Why I Write: Diana Lloyd

When people hear that I’m a writer, they all ask the same question. A variation of why/how do you write?

I will answer, “I write because I have to,” and “One word at a time.” Those answers are the simplest form of the truth and yet still meaningless to someone who’s never felt the urge to fill a blank page with words.

My writing comes from a desire to create, live in, and enjoy a world outside the realm of the limited opportunities of my existence. Writing is my way of working around the old conundrum that while talent is tin, opportunity is gold. Writing creates opportunity. Opportunity to discover, learn, research and investigate things that were otherwise beyond my reach both physically and economically.

Reading is essential to writing. Reading is mining tin and storing up the raw material to later make art. I started as a reader. And I read everything; cookbooks, dictionaries, instruction manuals. I consumed words as if I had a literary tapeworm. Somewhere between my Vampire Lestat phase and my all things Stephen King phase, I started reading biographies. I borrowed them from the library or bought them for a quarter at rummage sales and read them to learn about other lives, other ways of being. Biographies led me to history and history led me down the path to historical romance. I can hear people sputtering now, but… but… Romance?

I was born into the sort of large, poor, small-town family that rarely gets noticed for anything other than their run-down house or shabby clothes. Like my siblings, I started working while still in high school. I typed up forms at one job before walking down the road to flip burgers at the other job. I cleaned bathrooms, filed thousands of pieces of paper, answered phones, and schlepped around town selling products at home parties. I had to work to find the magic alchemy that would turn what little tin I had into gold.

I went out into the world to greedily collect experiences while reading about lives much more glamorous than mine. I took college classes as I could afford them. When the children were small, my husband worked during the day while I worked at night because we couldn’t afford child care. As jobs, marriage, and then children consumed more and more of my time I turned to free and lower-cost online self-guided learning. I was sleep-deprived, but I never once lost my love for the written word and my conviction that I was a writer.

I remember stumbling home from work on the day I got a lay-off notice from the best job I ever had, crying and thinking I’d never make that much money or have health benefits ever again. I was lucky to have a husband, but so many of the other women who left the auto plant that day were not. I couldn’t help but think that we’d just become Jane Austen characters, suddenly completely dependent upon having a man with means in our lives. I stopped and gathered up the mail before walking in the house and that day it included one of those shopper’s circulars that usually gets thrown in the trash after the good coupons are clipped out. Except, this time, having nothing better to do, I read it. A notice about the meeting of a local writer’s group caught my attention and I decided I was going to attend.

On the day of the meeting, I had enough money to either pay for my lunch or pay for the club dues if they demanded them on the spot, but I didn’t have enough to do both. I worried I wasn’t dressed nicely enough, I worried that they’d laugh at me. I went in anyway. At the end of the meeting each person read a page or two of their current work. When my turn came I took the folded sheets from my purse, the scraps from where I pulled them out of the spiral notebook that used to sit on my desk at work littered the table like confetti as I read. Writing was no longer just the secret project hiding in a box under the bed, now it was real.

That little group was a chapter of Romance Writers of America. Joining that group made all the difference in how much opportunity gold I was exposed to.

My reading tastes have changed over the years but historical romance will always hold a place in my heart. Stories of women with little autonomy, straining against rules put in place to keep them firmly within their social class and butting their heads against barriers constructed to keep them low and small, will always call to me. The characters in these books have to be quick and clever to overcome, survive and thrive. I read those stories for the triumph and satisfaction of a happy ending. And that’s exactly why I write them.

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Diana Lloyd, writer of words, mother of gingers, is a member of Romance Writers of America and their online chapter, Hearts Through History. Diana was a 2017 RWA Golden Heart contest finalist in the Historical Romance category. Her debut novel, HOW TO TRAIN YOUR BARON, the first book in the “What happens in the Ballroom” series, will be published by Entangled in July 2018. Connect with Diana on twitter @DianaLloydBooks or at www.diana-lloyd.com

About HOW TO TRAIN YOUR BARON

When Elsinore Cosgrove escapes a ballroom in search of adventure, she has no idea it will lead to a hasty marriage. The youngest daughter of a duke, all she wants is to make her own choices. Now she’s engaged to an infuriating, handsome Scottish baron who doesn’t even know her name! Using all her feminine wiles, along with advice gleaned from a training guide for hunting hounds, Elsinore is determined to mold her baron into the husband she wants.

Quin Graham is a man with many secrets. If another scandal can be avoided with a sham marriage, so be it. Only his fiancée isn’t at all what he’s expecting, and the clumsy, curious, and clever Elsinore refuses to be set aside. For reasons he’s unwilling to explain, the last thing Quin needs is to fall for his wife.

Tags: featuted, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers