Where Normal Need Not Apply
It’s often not easy to be a romance author, and the time around Valentine’s Day can be especially trying. A whole day (or week) focused on love and romance brings out all types of naysayers for the romance genre.
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Sometimes we’ll hear writing advice like “avoid clichés,” but what does that mean when it comes to story tropes? After all, can’t tropes be helpful? And if so, how do we make them less cliché?
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Aspiration is “a hope or ambition of achieving something,” such as we see with the #RelationshipGoals tags on social media. Not surprisingly, our hopes and goals are sometimes reflected in the stories we write or the books we read.
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Have you struggled with writing a synopsis, query, or Amazon book description? Romy Sommer shares her 10 step process for finding the core of our story and writing synopses.
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A recent Twitter thread brought up problematic reader expectations with story endings. Can we find a balance between “fulfilling our story’s promise and our genre’s expectations” and avoiding a cliché ending?
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Given reviews about too-abrupt endings, readers might want a sense of closure beyond what authors deliver. Should we use epilogues—or epilogue-like endings—to breach the gap?
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We often talk about the pros and cons of prologues, but epilogues can be good or bad as well. Let’s look at how epilogues differ from normal endings, what they can do, and what they shouldn’t do.
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Just as we have go-to favorite authors that we know we can depend on for delivering a certain type of story, readers are evaluating us for what we can deliver: What’s our promise to readers when they pick up one of our stories?
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After we finish brainstorming and start trying to assemble our ideas into a story, that’s the perfect point in our writing process to avoid major problems by questioning what story issues we might run into before we write too many words.
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Many authors dream of working with books beyond just writing them and become editors, agents, librarians, or booksellers. In fact, Angela Quarles, my writing bestie, is opening a bookstore! And she’s looking for suggestions to make her genre- and writer-friendly shop among the best.
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