J. Kent is Jean Salter Kent, co-author with Candace Shelton of the Romance Writer's Phrase Book: The Essential Source Book for Every Romantic Novelist (Perigee Books, 1984), one of the longest-running and most-recommended phrase references on the romance writing shelf. The book has stayed in print across more than four decades and is published by Penguin's TarcherPerigee imprint.
The Romance Writer's Phrase Book collects more than three thousand descriptive tags organized into fifty categories built around the actual moves a romance scene asks a writer to make: physical description, body movement, facial expression, eyes, voices, emotion, humor, sex, and color. The intent is not to hand a writer canned prose to drop into a manuscript, but to break writer's block at the sentence level, offer patterns a writer can adapt and rewrite in her own voice, and prevent the same descriptive phrases from recurring across a manuscript. Readers in romance, women's fiction, and even creative nonfiction treat it as a desk reference.
Public information on Kent personally is limited. The book remains her best-known and most-cited publication, and its longevity across generations of romance writers is the strongest evidence of its impact on the genre.
J. Kent
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