Meet Author Kaye Dacus

Kaye Dacus is the author of the Brides of Bonneterre, a series for Barbour Publishing and The Ransome Trilogy for Harvest House Publishers. She holds a Master of Arts in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and is a former Vice President and long-time member of American Christian Fiction Writers. A Louisiana native, she now calls Nashville, Tennessee, home. She is currently celebrating the release of her two latest titles, Menu for Romance and Ransome’s Honor. To learn more about Kaye and her books, visit her online at http://www.kayedacus.com/.

Everyone has a story about how they became a writer. Please share your story with us.

I've always had a very active imagination, making up my own internal stories, complete with characters, my entire life. Around age twelve or thirteen, I wanted to be able to remember what I'd been imagining, so I started writing it down on paper. And even though I majored in English/Creative Writing in college, it wasn't until my late 20s/early 30s that I realized I wanted to pursue publication and learned not only how to finish a novel, but the craft and skill that goes into writing one that's going to catch a publisher's eye.

Everything I've written has always had a romantic theme to it. They happen to have a spiritual worldview to them because that's my own personal worldview. Therefore, it was logical to seek publication in the Christian publishing industry, since that's where they fit best. But pretty much, my goal is to write stories that entertain and uplift---and that I can let my mom and my grandmother and my fourteen-year-old niece read without worrying about offending them.

You have two recent releases; Menu for Romance, a contemporary romance, and Ransome's Honor, a Regency era romance. How did you manage to write two completely different historical periods at one time?

Actually, I started writing Ransome's Honor when I was in the revision process on Stand-In Groom during graduate school. I'd been working on Stand-In Groom for three years, and I was ready for something with a totally different style, a totally different sensibility to it than the contemporary. I've had plenty of reviewers say that the style of my contemporaries is somewhat old-fashioned (in a good way), so I guess my voice as a writer has adapted to writing in both contemporary and historical settings. I look at it this way. Many, many years ago, I took voice lessons in which I sang classical English, Italian, and German pieces (arias, excerpts from operettas and cantatas) in an almost operatic style. But I've also sung Southern Gospel, pop, and more jazzy/swing style music. Writing different eras is much the same thing: training myself to have a good "ear" and picking up on the rhythm and cadence of the language and losing myself in it.

Being a Jane Austen fan, you must be thrilled that Ransome's Honor is being called a mixture of Jane Austen and Horatio Hornblower. Which Austen character do you relate to the most and why?

The Austen heroine I most identify with is Anne Eliot from Persuasion. Part of that is because I was twenty-seven years old when I first read the book---the same age as Anne in the book. But I also identified with the idea of an older heroine who'd fallen in love just once, when she was very young, only to have it not work out. Though my experience wasn't nearly as hard as hers (there was no broken engagement, as we never actually dated), seeing a character written about two hundred years before having gone through something similar touched me. That, and the fact that Captain Frederick Wentworth is my favorite of all the Austen heroes!

How do you come up with your story ideas? Describe how you go from idea to story plot.

My stories always begin with the idea for a character, usually the hero. I've always said that my greatest tool as a storyteller is my ability to fall instantaneously and madly "in love" with the hero character, which then makes me start thinking about what kind of heroine it would take for him to fall in love with her. Once I have my two characters---who usually come with their own conflicts---the story-development process is a matter of asking "what if." Because I know it's going to turn out to be a romance novel, I already have the basic framework to start building the story on http://www.kayedacus.com/2008/04/28/writing-the-romance-novel-the-seven-story-beats/ as described in Billy Mernit's wonderful book Writing the Romantic Comedy). Once I know who the characters are and what their basic story is---their individual conflicts and their conflicts as a couple---I start writing.

With the Ransome Trilogy, when I first started writing it, I thought it would be a single stand-alone novel. But then the more I got to know my characters, the more conflicts---and other characters---started popping up. After two false starts of about 10 chapters each, I finally stopped and sat down to write out a rough synopsis of the entire story running through my head---and realized it was enough to fill three books. At that point, I had to figure out how to structure the story so each had a logical beginning and ending point. But even though I'm more of a seat-of-the-pants writer and not an outliner/pre-plotter (I'm actually somewhere in between), knowing what happens in the third book proved very important so that I could drop hints and set up situations in the first book so that nothing seems to come out of left-field when it eventually happens in book three.

Most pre-pubbed writers fear is that they'll never be published. Now that you're a multi-published author, what is your biggest fear?

Come back tomorrow to read the rest of Kaye Dacus's interview with me, and remember to post a comment between now and Friday for your chance to win a copy of her latest release, Ransome's Honor.