Changing Gears In Writing

When novelists change genres, it’s a bit like shifting gears. At least that was my experience. I couldn’t put the pedal to the metal and ram straight from first into fourth.

I’m a lifelong reader and remember the first time an author changed lanes on me. I have always turned to romance novels when I was in a certain type of sad mood. I knew romance guaranteed a happy ending, and that day I needed one. The book I read was by a popular romance novelist. As the story went on I was amazed at how far she strung out the dark moment, when all hope seems lost. I couldn’t see a way to the happily ever after.

Turns out there wasn’t one. In the end, the heroine died. I was indignant. How could the author betray her readers that way? Easy. This author had stopped writing romance and had moved into women’s fiction. The book I’d read was this author’s clear signal that she was leaving romance for something new.

I was a writer too, still no books published, but I’d collected dozens of bylines from magazines and anthologies. Because I read so widely (romance, historical, memoir, women’s fiction, chick lit, literary fiction, poetry, biography) I realized that I probably wouldn’t be a romance novelist forever. Hadn’t I already gone all over the map with published confessional poems, book reviews, literary short stories, interviews and essays?

Like most authors seeking a book deal, I knew all about branding, and how authors are pressured to stay in their lane or risk losing readers. After I was published, I became the “romance” writer even when I was writing women’s fiction with themes like drug addiction and divorce. Didn’t matter. At book fairs and conferences, I was the “romance” author of the event.

I was lucky to land a publisher unfazed by my segues. When I signed my first contract, they only published romance. Later they started a mystery imprint. I had a firm grasp of the traditional rules of romance (no cheating, no divorce, keep the couple together on the page but apart romantically as long as possible) but my editors didn’t fuss when I began to write women’s fiction plots, with more going on than falling in and out and back in love again. From my first novel, there’s always been a little mystery.

By book four, I pushed that envelop into mystery with a fully developed murder subplot.  Book five was a flat-out cozy mystery, complete with amateur sleuth. When I began writing book six, my current release, I was determined it would be a  gritty crime novel and not include a hint of romance. I set my novel in Detroit instead of the sunny beach town of my last several books. My main character has a traumatic backstory, one that owes much to my similarly rough start in the world.  She’s left her cute little tourist town in northern Michigan, headed south to the big city. I’ve always loved fish out of water stories and Lily White in Detroit is that.

Another goal at the outset was to develop a complex psychological thriller of the type I enjoy reading. My bad guy is really bad. What he doesn’t know is Lily has experience with really bad guys. I wanted to make her stronger than she’d been before, determined that by the end of her arc, Lily White would fix herself.

Part of Lily’s backstory is her short but notorious (she goes viral on YouTube) career as a videographer. When she moves to Detroit, she still loves filming, so she trains as a private eye. In the course of her workday, she films insurance fraud cases and develops a knack for finding the occasional missing person.  The problem starts when she takes a case because she knows it will require plenty of filming. That case turns sideways when she unwittingly films a murder.

Lily speaks to police detective Derrick Paxton at the scene of the crime. He’s black, and Lily is as white as her name implies. I was really pleased with that, convinced I’d escaped any chance of romance because I was not a good enough writer to pull off an interracial romance.

Then my writing group read the pages with Lily and Paxton and because they know me assumed the two were going to get together at some point in the story. When I said that was not going to happen, my friends (and perhaps my characters as well) chuckled good-naturedly. Lily and Paxton clicked. They really liked each other, right from the start. I gave myself the writing pep talk about reaching higher than you think you can go.

When I finished with Lily and Paxton I had a full on crime novel. Even my publisher decided to finally place my book under their mystery imprint.

In my long and winding writing career, I’ve found it’s best to go where the writing wants to take me. Usually, this is somewhere far away from my comfort zone. Following an unfamiliar road is a thrilling thing. It’s also scary, particularly if you have an established brand and loyal readers.

Remember the famous romance writer who killed off her heroine? After I got over my initial pique, I continued reading her books. In fact, I’ve read every book she’s written after the one that broke my heart. Her books just keep getting better.

—

Cynthia Harrison has published ten books, most of them with The Wild Rose Press. Her current release (8/15/18) is the crime novel, Lily White in Detroit.

Find out more about her on her website  www.cynthiaharrison.com.

Follow her on Twitter @CynthiaHarriso1.

LILY WHITE IN DETROIT, Cynthia Harrison

Private investigator Lily White has a client with a faulty moral compass. When the client is arrested for murdering his wife and her alleged lover, Lily follows her intuition and her own leads. If she’s wrong, she’ll at least know she did her job. Detroit police detective Derrick Paxton remembers Lily from another case.

He understands she suffers from PTSD and thinks her judgment is impaired. He goes after her client and the evidence he needs to close the case. When Lily is kidnapped, the case takes an unexpected turn. In a sometimes racially divided city, a black cop and a white PI work together to peel back every layer to find the truth. What they find leads them to each other, but do they have enough to bring the true criminals to justice?

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, How To and Tips