Why romance?
I made my first submission using a pseudonym today, so apparently I’ve stopped dithering and decided to take that particular plunge. I’ll be writing romance and contemporary fiction as Layla M. Wier (which is 2/3 of my maiden name, so not really that pseudonymous anyway). I haven’t actually published anything under that name yet. I’ll keep you posted when I do! (I plan to make a separate blog for “Layla Wier” at some point, but it’ll still be closely connected to this one; I plan to keep the connections between the two names quite obvious.)
It’s a branding thing, mostly. My genre fiction and comics will still be under my regular writing name; the Layla Wier name will be for the more mainstream stuff. Doing this feels very weird, very commercial, but I figure that if I don’t like it, I can always go back to using just the usual name (which has the added advantage of being my actual, legal name).
But it’s made me less inhibited about trying things that are really different for me. Basically, this summer, as well as working on edits to my novel (which I plan to start submitting to agents this winter), I’ve been writing romance and chick-lit, which are new things for me. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it or trying to hide it (good grief, I’ve published bestiality porn and amputee fetishism under my real name; what is this “shame” of which you speak? I think my family is used to me by now …). But since I’ve been actively submitting SF and fantasy stories to pro markets as “Layla Lawlor” and will be trying to get agented this winter, I figured that it made good sense to do as the pros do and use a different name for the romance and non-SFF in general. Like I said, if I find it too confusing or I just hate it, I can always stop doing it and roll everything under my real name again.
It’s also interesting to me that I’m finding myself writing romance these days, because I have never really been a romance reader myself. There was a time when I thought I disliked romance, but I realized after awhile that it wasn’t romance I didn’t like, it was most of the common tropes. I don’t really gravitate towards romance as a storytelling trope; I like romance plots wrapped up in a bigger plot, but I also like (in fact, often prefer) friendships and parent/child, brother/sister relationships as a reader (and TV viewer).
So … why am I writing romance all of a sudden? I think a lot of it is that I’ve become very interested in telling “people” stories lately, as opposed to “idea” stories. SFF is very plot/idea-oriented, and I like that, I do. Plot is (usually) easy for me. I have more plot than I know what to do with. And I like my plotty stories to be character-focused as well. But for me, doing in-depth emotional storylines is quite hard. It’s not something that I gravitate towards naturally.
Romance is pushing my buttons these days because it’s all about writing character interaction - there is an external plot, of sorts, but the story is mainly about people playing off each other. It’s heavily grounded in the tiny details of people’s lives. I’m definitely not saying SF/fantasy can’t be that way too (in fact, the best of it is) but I’m finding very fertile ground, creatively, in exploring this kind of small-details character interaction without having it wrapped up in an SFF plot. I have been really enjoying doing the research for real-world settings (a sheep farm in upstate New York; the lives of faculty in a small Midwestern college town; etc.) without going ahead and throwing some aliens or ghosts in there too.
I think the other thing that’s pushing my buttons about writing romance is that it’s one of the few genres that actively encourages and celebrates happy endings. One thing I’ve realized over the last few years is that one reason why I’m having so much trouble getting published is because I’m trying to write “to the market” rather than writing what I naturally tend to write. This hasn’t always been true of me (which I guess Raven’s Children and the early Kismet stuff makes obvious) but aside from a few years in my early 20s, generally speaking as both a reader and a writer, I gravitate towards fairly upbeat stories that end more-or-less happily, or at least on a note that’s more positive than bleak. Over the last couple of years, not really on purpose, I think I’ve ended up suppressing my natural tendency to write stories that are essentially optimistic, and trying to emulate what I find in most of the pro SFF markets - stories that are bleak, gritty and, for me, joyless to write. I’ve been writing stories that are geared to specific markets rather than writing stories I want to tell. No wonder I’m not selling anything.
But selling “Netcasters” this spring made me revise my strategy (which up to that point had been “get published by writing stories for specific markets”). “Netcasters” is a fun, upbeat story, an idea I loved and a story that was an absolute blast to write - and it’s the first of my short stories that I’ve managed to sell to a pro market. Shock! This made me stop beating the dead horse of “writing stuff to sell”, and start doing what I’ve intuitively known all along that I needed to do - just writing what I want to write, whether it’s bleak and gritty or cheerful and funny, whether it’s my usual kind of fiction or not, whether or not I think I can ever actually find a place to sell it. I had started doing the “focus on specific markets” thing a few years ago because I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere at all by writing whatever came into my head - I never finished anything, and it seemed like I needed more structure. Now … I don’t know. I think I’ve leveled up a bit, because finishing things is easier now, and so is spotting which of my various “must be written!” ideas I’m actually going to be able to finish. I suppose that the more you do this writing thing, the better you get at it. Who knew?
Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.
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