Why Write a Romance Novel (Part Four)

If you've made it this far, congratulations! This is where the tale gets good. You see, I'd started with the idea that anyone, even myself, could write a good novel, WITH NO TRAINING. Maybe "great" might be a bit of a stretch, but certainly "good" would work as entertaining fiction. The problem was, I lacked all knowledge of structure, pacing, plot shifts, character arcs, or what agents (and readers) were seeking. I'd plotted my way into a pantser's wet dream of a book. Every chapter was double the length necessary. All of the backstory was front-loaded. And it was a full four chapters before my female and male leads even met!

Thinking I was the next James Clavells while blindly pounding out a Quinn-style romance had created a disaster. But, I refused to quit.

Buckle down, turn off the phone, mute the dogs, and write.

After submitting the first four chapters for a college editing class' review, I was wholly disheartened by the feedback. It wasn't at all what they'd expected. Nor was it anywhere remotely near "good". I'm just being honest. While I believed (naively or optimistically, depending on your view) that the best writers did so organically, without the sort of micro-dissection common in story-telling today, no one else in the publishing world shares my belief. If I wanted this book to see the light of day, I'd need to rework it. Utterly. Completely. From back to front, sideways, and upside down. And so started Year Two of the saga.

I started by throwing away the backstory. All of it. Gone. It was okay (I was told) to bring some of it back later, but no one needed to know how my MMC's parents met, or why he disliked driving on a particular stretch of the 101 freeway. Or his how his last dinner went with his ex-fiancee months earlier. I threw away entire chapters filled with useless drivel, tossing them into a growing file called "Cut Scenes and Backstory". Twenty-two thousand excised words later, I still had 104k and was no closer to publication than a year before. But... I was making progress. My characters had their story arcs tightened, and the plot moved at a snappier pace. Less exposition, more dialogue.

But was it "good" yet? No.

Begin Year Three studying more structure. Give in to the inevitable and move the cute meet to chapter one, just as my professor suggested a year before. Return to my original Prologue but tighten, tighten, tighten until its barely over a page in length. I know agents will hate it but its necessary to set the scene for all that comes later. Add depth to the story, add dialogue virtually everywhere. Cut and revise extensively, polish wildly. And, inevitably, become trapped in the whole "does my writing suck" paradigm. An endless feedback loop of self-evaluation and revision with no end in sight. Just last week I revised phrases within the first three paragraphs, yet again. Sigh.

And that brings us to today, four years almost to the day from the point in 2021 when I started. Four years spent turning this idea into the best novel I can possibly produce. I've worn down the keys on my MP Pro, hired an editor, and paid for a cover design I love and still have zero interest from agents because, as I've only recently learned, I have no social media presence. At some point during this process, I was supposed to have cultivated a groundswell of fans clamoring for my book. While it seems counterintuitive that a healthy following is required to publish a debut novel in the Traditional Publishing world, that is exactly what agents and publishers require. Without it, they won't even read my story.

I have resolved to self-publish Schrödinger’s Heart. The story has reached the point where I feel further editing will prove counter-productive (absent a professional hand guiding me). But why, you ask, did I write it? Because I wanted to do it. Because I needed to prove to myself that this one goal, which I'd envisioned as far back as high school, was achievable through my own hard work and steadfast dedication. Maybe its a little ego-centric, but I did this for me.

Jimmy Buffett said in his book, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, when he was writing, the rest of the world would fade away, and no matter where he was or who he was with, there were times when he could only see his characters living out their stories. I read his words but didn't understand them until, driving home from work one day with the radio off, I felt I could see and hear an entire scene play out, as if I were watching a movie. I wasn't looking at the road or the trucks around me (dangerous, I know). I wasn't in charge of my own mind. My characters were. When I got home, I quickly typed up what I'd witnessed, completing an entire chapter in record time. I think it turned out to be one of the best chapters of the book.

At the end of the day, at the end of all of this fuss, and editing, the the stressful rejections, and the blogging, and webpage designing and social media campaigning, I am still burning with my desire to share these characters with the world. I'd like to hear folks tell me that they see a little bit of themselves in the love which plays out between Sophie and Tyler. For me, that will be the best part of the entire process. Of course, robust sales would be lovely too. One can only dream...