It’s Never Too Late To Change Genres
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO CHANGE GENRES
(Even after you’ve written the book.)
Seeing the book of your dreams (the one with your name splashed across the cover) become a reality can take many paths. And years. And a lot of missteps and giant leaps of faith along the way. But finally discovering the kind of stories you love to write, whether anyone wants to read them or not, will set your heart free.
I began writing romance BC (Before Computer) on an old IBM Selectric typewriter while my kids were at school, asleep, or watching a battered VHS of The Empire Strikes Back over and over again. This may explain why Harrison Ford was always my hero of choice in those days. I knew I wanted to write romance, but I didn’t have a plan. Should I try writing a 50K word girl-meets-boy-loses-boy-gets boy back for Harlequin? Or attempt to create something more substantial, like one of those long, windswept historical romances with some version of Fabio on the slightly embarrassing cover.
I’d never actually read very many of those novels—my taste ran more to Agatha Christie, Mary Stewart, and Daphne Du Maurier (I was named after her book, Rebecca, after all)—so I’m not sure why I kept cranking out romances when the books I chose to read were not very romantic. But crank them out, I did.
Looking back, I don’t think I gave myself enough credit. I didn’t believe I had the smarts to pull off a “serious” book. Women’s fiction wasn’t the driving force it is now, and I thought writing a 150-page category romance would be an easy, surefire way to get published. I was naïve about the easy part. Writing a category romance is anything but easy. I heard a best-selling author say once that writing a Harlequin romance was like staging Romeo and Juliet in a phone booth. I admire anyone who can do it, and do it well. It takes finesse. It takes loving the genre. It takes a special skill set I do not, nor will ever have.
After I discovered books by J. D. Robb, Sandra Brown, and Jayne Ann Krentz, I thought, that’s it! Romantic suspense is the genre for me! And it was. Mostly. Writing the mystery part happily kept my seat in the chair day after day, but making the romance believable and sexy proved to be a struggle. I kept throwing in one-liners at inappropriate times and laughing at the descriptions of body parts that sounded ridiculously lame to me. (You try coming up with a new word for the hero’s…well, you get the idea.) I could have let the lovemaking take place offstage, as many authors do, but it didn’t seem fair to the reader.
Readers have expectations when they buy a book. I didn’t want to let them down. And so, I trudged on, writing what I almost loved. I eventually got a book deal, and then another. I was pretty proud of those books. They got some decent reviews and people seemed to like them, but I had begun to lose interest.
The romantic suspense genre has an unwritten rule: the romance from first blush to happily-ever-after typically takes up half of the book’s real estate, while the mystery dominates the rest. Spending weeks working on love scenes I knew I wasn’t very good at writing began to feel like a chore. I liked giving my protagonist someone to love—I still do—but I enjoyed writing about the irresistible attraction between two people, usually against their better judgment, and the sparks zinging back and forth as fast as the witty repartee. But what I loved most was creating a giant puzzle for the heroine to solve and a few daring plot points to brave without getting herself killed.
By this time, I was devouring books by Ann Cleeves, Sherry Harris, and Sara Rosett. The cozy mystery market suddenly seemed like a good fit—charming settings, eccentric characters, suspects crawling out of the woodwork, clues, family secrets, and occasionally, even a romantic interest or two. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get locked into a series, although I’m not ruling that out for future books. I can see the allure of not having to start from scratch each time you tell a story, and readers do love to get caught up in the ongoing lives of characters they love. I do it myself.
I decided to salvage an old romantic suspense manuscript I had written that I wasn’t crazy about. I loved the plot, but the main relationship seemed forced. The dynamics between the heroine and hero were still integral to the plot, and since the heroine counted on the hero (one of the six suspects) to help her solve the mystery, I kept their blossoming romance intact but relegated it to the back burner. I discarded the hero’s point of view entirely and filtered the important information back through the heroine’s eyes. I switched her point of view to first person, which was something I’d always wanted to try, and never looked back.
A single point of view doesn’t have to be written in first person, but since I was combining a lot of pertinent information into one person’s perspective, it helped simplify things in my head.
The result is The House on Crow Mountain, a cozy-ish small-town southern mystery with quirky characters, some juicy family secrets, a bit of suspense, a lot of humor, a little romance, and no sex. I’ve never been happier.
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Rebecca lives with her husband and a dog named Wilbur in the beautiful misty mountains of East Tennessee, where the people are charming, soulful, and just a little bit crazy. She’s been everything from a tax collector to a stay-at-home-mom to an award-winning professional actress and director. She loves to travel the world (when there’s not a pandemic), go to the Outer Banks for her ocean fix, watch British murder mysteries, and make her day complete by answering the Final Jeopardy! question. Her Southern roots and the affectionate appreciation she has for the rural towns she lives near inspire the settings and characters she writes about.
Twitter: @rbeccaleesmith
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rebecca.l.smith.18
THE HOUSE ON CROW MOUNTAIN
When her aunt suffers a stroke, New York portrait artist Emory Austen returns home to the North Carolina mountains to mend fences and deal with the guilt over her husband’s senseless death. But that won’t be as easy as she hoped. Someone in the quirky little town doesn’t like Emory. Is it the sexy architect who needs the Austen land to redeem himself? The untrustworthy matriarch? The grudge-bearing local bad boy? Or the teenage bombshell who has raised snooping to an art form?
Even the local evangelist has something to hide. Who wrote the cryptic note warning her to “Give it back or you’ll be dead? And what is ‘it’? As the clues pile up and secrets are exposed, Emory must discover what her family has that someone would kill for.
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