PRECIOUS PASSION ALSO NEEDS TO BE PRACTICAL

To write romance novels, it helps to have a romantic soul, a good imagination and a compelling writing style, according to Elizabeth Doyle Stott, whose first novel, "Precious Passion," is now in bookstores.

But the most important attribute is something much more practical, the ability to finish what you start, said Stott, as she sat in the home of her in-laws Barbara and Gerald Stott of Cape Girardeau.

"The biggest obstacle for most people who want to write is that they don't finish the books they start," said Stott, 28, whose second novel, "Now and Forever," is due out next month.

She and her husband, Lance, were in town for the holidays from their home in Austin, Texas, where Lance is an attorney and Elizabeth, who writes under her maiden name, Elizabeth Doyle, supplements her income from writing novels with a typing job.

Stott, who studied sociology in college, had never given a thought to writing until she started reading romance novels a few years ago.

"I decided, I can do that,' and I wrote one from beginning to end in eight weeks," she said. "I enjoyed it so much, I wrote another one."

The hard part came, Stott said, in trying to get her novels published.

She sent samples of her novels to every book agent in the country and got rejection slips from all of them. Not to be deterred, she then sent samples to every publisher.

"The publishers liked my work much better than the agents did," said Stott, who ended up signing a contract with Kensington Publishing for its Zebra Books division.

Her first published novel, "Precious Passion" (Stott notes that the publisher picked out the name), is about Aurora Black, a woman pianist who doesn't want to get married, and Max Birmingham, a nobleman who falls in love, first with Aurora's music, then with her. The novel is set in London at the end of the 1800s.

Stott said she started the novel by researching the time period, then she dove into the writing, starting at page 1 and continuing through to page 400.

"I don't use an outline," she said. "If you follow an outline, the characters can't make their own decisions."

Her characters are real enough that Stott's fans often ask about her piano playing, assuming she shares that talent with her heroine.

"But I can't play piano," Stott said. "As a writer, my job is to pretend these things, not actually do them."

Stott set her next novel in 1880s St. Petersburg, not knowing that Kensington had never published a Russian romance novel.

"I had my heroine in mind, a girlish chatterbox who is a petty thief," said Stott. She wanted that heroine to be a farm peasant who moved into a large city and became homeless. St. Petersburg, which had a large influx of rural peasants during the reign of Czar Alexander II, fit the bill perfectly.

The novel was good enough, Stott was told, that the editor decided to take a chance on a Russian setting. "Now and Forever," about a Russian peasant girl rescued from a life of homelessness, poverty and crime by a foreign spy, will come out next month, Stott said.

"I'm more of a Romeo and Juliet romantic as opposed to a Cinderella romantic," Stott said. "In Cinderella stories, the heroine falls in love and moves up in society. In Romeo and Juliet stories, the heroine falls in love and breaks away from society."

In her own life, Stott loves romantic things. When she met Lance Stott when both were students at the University of Southern Florida, she decided she was his type even when he insisted she wasn't.

"I was determined and kept pursuing him," she said.