You’re tired of your soul-crushing job. You love Nora Roberts and Sandra Brown. You long to transport readers from the daily grind to a world of high fashion sexpots in stilettos searching for Mr. Ishetheone, or sloe-eyed dames trading bon mots with rugged gumshoes on the mean streets of Gotham.
No problem. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and get to work. You need a heroine, a hero, a setting, a conflict, and to find your voice as a writer (hint: imagine you’re telling the story to your best friend). When you hit 70,000 words or so, cursor back to the beginning and start revising. Then revise again. After that, treat yourself to a walk around the block or an afternoon of light housework before you launch headlong into your next manuscript. A successful writer never stops writing.
Oh-one more thing. If you aren’t a fan of romance novels to begin with, do us all a favor and don’t try to write one. If you think romance novels are formulaic and simple, then you’ll write something that’s formulaic and simple and no one will ever misconstrue your condescension for authenticity. If you scoff at happily-ever-after, you’re too cynical for the genre.
Harness the Power of the Internet
Two things you need to do while you take your allotted, hourly 5-minute breaks: Check out the guidelines on the vast and welcoming Harlequin website (even if your manuscript isn’t intended for them), and join Romance Writers of America. Both provide a jackpot of insider information on how to write and submit your manuscript in hopes of having it published. Then-and listen closely here-follow their instructions. The business end of the romance game is no place to buck the rules.
If Harlequin says to submit the first 5 pages of your masterpiece, don’t submit the first 6 pages. If they say not to call, then don’t call. If they want a SASE, include one. If they accept email submissions, great, but if they say no attachments, then for the love of Aphrodite-don’t send an attachment.
Romance Writers of America will give you an instant support group, a coterie of like-minded writers who will trade tips on which editors at which publishing houses are looking for stories with brunette heroines who love volleyball. They will tell you how to write an effective query letter and which literary agents are accepting new clients. They will invite you to conferences and local meetings where you can network and finally be among your people. They have much to teach you, grasshopper. Their first lesson will be: Never give up.
However, no organization or website can write your story for you. And you can’t start submitting your work to agents and editors before it’s written. And finally, no one can guarantee you’ll see your name on the cover of a book when you walk into your local book store. That, my friends, is the sole domain of Fortune, a fickle muse whose actions can never be controlled.
You can, however, do an end run around Fortune by self-publishing your work. Sites such as Lulu.com allow you to print copies of your book and sell them yourself or through Amazon, and sites such as Smashwords allow you to make your book available on all e-reader platforms. These are updated versions of the vanity publishers of yore-but in this day and age, there’s a lot to be said for taking matters into your own hands.
The love story with a happy ending-that’s the definition of a romance novel. The person who writes such a story-published or not-that’s the definition of a romance writer.