CWD Member Interview - Meredith Resce

Each Thursday we will be interviewing one of the members of Christian Writers Downunder – to find out a little bit more about them and their writing/editing goals.

Today’s  interview is with Meredith Resce

 www.meredithresce.com

Question 1: Tells us three things about who you are and where you come from. 

Hello. Well I am one of those country girls who has lived in the city since I got married 35 years ago. But you know what they say: you can take the girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. My place of origin, where I always drift back to, is Melrose, Southern Flinders Ranges South Australia. My parents still live on the farm there, so that is the place I still call home. However, I have not lived there since 1983. I’ve lived in Adelaide for 22 years in stints broken up by 6 years in Geelong, Victoria, 1 year in Bristol UK and 6 years in Melbourne, Victoria. Though I hate moving and hate being away from family, those years spent in other states and overseas has served to broaden my horizon, and I’ve found lots of places to connect with new story ideas. 

I’ve been married since 1983, have three children and two grandchildren. My husband and I have served in Christian ministry for the majority of those 36 years. My focus in ministry has been music, drama, writing and sharing the gospel through teaching and preaching—and most importantly, I have loved connecting with and encouraging people.

Personally, I love sport – playing and watching (though I stopped playing Basket Ball last year as I was getting too slow). But I’m a football (Adelaide Crows AFL) and cricket (Adelaide Strikers and Australian Cricket Team) fan. I hate shopping unless it is a bookshop, stationary shop or kitchenware’s shop. Clothes shopping makes me break out in hives (metaphorically speaking).

Question 2: Tell us about your writing.  What do you write and why?

I prefer to write fiction. I’ve tried a number of genres. The most successful has been the historical romance Christian Fiction I originally published. I’ve also tried fantasy allegory, murder mystery, crime drama thriller, contemporary romance, and a couple of non-fiction titles. The market has changed dramatically in the twenty years since I was first published, and currently, I am writing contemporary romance for the Christian Fiction market, and am hoping to break into a new market in the US.

Question 3: Who has read your work? Who would you like to read it?

 

Over the years I’ve had people of all sorts of shapes and sizes who have become fans, particularly of my ‘Heart of Green Valley’ series.   I still get requests for the one book in the series that is out of print, as folks are still discovering them and enjoying the stories.

I’ve had readers from all age groups – teens through to ninety plus. That series has been my best selling series by far.

With my change in direction, I would like to broaden my reading audience. So far it has been mainly Australian, New Zealand and English readers. However, I am aware that if I am able to gain access to the American audience, I have to change from Australian spelling and language to US spelling and language, and that is a scary prospect.

Question 4: Tell us something about your process. What challenges do you face? What helps you the most?

Getting ideas is the easiest part of the process. Turning the ideas tap off would be helpful if I knew how, so as a result, I have more story ideas than I can manage to develop. Writing is a fun process. It used to absorb and drive me twenty years ago. Now I need to be disciplined about making time to write, but I always enjoy the way the story develops, and particularly like reading it after I finished. 

My main challenges are finding time, and working against the injuries that develop from a static lifestyle. I have to get more active as writing is hurting me. Doing the recommended stretches is great, when I remember.

Question 5: What is your favourite Writing Craft Book and why? 

Can’t say I have one, though recently I was recommended:

 “The Word Loss Diet”

And “Understanding Show Don’t Tell (and really getting it)”

They provided some help on some recurring writing faults.

Question 6: If you were to give a shout-out to a CWD author, writer, editor or illustrator – who would they be?

Editor – Iola Goulton (I never feel totally settled until Iola has cast her discerning eye over a manuscript. She’s brutal, but the product is always so much better for her honest edits.)

Writers – Paula Vince (my first Australian Christian Fiction writing buddy); Amanda Deed and Rose Dee (we collaborated on a title ‘TheGreenfield Legacy’, which I believe is an excellent piece of writing); AndreaGrigg, Narelle Atkins (we contributed to a Christmas Book set that turned out to be a lot of fun)

Question 7: What are your writing goals for 2019? How will you achieve them?

I am planning to finish the ‘Luella Linely: License to Meddle’ series. This trilogy is based on popular Regency Author, Luella Linley and her busy attempts to match make her adult children. Her novel characters are much easier to manipulate.

Ideally I would like to find a US publisher to take this series, and so I will need to think American, which may prove a challenge, given I am very Australian, and quite proud of it.

Question 8: How does your faith impact and shape your writing?

My faith underpins my writing in the sense that I believe God has given me the ability to communicate through writing, particularly through writing fiction. I love sharing about God, faith, hope, healing, salvation and deliverance, but I do not like to have my characters behaving in an odd way, so they don’t usually express any religious ideals unless the situation calls for it.  Much like the way I move through life. I am open to God at all times, but I don’t go all super-spiritual, religious jargon in everyday situations. Neither do my characters. My motto for my writing has long been: to encourage and inspire.

