Tell me a story

Because I have been working so much with all these different writers I have been seeing so many different styles of doing essential the same thing, telling a story that people want to hear. But I have also been seeing people who have been getting locked into the eternal torment of "getting it right." They are so imbued with advice from every direction that some of them are afraid to make a move for fear of it being the wrong one.

I don't know what puts me in the position to say these things but I am going to say them anyway. If you feel compelled to know my qualifications I have written extensively as a journalist and also have been published in magazines. I have been a scriptwriter for two sit-coms and have published a children's book. I have been writing for seventeen years and have written five book length works of fiction.

And I have never sold one of them. And up until recently I've never even tried preferring, instead, to use my writing time for writing rather than what I viewed as pandering.

So what qualifies me? Pretty much nothing but I'm gonna say what I think. I think that the point of writing is to tell a story. There are some rules you absulutely have to follow but I think that any writer who is anywhere near publishing knows what those are. Otherwise I say, as I did in my other blog, make your own rules. This is your story and you are telling it for two people who live in your head and will live on your computer screen so that maybe one day they can live for other people too.

The only person you owe when you write a story is you, those characters and that reader on the other end. I say pretend that no one else exists when you're writing and then you can worry about those other people later. You can't live in fear of doing the wrong thing because no matter what you do it will be wrong to someone in the business. And fear will ruin your writing. It just will and once you've lost that ability to craft you have nothing left even if you follow every rule. What you produce will be correct and empty.

This business is about telling a story, and for those of us in the romance genre and I think almost in any genre anymore, it's about telling a story about relationships and the things that affect them whether those things are murder, or aliens, or something else entirely. That's where your focus has to be.

Then again, I remain unpublished so do whatever you want. I do.

Too tired for a song and a quote but not for a rant---A