Instructor: Beth Daniels. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the story I’m reading is someone’s manuscript or a published book, the element that is very irksome to find missing is a sense of Story Logic, or Story Sense. 

I define Story Sense as the actions of the characters remaining true to how they are being portrayed. Story Logic is much the same thing, but has more to do with the way the plot plays out. 

For instance, if a hero is going to take on a terrorist or a mugger, he needs to have a background that included any martial arts he now unveils to save the day…and the writer should have alluded to his expertise early on, not waited to spring it on readers.  

Or perhaps the author is spinning a tale where characters are either older or younger than she is. In that case the twenty-something heroine can’t prefer listening to Cole Porter or Gershwin tunes or talk about Cary Grant movies, not even if she was brought up by her grandmother who enjoyed these things. She has to be a contemporary woman. Likewise, if a character is a decade or more older than the writer, it isn’t likely that they will head to a modern dance club, or suddenly go goth.  

Story sense and story logic go hand in hand, but they can easily be lost or overlooked. And they are far more subtle than the above obvious examples. The trick is to catch, recognize, and repair things before they leave home to nest on an editor’s desk. 

Because it is far easier to spot things in other people’s work, students will be urged to post their synopsis, or post a free-write in which they spin the elements, or steps, that they plan to take along the way.  

Lectures would be posted on Monday and Wednesdays with comments on pieces posted by students returned by the instructor before the next Monday posting. Each posting will be limited to 10 pages per week, though, as turnaround time would not allow for more than that. Ideally the class would run four weeks.

Beth Daniels currently writes as Beth Henderson and J.B. Dane, though she answered to Lisa Dane and Beth Cruise in the past as well. She has worked with editors at Berkley, Zebra, Leisure, Harlequin/Silhouette, and Simon and Schuster's Aladdin Paperbacks, done e-books for a now defunct company (not her fault, she says), and began her writing life with hardcover books slated for library use with a publisher that got out of the romance business (again, not her fault). More recently she’s had a number of articles about writing picked up by e-zines, saw a short story published in a mystery and suspense magazine that turned up its toes the next year (really, really not her fault), and has a story in the MOTHER GOOSE IS DEAD anthology from Dragon Moon Press.

For over a dozen years Beth taught college level composition, both in the classroom and online, and a credit course on Novel Writing. Five of her former Novel class students are now published.

Twenty-six of Beth’s manuscripts have appeared in print or e-book format. These have been historical romantic adventures (6), romantic comedies (10), romantic-suspense (3), and young adult romantic comedy (7). Her titles have appeared in 12 different languages in over 20 countries. At the moment she is working on various manuscripts and collaborated with another RWA member on a contemporary/fantasy/romantic adventure. She also ventured into self-publishing to keep her out-of-print backlist in print.