Is Your Writing What You Think It Is?

I have talked about this before but I thought it would be a great time to bring this up again. For a lot of authors, the story they think they are writing is not really what they are writing. The problem here is, if you are aiming in the wrong direction with your writing you will run into a lot of problems. You will start to add things that don't fit with the genre, use techniques that are not in alignment, and finally, you may end up submitting the story to the wrong people and then wonder why you are getting rejected.

Now, there are several issues here, and all of this comes down to improving your education of the business and writing. Yes this does mean that it will be another issue of taking the time to learn this. for some authors, this is an issue of writing with blinders on. The author is so focused on wanting to write one style of book, that they are not seeing what they are really writing. For others, they simply do not fully understand what the genre requires.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Some writers want to write single title stories. While this is a great goal, if your voice is something that fits more of a category line, then there will be issues. For these writers, they seem to believe that by simply adding more words to the story, it will now be what the editors or agents are looking for - WRONG.

Here at Greyhaus, I get a lot of writers (and yes, most are men) who submit stories they feel are romance. What they are really writing, however, is nothing more than a fiction story that happens to have a character who is married or who has a sexual relationship. In this case, we have someone who really has not taken the time to learn and understand the genre. Simply adding something to a story such as people falling in love, or sex, does not make something a romance.

Let's look at an example from the Harlequin line - The Medical line. These are stories where the setting, characters and romance are all focused around a medical setting (obvious). But, just making the hero or heroine a doctor, or putting the story in a hospital, does not make the story a romance.

It is crucial that authors take the time to really study and understand the genre they are either writing, or wishing to write. Doing so will insure much more success in the long run.