A while back I wrote about writer’s block and the nifty nuggets of wisdom I receive every day by email from Advice to Writers.
I liked this statement from Joyce Carol Oates:
Writer’s block is a temporary paralysis caused by the conviction, on an unconscious level, that what the writer is attempting is in some way fraudulent, or mistaken, or self-destructive.
Here’s how I see my own writer’s block (all gone now! Hooray!) from Oates’ perspective.
When I first started writing about 12 years ago, I knew nothing about genres, not even enough to think about them one way or the other. I wrote what I wanted to – and my first and second novels were quickly bought by Kensington Publishers. They publish romance.
Well, my books certainly have romance in them, but for me, the focus was on the historical part. What was it like to be alive in this time and place and facing this or that historical crisis? And then I was labeled a romance writer and felt like Un Uh. But that was what got me published. So I dithered and wrote and fretted and wrote – I didn’t want to be a romance writer. But that’s what sold. In Oates’ words, I felt I was trying to write the wrong thing for me and it wasn’t working.
Well, I’m over that. I’ve now read hundreds of romances, some awful and some great, as in any genre. Those romances I admire taught me that a good story is a good story, good writing is good writing. Forget about labels. And I’m writing smoothly again – if you’ve ever been stuck, you know how painful it is and how wonderful it is to get past it. Now, I write what I want to write, historical novels with romance elements – that’s what my readers want from me and that’s what I am happy writing.
Gretchen Craig 