is all I have, and I made it

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: 3 min over. But that was so. That was just so. Chock full of so much good stuff. I'm like I was taking notes, even though I know I was like, don't take notes. Come back to it later. But it'll definitely be something to watch again. I'm gonna try to get through as many questions as we can, so we'll just rapid fire and see where we go. Our first is from Kimberly. Who just wants to know what's the best way to send you a referral?

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Samantha Skal: Oh, just. I go in my contact form on my website, and I'll I'll get it. And it's just me over here. So anything that goes to my contact form just comes to me and thank you.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Perfect. Tara says I have a mystery in my romance. Would you include the mystery in the blurb description, or leave it out, since it's primarily a romance genre.

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Samantha Skal: Oh, no, I'd mention it. It's just, you know. Think about what you want the reader to walk away from when they read this blurb and this query, book, jacket, copy. However, you wanna think about it. It's not gonna be the primary thing, but people who are not expecting a mystery and then encounter a mystery, maybe disappointed in some way. And so this is only gonna help. If you give people a little more information.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: great

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Samantha Skal: and then someone asks, how would you marry romantic suspense with fantasy? Would it be 50, 50, or 33, 33, 33, as far as plotting? Good question so fantasy. The way I think about it is, that's all the world building right? And the characters that move through the story

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Samantha Skal: are people who have wants and needs and desires. And so the romantic suspense part of that is just gonna be like, well, they'd be able to get their love interest or not. And then the suspense part is, there's going to be this other thing trying to stop them right? And so the fantasy part.

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Samantha Skal: I mean, it matters tremendously. There's a lot that goes into the fantasy genre. But ultimately it's about people moving through a story or sentient beings, you know, whatever they are, maybe not humans, and so I don't think I'd think about it in terms of percentages. I would think about it in terms of what's the main thrust of the story that you want to tell, and that's going to be how these 2 people get together in the end, and what obstacles stand in their way.

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Samantha Skal: And so I would think of it first, almost like the romance, then I'd add in the evil, and then I would put it in the confines of this beautiful world that you have built.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Amazing? Esther asks. This is a question a bit earlier in the presentation. But it was, does this mean in mainstream romance. We can't introduce a third party who tries to prevent the main characters from getting together.

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Samantha Skal: Yeah, no, not at all. So I would say in mainstream romance, you often have the ex or somebody else who's in love with one of them, or somebody who's trying to steal the end, or whatever it is right.

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Samantha Skal: It doesn't always have to be something that's like life or death in romantic suspense. The expectation is that it's life or Death Stakes, and somebody is trying to do something that's pretty awful. In romance itself, I would say. That's generally not a thing. And so yes, absolutely have character scene. All this applies to this. It just, you know, take away the murder part.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay. In my story. The villain must be kept a secret until later in the story. How do you keep him or her a secret in the blurb and synopsis without giving them away in those 2 areas.

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Samantha Skal: Yeah, such a good question. So if you look at the book jacket copy of a bunch of your favorite romantic suspense novels. This is, gonna be your best training, and you'll see that they don't give away the answer. It's like, Oh, you know, it'll be a question like, but then they encounter something that they didn't even expect or like. It's far worse than they expected or whatever it is. And so we know that there's going to be some kind of

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Samantha Skal: huge, scary climactic scene, but we have no idea what that threat looks like where it's coming from.

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Samantha Skal: Etc. And so think of on book, jacket, copy, or when you're writing a blurb like this, who? What? Where? When? Why, right? We need the basics. Then we need to know like how they got through the story mostly, but without a lot of detail, so that we end up understanding what the story question is, if that's going to be resolved in the climactic scene.

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Samantha Skal: So with romance, it's whether or not they're gonna get together. That's a given. But with romantic suspense it's what is this outside threat. And how how does this make the protagonist feel for kind of a lack of better way of explaining it? But honestly just pick 10 romantic suspense novels off Amazon, or good reads, or whatever, and read the blurbs. And you'll kind of see what I'm talking about

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: hopefully. That helped

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: okay, Alice asks, can your antagonist villain be more abstract, like societal norms, or a social class? Or do you feel like even then there should be at least some sort of kind of real antagonist, even if they are a full pledged villain. Such a good question! I would think that I would say that the woman, the clap, the romantic suspense, genre expectations dictate that this person is sentient.

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Samantha Skal: There are going to be exceptions. But you're gonna get a further away from a Roma ROM ROM romantic suspense, and more into like literary for fiction, for example, or like, you know, if you're talking about this abstract concept of like somebody fighting

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Samantha Skal: exactly all the things you just said. That's not going to be in the genre expectations for roms us, it's going to be something slightly different.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: Okay? And then I think we've got time for one more. Anonymous as I'm at writing romantic suspense for the first time my readers are romance readers, but I want to attract new readers who are interested in suspense, too. In my first chapter I, writing a romantic scene to keep my romance readers interested in reading. Should I be mixing romance and suspense in the first chapter? Or can add, can I be adding suspense later?

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Samantha Skal: Great question.

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Samantha Skal: gosh! It's gonna depend so heavily on the story, right? But I would say that if you're trying to introduce more suspense, you're trying to attract more readers, you can use language and kind of vibe to sort of indicate that this is gonna be a scarier book. Then it's just gonna be, you know, fun, sexy scenes and 2 people getting together. So maybe there's kind of a perceived threat that they sort of.

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Samantha Skal: you know, is not really real. But you get this vibe of sort of uncomfortable fear. That can be on top of or within that first scene that's going to give a hint, but not necessarily be like someone coming at you with a knife. So yeah.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: yeah. Doesn't necessarily have to be a dead body. But there can be. There can be vibes. Yeah.

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Hayley @ ProWritingAid: amazing. Well, thank you so much, Sam. This is so valuable. And I have put the link to Sam's site in the chat. If you want to try if you want to grab that and just click it right from this the screen so that way you can stay in touch download all these goodies, and then again, just be on Sam site if you wanna keep in touch and see all the great things she's up to. But yeah, thank you so much. This has been so fabulous, it was so fun. Thank you all for watching. I really appreciate it, and I hope you'll have a great day. Alright, bye, everyone.