With each rejection, you should hopefully learn something about yourself. With this one, I’ve begun to look at why I’m not yet meeting success.
For me, I think my biggest hurdle right now is finding the right fit for my writing. From the feedback I have gotten from my R&R and my contest entry, basically I am seeing responses that say I’ve got a solid, engaging writing style, but perhaps not the basics of the genre expectations.
Which, for me, makes sense. While I have always wanted to be a writer, I have not always been a romance reader. In fact, I didn’t begin to read romance until halfway through college, and for a very long time after that I only read one romance author.
In a weird way, it’s almost like having the opposite problem of many romance writers I know. Many of them started as readers and fell so in love with the books, they turned to writing. I fell in love with writing, period. When I read romance for the first time I just realized that is the genre that best fit my writing–not the other way around.
This is problematic because most of my story ideas were not formed with the idea of the genre of romance. They were merely formed as, this is the story I would like to tell. While I think this is a good way to start, at some point it does have to become and how does it fit into the romance story arc? And if it doesn’t fit, is it compelling enough to make the lack unimportant?
2010 was the first year I began to seriously look at publishing, seriously look at what publishers are looking for and what makes a good, publishable story. I’m hard on myself because I know I’m a good writer, but I need to remember I’m still a romance newbie.
Nicole Helm 