Writing A Silly Little Romance, for Dummies

It's me, I'm the dummy.

Ok so here’s the deal.

I’ve been a visual artist my entire life. My mom is a multimedia artist and my dad was a photographer, so I was given a leg up in a future in the arts since I was a wee babe. It’s like nepotism, minus the fame and money and talent (I had to work for these art skills, believe you me).

But, what it did give me was the unabashed confidence to refer to myself as “An Artist”. I would be a little kid doodling in a Wal-Mart sketch pad, fucking begging to fight anyone who had the audacity to say that “someday” I would be an artist. I was one at that moment! I am still one now, a million billion years later!

As a child, and an adult, writing as also been one of my many loves. I have a blog (you’re lookin’ at it), I am actually (fun fact) published in academia (lol), I journal (sometimes) and make little diary comics and plot novels. But, am I a writer?

Now, I am a firm believer that you are what you want to be, and I would never hold other people up to my imaginary standards for “what a writer is”. But (if you’ll forgive the theme park analogy) I see myself walking up to ride the rollercoaster with the other writers, but I can’t ride yet. I’m just not tall enough.

I think this is because, even though I love blogging and I enjoyed my little academia moment while I had it, I have never written a full-length novel. And, I have always wanted to.

I understand what Captain Ahab was yapping on about with that whale—there is a sense of incompleteness with The Self when you know that you are meant to achieve something, and you haven’t achieved it yet.

Blogs are fun to write because, for me, it’s the equivalent of doodling, but with words. There is that element of fun with novels: I have an easy time finding a Big Idea and can come up with characters and I can visualize the scenes in my head like a movie. But, writing a full length novel is work, and the work of it often destabilizes my motivation. Succinct ideas become loose and formless, characters start to lack depth, consistency becomes inconsistent at best — my daydreams of being a novelist are often shattered by repeatedly falling in love with the idea for a novel only to realize, again and again, that writing is hard. Boo.

But, this isn’t going to be an essay where I whine to you about writing being hard (let’s be real, this app is like 90% people who write, you already know it’s hard), this is an essay where I tell you what I’m doing about that struggle.

I found three books on writing to help me out: Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes. and Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series by Zoe York.

These books aren’t rare or unknown: many writers use them to help guide a story along. The combination of all three together is what I believe is helping guide me towards, oh I don’t know, maybe actually writing the novel I’ve been trying to write for two years. And, oh my gosh, have they helped me tremendously.

The books represent my goals: I want to write a short romance genre series, and I want it to be good.

I am a long time fan of the romance genre, which has recently exploded in the era of “booktok”, “romantasy” and Kindle Unlimited (side note: fuck amazon, but you can’t deny the impact KU has had on romance readers and writers for the good and bad). I’ll also be the first one to say that there are a lot of romance books out there that tend to…suck…a little bit.

Listen, read whatever you like and don’t let me stop you. But there are a lot of people who see the formulaic writing process of the romance genre, say “I can do that”, and then proceed to produce the worst book I’ve ever read.

I’ll protect the anonymity of this book that I’m about to trash, since I’m not trying to be a jerk to an author out there (see: I know that writing a book is really hard). But, reading as characters with 0 chemistry fumble through the most boring sex scene known to man (yes, the SEX SCENE WAS BORING) made me look into a metaphorical camera, like on The Office, and say “Oh my god, I never want to write a book like that”.

(Another side note: when I say “bad” I mean poorly written, disorganized, and lacking depth. I do not mean the romantic sub-genre. There’s a lot of romance books out there that people have declared as “weird”. But, I’ll tell you now. Some of those Kindle Unlimited Monster Smut books have better characters and writing than some of the romance novels published by the major houses).

But, anyway. I want my book to be good, at least by my standards (inevitably, someone in the world will hate it, such is life and whatever). For me personally, that means creating and retaining a sense of organization that doesn’t devolve into knotted spaghetti garble.

You might be thinking: “hmmm, knotted spaghetti garble” is a really specific way to word something. Yes.

I’m one of those people who is faux-organized. I will look you dead in the eyes and with my whole chest say, “yeah, I’m currently outlining my novel”. There will be glitter and sparkles. You will be so impressed by how organized that sounds. You need to know that I am a liar who lies.

Is it an outline? Maybe technically. Mostly I just write scenes, and some are detailed, and some are bulleted. Some are quotes and some are in first person POV. Most are 3rd person POV. Is it possible to have a 4th person POV? Because if so, it’s probably on the outline. There will be a coffee stain on it. “Brooke, you typed it on Google Docs how is there a coffee stain on it” — wow wouldn’t we both like to know that.

But, this also isn’t about my crappy outlining skills, this is about me turning my life around! I really loved reading the trifecta of books I posted above, and this is what the three of them taught me:

1. If I want to write a multi-book genre series, I should write the outlines for a few of the books before writing the first book to completion. That way I can set up the characters in books 2 and 3 more fully. (Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series by Zoe York. )

2. Beat sheets and outlining may seem like it can produce books that are overly predictable, but in fact many of the best stories follow the same beat sheet. A beat sheet is simply a way to organize your story to make the writing more digestible to write and the reading more digestible to read. (Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes)

I decided to craft a beat sheet/outline based on the ones provided from Save the Cat and Romancing the Beat. I take absolutely no credit for this outline, as I simply pulled it from the books and combined it to make it work for my brain. The main outline is from Save the Cat and all the beats in green are from Romancing the Beat.

This update in organization has helped me tremendously, and I feel like I am very nearly ready to start actually writing my stupid (said affectionately) novel. Someday, I’ll post the completed beat sheets for these novels, but for now, no spoilers (wink).

I’m looking forward to delivering more Updates from Writing-Land for you as I struggle through learning how to become a writer. If you have any advice for a floundering fish (me), drop it in the comments!