Re-write it yet another time...

My first effort at publishing was a success. How about that? That’s not something you hear every day.

 My first novel ‘The Manse’ was not the first story I’d written. In fact, it was not even on my schedule to write. I had written eight or nine unpublished novels prior to this, and I only started to write ‘The Manse’ because I was given an opportunity to contribute a serial to a bi-monthly magazine. As I began to write it, I had a vague idea where I would take it, but I only wrote about five or six hundred words every other month. This, dear reader, is not the way to approach the writing of a novel, but it is how I started out.

After two years of episodes coming out in the South Australian CWA magazine, the editor asked for an ending. She and the readers wanted me to bring it to a close. At this point I had a pink-fit. In my vague plan, I had reached the part of the story where the characters had just become established, and the first major conflict had been revealed – and they wanted an ending.

Believe it or not, this was a God given opportunity. I needed to tell the whole story, and I was losing my outlet, so following inspiration, I contacted the editor and proposed that I would wind the story up for the magazine – which would be a very unsatisfactory, unresolved ending – if she would allow that I could advertise the full novel for sale. She agreed. Only one small problem remained – well a host of small problems actually: I had to finish writing the whole novel, then I had to figure out how to publish it. Find a printer, right? Oh, and I’ll have to sort out a cover, and I guess I’d better get someone to read over it to look out for mistakes.

I did it. I published it myself, two teachers from school read over it and found a couple of spelling errors, it had a very dodgy looking cover, and I advertised in the CWA magazine. Between that outlet and various church contacts, I sold all 300 copies in no time. I had readers coming and begging for a sequel – which I thought was silly, as I had no notion of writing a sequel. One reader said she’d pray until God gave me a sequel. I was annoyed with this statement and got to thinking about how there was no opportunity for a sequel. But wait, there was that young lad, whose father had been killed suddenly...

Ok, so I wrote a sequel, actually a whole series that has six published titles, and one unpublished one.

In 1998, through a contact I had in Christian Book distribution, I had the opportunity to have ‘The Manse’ and ‘Green Valley’ (the sequel) distributed throughout Australia and New Zealand. He gave me this opportunity on the condition I sorted out that cover.

I found someone who was slightly more knowledgeable about graphic design than me (still not a professional), and I had someone who said they’d worked as an editor with an American publishing company go over the manuscripts again. I made some changes, and the 1998 version was released, and began to sell like crazy. ‘Like crazy’ means I sold them in the thousands.

In 2003 I was contacted by a publisher in the UK, who’d heard about my work. This publisher eventually accepted the first three books in this series. They went through another editor and re-write, with a professional designer on the cover this time.

All good – right? I’ve sold over 8,500 copies of ‘The Manse’.

Last year, to celebrate twenty years in print, I dragged the manuscript out – the UK version that has now been edited and re-written three times – and decided to get it ready for eBook. My giddy aunt!!! The writing was in such a bad way, I can’t believe I’d sold 25,000 copies of the series, and have avid Heart of Green Valley fans.

Christian writing in Australia has evolved at a rapid rate. I guess when I set out, I had no clue, and muddled along with the opportunities God put before me. Thank goodness the readers over the last twenty years didn’t know what I now know. Head-hopping; author intrusion; rogue adverbs (which I really actually like very much); elaborate speech attributions; loads of telling and not nearly enough showing; and an uncanny habit of using explanation marks for just about everything! These writerly sins were a solid part of everything I wrote pre-2012 – that’s like about eleven titles.

So here I sit. I did tell my readers I planned to release all of the Heart of Green Valley series to eBook. I re-wrote and re-edited ‘The Manse’ for the fourth time (and I admit, I skimped on the final editing as the opportunities to exploit the title for return are not there as they were twenty years ago).

This week I opened up the sequel, ‘Green Valley’ and groaned. This had been edited by both the American editor and the English editor. Obviously they had no idea either. I had thought I’d just have to make a couple of changes here and there. You know, cull all the adverbs, simplify the speech attributions, and sort out POV. No such luck. So far I have worked on the first scene, and out of about a thousand words, I’ve retained about twenty. Another deep sigh.

But I have to do it. If I was to put it up in its current format, the critics would move on it like a bunch of sharks at a feeding frenzy, and point out all of the issues. This ultimately would affect my reputation as a writer.

So be encouraged dear writer friends. Look at the bright side. You have the information at your fingertips today. You know what the writerly sins are, and can easily look up how to avoid them. Get ahead of the program and learn not to do it when you first write, so that you don’t have to spend half your life re-writing.

2017 marks the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of ‘The Manse’, the first title in ‘The Heart of Green Valley’ series.

To read more about Meredith Resce and all of her work, visit www.meredithresce.com