Books for Company: Guest Post - The Making of Play With Me

25.11.13

Guest Post - The Making of Play With Me

Please welcome to Piper Shelley to Books for Company.

Play With Me sounds awesome and I can no wait to read it! In the meantime I enjoyed reading about the journey Piper went on with her characters.

Hello everybody,

I’m the author of the teen romance Play With Me, and today I’d like to tell you a secret.

Many readers pointed out in their reviews that they couldn’t tell throughout the entire book, with whom of the guys Liza was going to hook up eventually. Tony Mitchell or Ryan Hunter. Believe it or not, there’s a simple reason for it.

I didn’t know either…

When I began telling this little novella in the heroine’s voice, her name was Samantha Matthews. And Samantha was always meant to be with Tony. At the beginning as much as at the very end. I brought in this hot guy, Ryan Hunter, just to give the whole book a little spice. The heroine should have a nice time with him, lots of fun, some bantering and flirting, but nothing more. She was never meant to fall in love with Ryan. And that kiss she shared with Tony at the end of the book should have been the final one. The one that brought the two of them together.

But a funny thing happened that changed it all. During a break after I’d written half of the story, I read the book of an author friend of mine. Her heroine was named…tada…Samantha.

Damn, I thought. I can’t do that. I just can’t name my heroine Sam right after reading her book. My friend might think I copied her. And that was the last thing I wanted. So I banged my head on the keyboard a few fierce times, trying to come up with a different name. A name that had it all, just like Samantha. It had to be simple, there must be a way to cut it short, and it had to go well with the last name Matthews. Finally I found what I needed. Liza. Short—Liz. It was perfect. In a simple replace command, I changed all the Sam’s in the book to Liz. Great. Job done. The only trouble with it? My heroine suddenly had gotten an entirely new personality.

That’s what happens when you pick names for your characters. You also pick personalities with them. Hair color, style of clothes, traits, habits, talents, and moods. For me, it all comes with the name. And Liza wasn’t how I had shaped my heroine so far.

Liz and Ryan

Basically that meant I had to go back to paragraph one and make adjustments. And suddenly, the girl spoke to me in a way that Sam never had. I wanted her to be in love with Tony, but Liza just fell for Ryan. A little more on every page. There was nothing I could do about it. Especially since I fell for the guy myself. Whatever I made him say or do came right out of my personal dream-guy-factory. So yeah…such a man is usually hard to resist. ;-)

And apart from it all, one thing was crystal clear. Tony would hook up with one girl only. With Samantha. And if there was no Samantha in this book, then he wasn’t going to be the lucky winner in Play With Me.

You see…the simplest thing like renaming the heroine can change a story entirely. On that note, Tony finally got his girl in T IS FOR… (book #3 in the Grover Beach Team series)

Keep reading!

Cheers,

Piper