Commit: Go Big Or Go Home

I was working through some edits with one of my clients this weekend and this concept came up. It was about an element she was using in her series she was working on. I don't want to go into too much detail on the concept here but, we were doing something kind of unique. In any case, in her first book of the series, she used a bit of this concept, enough that made it important enough to the storyline. Now, here is the kicker. When we hit the second book, that concept was barely noticeable which was reading amazing without it. Ugh.

This is when I got thinking. What do we do? We have two options now: 1) eliminate the concept in the first book; or 2) add the concept in the second? Technically, either way works... maybe????? Or does an option ruin one of the books?????

When it comes to doing something unique in your stories, you have to fully commit to it. You have to decide to, as the title of the blog says, Go Big Or Go Home. You cannot half-way do things. Let me give you a couple of examples where I see this happening a lot.

Authors who try multicultural romances. I think these are great stories. This is a chance to truly dig into the cultural experience. The problem, however, is that they don't Go Big Or Go Home. Just having the two characters with different skin colors is not a multicultural romance. Sorry, it isn't. First of all, do not get me started on the concept of culture here. My wife, who is a communication instruction who specializes in this will get on my be all over this blog, but culture is more than skin color. It goes MUCH deeper. These stories have to really have culture literally being a character in the story. 

Think of it this way. While I loved the TV version of Bridgerton, changing the ethnicity of the characters did nothing to change the storyline of the story. 

It did not suddenly make this a multicultural story. It is still the same Julia Quinn novel.

Does that make sense?

Authors who want to write "hot steamy stories". I get this all of the time from authors who send queries and tell me that they know that hot steamy stories are the new "in thing" so they have written one. But do they? No. They often take two approaches. They either spend the entire novel writing nothing but erotica and what they think is hot writing (which ends up as nothing more as graphic sex scenes with no plot), OR, they write everyday stories and then, in the middle of the story, write one scene that is very out of place with a hot scene, which is often writing the same thing that previous author did, but just one time. 

Not what we are talking about.

Those hot steamy stories are the ones where the characters are hot and steamy through the whole thing but guess what? It is not about the graphic sex. It is not about how many times we can use graphic words and descriptions. If you want to write these stories, GO BIG OR GO HOME. Really tell the romance and make it true. 

Authors who want to write time travel. Ugh...I am going to leave it with this one. Again, GO BIG OR GO HOME. These stories have to be just like those multicultural stories. Remember how culture had to be a character? Well guess what? The time travel has to be as well? Just transplanting your heroine in the Regency period and calling it quits is not time travel. It is now a historical. If you think about Outlander, Claire and Jaime are constantly having to deal with the issue of knowing too much about the future, about what Claire knows about how to get back, about what if she goes back and leaves Jaime, about the fact that her kids can go back and leave her family.... the list is endless. Time matters. It IS a character. This is not just a historical. 

Get the idea?