Romancing the Blog | Romance Authors and Readers Who Blog

Write something fresh and different. Find a new angle on an old idea. Avoid the stock character types and overdone plot twists, and write something that shines. Great advice, all of it, but if you’re a frustrated writer, banging your head against a wall of editors and agents in an attempt to get someone’s attention — anyone’s attention! — it can be easier said than done. We all know that, if you want to get published, it’s important to write a story that’s uniquely yours while still appealing to your potential audience, but how exactly is a writer supposed to do that? Where do all of these innovative ideas come from?

Good question.

It strikes me that another bit of advice we hand out can do just as much harm as good when it comes to helping writers dream up their most original work: Read. Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t read — far from it. If a writer doesn’t read, they have no business trying to write. But it’s a common practice to tell new writers to read all they can in their genre of choice, so that they can really get to know the market and find out what is working for other writers. And it makes sense, to a point. After all, it’s hard to know if your idea is fresh if you haven’t checked out the stories already on the bookstore shelves. But it’s possible to get too familiar with the successful works in a given genre, so familiar that the tone and rhythms of your favorite writers begin to flavor your own work, as well. It’s difficult to be original when your brain is filled to overflowing with the wonderful plots and characters of the current best-sellers. It’s human nature to dream up more of what we love and enjoy.

How do you get around this rather paradoxical dilemma? It seems simplistic, but read other things. Go right ahead and continue to read your genre of choice, but try mixing it up, particularly when you’re in the process of brainstorming your next story idea. Do you write paranormal romance? Go ahead and read a few, but if you’re writing about witches, stick to vampire books for a while, and then branch out into some romantic suspense and maybe a good western. Take a detour down the mystery or science fiction aisle and see what you stumble upon. And by all means, stroll over to nonfiction and see what sort of research might inspire you; brush up on the history of the Salem witch trials, check out a book on Tarot readings, and maybe find a couple of good travel guides to the area you intend to use for your setting — even if it’s your own hometown. Who knows what you might learn?

Expand from there. Pick up books that sound interesting, or that someone’s recommended, but that you wouldn’t normally read. Not a big nonfiction reader? Try a literary biography about a writer whose work you admire. Or start small, with essays or magazine articles. Get one of those “Best of” anthologies that come out every year, and read at random. They have them for nonfiction as well as for fiction; check out the one on travel writing or sports writing for a change of pace. Read about a religion other than your own — or any religion at all, if it’s not generally your thing. Thumb through a science journal or a technology magazine, and find out how tomorrow’s innovations might help you jump start today’s fiction. The mind is a funny thing, and you never know how something you read will play off the ideas already circling your imagination. You just might stumble upon the next big thing in romantic sub-genres.

A friend of mine reads like a demon most of the time. She goes through books so quickly that I practically drip envy from my pores when we talk about our latest reading; she easily zips through about twenty books for every single one I manage to squeeze into my schedule. But said friend is a writer of young adult fiction, and when she’s working, those YA reads pile up next to her bed and under the coffee table and all around her home. She won’t read YA when she’s writing YA, because she doesn’t want her writing style or her ideas to become infected by someone else’s work. That’s not to say she doesn’t read everything else, however. And the moment she finishes that draft of her WIP, she dives for her YA hoard like Carrie Bradshaw after a pair of half-price Manolos. Other writers I know still read only within their own genres while they work, and find it doesn’t affect their creativity or their voice at all. It’s an individual thing, like so many other aspects of the writing process. But if you’re finding yourself stuck in a groove, where your ideas just don’t seem big enough or fresh enough to break you out of the pack, try a little variety in your reading life. You never know where it might take you.

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