Spotlight on Sharon Sala
(Published in 2002)

By Cheryl Bolen

The first time I ever heard of Sharon Sala was when I was asked to write an article on new/used bookstores for the RWR (Romance Writers Report). I surveyed several booksellers, and one of the questions I asked was about their customers' favorite authors. If there was consensus among all stores about an author (like Nora), I included the author's name in the article.

Sharon Sala was a consensus author. Heck, even her sometimes-used pseudonym Dinah McCall was a consensus!

So, of course, I had to read her. And when Jo Anne Banker invited our chapter members to hear Sala speak at the April 27 Northwest Houston RWA meeting, I had to go hear the author.

What's so phenomenal about her is that she has skyrocketed to bestseller status and earned four Rita nominations since her first book came out in 1991.

I had seen her photos and been impressed. She made no effort to hide her white hair, and her bios referred to her as a grandmother. I liked this woman!

But I must say there is not a whole lot of resemblance between her photo and the in-the-flesh grandmother. For one thing, she's . . . well, she's a good bit heavier than her photo. And she wears glasses. And she had to kick off her shoes during her talk, leading me to believe she had aching feet. All in all, Sharon Sala looked like everyone's grandmother. She looked like the woman in front of you at the Wal-Mart check-out.

And she was very candid with the authors who came to hear her talk. She had no college degree. She said she didn't know anything but parenting and gardening. She spoke about how writing enabled her to get out of bad marriage. With one bad (teenage) marriage already under her belt, she married a man who was ten years her senior. (She had divorced her first husband when she was seven months pregnant with her son.) Husband Number 2 dominated her thoroughly, but she stayed with him. For 31 years.

When she was finally able to leave him, she said he spread lies about her in their small (2,500 population) Oklahoma town. "There's no other man," she said. "I don't want this one, why would I want another?"

Just because she did not want her husband did mean family was not important to Sala. Her mother, her aunt, her grown son and daughter and four grandchildren are all very important to her.

In fact, she said, "I have no discipline (in writing) because I let family intrude." During the day, she helps with her elderly mother and aunt and does mundane tasks like grocery shopping.

She writes at night. She typically does between 10 and 20 "rough draft" pages a night. When her children were at home before she published, she wrote around their schedules, getting up early in the morning and writing after they had gone to bed at night.

Like Hemingway, she advises stopping in the middle of a scene you really enjoy writing so you'll be anxious to get back to it.

Her talk was about putting emotion into your writing. Here are some of her suggestions:

1. Use weather and geography to underscore the emotional tone. For example, dark clouds and menacing skies for fear.

2. Give your character a fear to overcome.

3. Heroes and heroines need to have weaknesses as well as strengths.

4. In prewriting your characters, give them favorite memories, a memory that evokes something that can be used later in the book.

5. Break high emotion scenes with some kind of relief.

Sala does not start a book until she knows the title.

The most important thing in her writing, she said, is knowing where to start the book. If you don't know that, "It's like putting in the zipper before you've cut out the dress."

She recommends starting a book with a point of action or riveting hook.

She sketched the beginning of one of her books in which the heroine starts off with not one bad thing, but a lot of bad things. She's pregnant from an abusive relationship. She's just been evicted from her apartment and has no money. She witnesses a murder. She gets shot. And this is just the beginning of the book! These are the kinds of devices that will make your heroine sympathetic to the readers.

Surprisingly, Sala says 95 percent of her plots come to her in dreams.

Works for her.

Many thanks to Jo Anne Banker for arranging the Sala talk and having Sala as her houseguest.