Thursday, February 18, 2016

Guest Post with author Hannah Fielding

Writing my heroes by Hannah Fielding

Why do I write romance? The heroes – oh the heroes! What better job can there be in the world, I thought as a young, aspiring writer, than dreaming up men who make one’s heart pound and knees melt? Now that I have published four books featuring Rafe (Burning Embers), Paolo (The Echoes of Love), Salvador (Indiscretion) and Leandro and Andres (Masquerade), I have not changed my mind in the slightest – what men!

I love to create confident, masterful heroes, very much Alpha males. They are attractive, though not necessarily beautiful; theirs can be a rugged kind of appeal. They are invariably strong, perhaps even a little imposing to the heroine at the start. They look after themselves physically; I think that is important in a hero.

Career always matters. I like my heroes to be self-sufficient and successful in their business field. To me, intelligence, determination and the willingness and ability to work very hard are attractive qualities in a man. Wealth makes for a more exotic and luxurious story, but is not essential: it is the man, not the experiences he can afford to offer, that matters most.

No man is an island, and certainly none of my heroes stands as such: each is connected to others in meaningful ways. I especially like a man to care about such things as history and culture, to place himself within a wider, richer picture. Paolo, for example, in The Echoes of Love is a collector of local legends, which he shares with Venetia. All of my men are thinkers – about what has come before, about what happens around them and what will come to pass.

But my heroes don’t only think: they feel. I have always been pulled towards Byronic heroes. There is something about a tortured hero – like Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – that pulls on the heartstrings. I think also that men with a past and who struggle with that past are more real; it is easier to fall for a man who is human, who struggles with life sometimes just as a woman does. So I write men with depths. Men carrying burdens. Men doing their utmost to move forward. I write heroes who really need the heroines to alleviate their inner pain, to teach them to trust and to love again. Sometimes, the true meaning of ‘hero’ is not saving others, but allowing another to save you.


About the author:

Hannah Fielding is an incurable romantic. The seeds for her writing career were sown in early childhood, spent in Egypt, when she came to an agreement with her governess Zula: for each fairy story Zula told, Hannah would invent and relate one of her own. Years later – following a degree in French literature, several years of travelling in Europe, falling in love with an Englishman, the arrival of two beautiful children and a career in property development – Hannah decided after so many years of yearning to write that the time was now. Today, she lives the dream: writing full time at her homes in Kent, England, and the South of France, where she dreams up romances overlooking breath-taking views of the Mediterranean.

To date, Hannah has published four passionate, evocative novels: Burning Embers, a ‘romance like Hollywood used to make’, set in Kenya; the award-winning Echoes of Love, ‘an epic love story that is beautifully told’, set in Italy; and books 1 and 2 of the Andalusian Nights trilogy, set in sultry Spain, entitled Indiscretion and Masquerade. She is currently working on her fifth book, Legacy, which will publish this spring.


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