Writing A Romance Novel

My older daughter has been telling me for years that I should be writing fiction. When she finds out I am still largely writing non-fiction, she doesn’t hold back her disappointment. I value that about her - pushing me to evolve my gifts. Periodically when we see each other, she will ask how my fiction novel is going, and she will listen non-plussed as I parade by her a host of reasons I haven’t started. Finally, in the last year, I was able to tell her I started to read romance novels to get to know the genre better to fulfill a dream to write one. I don’t think that was the kind of fiction she had in mind, but I have one my bucket list to write a romance.

I tried to write for Harlequin back in the early 90’s when you sent in a sample laboriously pecked away on a typewriter and waited two months for a rejection. I took rejection to heart back in my twenties; my self-worth had no capacity and I would give up on my writing very easily. I do think that some literary journeys we have to wait for. If I was meant to be a romance writer in my 20’s, or 30’s or 40’s, I would have been one. The non-fiction I wrote in mid-life was largely part of my catharsis, and it’s a gift to be able to share your words that could heal others.

Now that I have experienced a safe and true romance IRL, I can sit down and think about two fictional people falling in love. For me, this became what I have now learned to be a “second chance” romance between two people who met in high school, were ripped apart by circumstance, and then re-united as adults. There are questions like, had they stayed around each other as seniors in high school, would it have lasted. Most surveys will say absolutely not. When you meet high school sweethearts, one can’t help but judge a teeny bit (you slept with no one else? is where my deformed thinking goes…) And why is sex the decider to the determination of true love? I am a cynic in thinking people settle, because we learn about it all the time. It’s easier to just fall into a groove than to bring change into a marriage or a relationship.

In romance novels, the tree is shaken. People doubt and are willing to walk away, and then the power of that love brings them back. But as my daughter said so aptly to me yesterday when we were discussing love, “Fate isn’t always fate when it comes to love.” Well put. And I said back “And red flags are not a parade.”

Nobody wants to believe that they can have a better love because it means getting really truthful in the level-up of who you are and what you want. Trusting that painful instinct in your heart that says, “There could be more here.” Are you kinky and never explored it? Are you nomadic and been stuck in the same place? Are you wanting to have more romance and don’t know how to engage it without rejection?

Romance novels allow us to explore all the ways people go for their romantic dreams with unlikely characters. It’s fantasy at its best.

My characters are speaking to me, there are 27, and I am hearing them. I was 27 once. When you are 27, you think never about being 40 or 50 or how your life in the long run would work out. You can barely see 30. The existential angst was intense. We are so consumed by the ego of self. I was romantically partnered young and we got through our twenties together, sharing our ambitions, building dreams that made sense at the time, but our love lacked fire. It simply made sense for survival and contentment. I didn’t think that I would ever know more about love. Then ten years into that relationship, when I discovered the world could offer more fire and passion, I decided to be single again. That lasted all of two years, then I got married again. Two kids, that whole drill, lots of moves, and fifteen years later,I am getting married for the third time. I am at peace. I feel rounded, discovered, seen, enjoyed, and I am in bliss.

But to write characters who are 27 that think they know what is ahead of them makes no sense to me. I want to instill in them the power to understand if something is lasting, but I only have 350 pages to do it. Which means I can’t do it. So knowing what I know about love, I have to put that aside and see what they believe. What do they believe or want from love? Does it align?Yes, this is my non-fiction brain taking what it knows about my truth, and bringing into the characters that have their own experiences.

I do think age defines us, and I want to encapsulate and reflect on those times in my life when I believed in what I wanted, and I was so scared to get it. I had scars and holes and dents and bruises, and little idea how to repair them. So I let certain dreams fall to the wayside and focused on being where I was at the time with what I knew. The beauty of the romance novel is the couple only resides in the 350 pages. They may or may not last. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the evolution they went through to come together, fall off and then come together again.

Since I have reckoned with the fact that life is not like that at all, finally writing about it is fun and refreshing.

I am in the process of taking a Meisner acting class concurrently which is teaching me how to read people, and understand what it takes for them to reject an advance, or a stance or an opinion. We walk around in the world with our faces in our phones, and we have forgotten that the people before us are feeling and reacting all day long to their own opinions, history and desires. Interacting and communicating evolves on a whole other level when you can feel into what someone says about what you said. While authors, especially romance writers, are depicted as locked in a room all day writing and not interacting with anyone, the truth is they have to know how to read people.

I for one have seen that many of the romance books I have read are all in one person’s head. They are trying to figure out their life, and what falling in love will mean for their well being. They are trying to track another person but they are doing it in often a very one dimensional cat and mouse way. The histories of the people falling in love in most romances I have read, even the big popular ones, base the way people feel in their 30’s on some kind of trauma like their parents died, or get divorced, or they recovered from some illness. While these are specific identifiers about how their world got shaped, truly, for any of us who lived through our 20’s and 30’s, we know that we were insecure as fuck and spent most of our time trying to read people who were trying to read us, and failing. We had not come to terms so much with the family of origin and the depth of how that affected us until our 40’s. I could be broad speaking here, and I know that my kids have faced a lot in a young age, but they are raised by parents who are into therapy, and communication. Many families are not. Nothing is talking about. Life is confusing.

In the stack of romance novels I have read, characters are always trying to separate the confusion of life and the existential angst from the romance. And they can succeed doing that in the scope of the book to a degree. If we actually looked at these people in real life, with all they had to accept about themselves and their surroundings, nothing would be so set in stone.

We know nothing is set in stone in life, so romance feels like a way to understand that in some cosm of time, we get to have conclusion. We get to have butterflies. We get to love. Life has proven to be a basket of happiness and despair, so we have no choice but to lean in and have fun.

Add to this romance writing endeavor the fear I am wasting my time and not getting it right. When I wrote in my twenties, that was all I had to worry about. Now I write and am concerned about the well being of my children, my partner, my friends, and I have an endless list of life tasks I am constantly re-scheduling or batting away so I can sink into the fiction world. It find it really helps me to be efficient and effective and I also don’t need to be a best seller. I can easily publish the book on my own web site, and be happy just for myself that I got it done and it makes a few readers happy.

When has it not been okay to just write because one wants to, and then trust that the words will find their audience? We are so wrapped up that every minute must matter, but what does that do for us? Nothing. I write this Substack for roughly 400 of you and I hope it evokes something. Even this piece alone could have you thinking about your current relationship and romance, or your relationship to writing, or when you were 20, or the feelings you have about art and aging.

Let these questions come up to the surface to be explored.

My Meisner instructor tells us every class, know how you feel about something. If you don’t know how you feel about something than you can’t express it out into the world. People won’t know you. Your communication will be false and fake. I have been writing lately how I feel about things and having some fun with it. Journaling can be a bit a little to literary for me, so when I start with how I feel, I get to the source of my position. I then can sit on it for a bit.

How do you feel today about XYZ? Explore!

I am holding an event in Seattle and we are going to sell out. I would LOVE to see your face IRL in Seattle for my Delicious Life event The Exhale: Put Yourself First. You can find the deets on what the Delicious Life means on my new web site Live Your Delicious Life. Please forward to any woman who you think would love an event sharing time with other women who are looking to re-connect to who they are after spending decades serving societal norms and conditioning to serve.