Boring yourself.

On writing, craft, and evolution...

I write romance. Romance is built on tropes and at least one required predictability—a happy ending. These facts are often wielded like weapons by non-romance readers against the genre—oh, it’s formulaic, paint-by-numbers, blah blah blah.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to defend my genre to (often well-meaning) “outsiders". (Picture me in the dentist's office, the hair salon, dinner with my husband’s co-workers giving the following speech, lol.)

All genre fiction has tropes, not just romance—there are mystery tropes, suspense tropes, science fiction tropes, etc. Genres are genres because they have defining qualities. Also, those tropes can be used in a million different interesting and fresh ways to make sure you’re not telling the same story over and over again.

I’m saying all of that upfront because I don’t want what I say next to be misconstrued as a knock against my genre. This is a me issue not a romance genre issue.

I got about 20k words into this new book I’ve been working on, and I could feel ambivalence creeping in. When I dug into why (via my morning pages), I realized…I’m bored. I could feel myself treading down a familiar story path. I could see the main plot points of the rest of the story unfolding and just felt…blah about it.

The Blahs and Growth

I’ve written 20+ novels, so I’m sure it’s not uncommon for this to happen, but I just felt like, in some ways, I was repeating myself. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing for readers. Readers stick with certain authors because they know what they’re going to get and like that thing. If anything, when a writer veers too far off the path of their “brand” or switches genres, that’s when readers can get mad (because they feel like it’s a bait and switch.)

However, I can feel this need inside me to grow, to get better, to continue evolving as a writer. (For those fluent in Clifton Strengthsfinder, I’m #1 Learner and #3 Achiever in my strengths, so this makes sense.) And so I think I’m getting bored because I haven’t been pushing myself to evolve.

I still love the seed of the idea I’m working on, but I think it could be a bigger, deeper story than what I was writing. So, I’m hitting pause on adding words right now and am focusing on growth in my writing craft.

Next steps

I’ve ordered a stack of new writing craft books—ones that deep dive into more specific aspects of writing instead of overviews and ones that lean more literary. I’m going to read fiction from a wide range of genres (which I already do) but put a focus on books that are considered “upmarket” or more literary. (If anyone’s interested in what I’ve added to my TBR pile, you can see it here on Goodreads.)

For those unfamiliar with the term upmarket, I like this definition of upmarket from TCK Publishing: “Like literary fiction, upmarket fiction addresses complex themes and emphasizes excellent writing. But like genre fiction, you’ll still be able to recognize some genre tropes and elements from commercial fiction.”

Sure, that sounds easy

I love the idea of writing upmarket romance or upmarket women’s fiction, so that’s what I’m going to aim toward. It’s a lofty goal—one I’m totally intimidated by, lol—but at least it’s not going to bore me!

So that’s the update. Part of me wishes I could’ve reported, yep, I finished the chapters and wrote the proposal and sold the book! But the writing journey is messy and not a straight path. I’m just happy the desire to write is back for me because, for a while there, I was worried. Wanting to grow in my writing is progress. And I’ll take progress.

How are things going for you?