Romance Writing Mistakes

2. Fear of Failure

This is closely related to mistake No. 1, but tends to manifest in the form of procrastination. Forget your sock drawer. What we're talking about here is when everything from your room/apartment/home to your email inbox and your Netflix watch-list has to be tidied up before you can even think about sitting down to write. If this is the 200th book on writing you've read in the last month, you know exactly what I'm talking about. 

Yes. I see you.

Procrastination isn't laziness. Never mistake it for that. The very fact you've managed to get fifty to a hundred other things done is all the evidence you need. Procrastination is avoidance, and deep down, we all know the reason we're avoiding writing is because we're scared.

Scared the story sucks. Scared our writing sucks. Scared the genius plot we dreamed up has been done a thousand times before. Scared no-one will ever read or buy the book no matter how hard we've worked on it and any reviews will rip it to shreds. Scared the one book we sold will be the only one we ever sell. Scared the next book won't be as good as the last. Add your fear of choice here, then allow me to banish some of those demons. 

Take a deep breath.

That instruction isn't because what I have to say is going be tough to hear. It's because the first thing you need to do is calm down and think this through logically. 

Fear is about control.

The only things you can control are the story and your writing. Everything else is out of your hands. You can, however, improve the odds of success. Telling the best possible story in your own unique voice is the first, and most important, step. It involves sitting down to write. There's no way to avoid that. When it's finished and you've edited it to the absolute best of your ability, your level of control diminishes. You can do all the necessary research to decide where to pitch it or publish it. You can even tweak it to fit in somewhere. You can do everything possible in the way of a synopsis or a great cover and an attention-grabbing blurb, and pimping it on Social Media. But you can't force people to read it and I guarantee you, not everyone who does read it will love it. What's more, some of the people who do love it will never tell you. The only thing they'll do is read your next story and hopefully the one after that, and the one after that.

Control what you can and let go of everything else.

You may be one of those people who loves tidying and can't settle until their writing space is organized and spotlessly clean. In that case, A/ Can you come to my house? and B/ That's absolutely fine. Again, it's about what works best for you. But part of what works for you must be an understanding of why you do things a certain way. So, if you're on your hands and knees scrubbing the floor tiles with a toothbrush rather than writing the story you can't get out of your head, ask yourself why you are procrastinating, and then decide what to do about it.

(More on the stories that have been told a thousand times later!)