Always Be Learning

One of the most important things you can have as a writer is a measure of humility about your craft. No matter how many years you’ve been doing this, there’s always some area to improve, something to learn. This is not to say you shouldn’t be confident about what you write, but you should always be open about feedback and advice. One thing experience should give you is the ability to analyze that feedback and advice to recognize something that could improve your work.

Recently I heard a comment, and it changed both the book I’ve written and the one I’m working on. I was talking about the first book of the Jack Paris series (the occult detective series that’s my current WIP) with my wife. Now she’s a fan of witchy paranormal cozy mysteries, so not quite what I’m writing. And she was concerned that I wasn’t mentioning a love interest for the main character. At the time there really wasn’t one. There was a high school friend that I’m sure future fans of my work will ship with my protagonist, but no active romantic interest.

So, is that really a flaw? I’m not writing in the same UF subgenre that she reads, so what’s the problem? Well, she said something that raised alarm-bells for me. “Most people are in a relationship.”

In fact, if you include those that are between relationships or are looking for a relationship, you got most of humanity covered. I realized that not including some sort of relationship, past, current, or future, was implicitly saying things about my protagonist that I wasn’t intending to say. Not to say I couldn’t write that protagonist— there’s nothing wrong with ace protagonists— but there are problems doing so unintentionally. Your protagonist, especially in a noir setting, will probably be describing characters in a dissonant way at the very least. And there’s be even more dissonance if, in a future book, I ever decide to bring Jack and his high school friend together.

So, at the very least, I needed to address Jack’s relationship status.

So, by inserting a girlfriend into the book I addressed this problem and a few others. One, I think it helped the pacing. It gave me something substantive to do with Jack’s downtime. By making it a new relationship, it gave me opportunity to naturally reveal some of Jack’s character and backstory. It gave me a minor subplot. Overall, I think it improved the book, even though I am not writing paranormal romance.

Now that I have this new character, I’m weaving her into what I’ve written of book two. And I think it’s a major boost to the pacing. It’s breaking up the drumbeat of investigation, A to B to C to D, giving the reader spots to breathe.

Lesson, always consider feedback that might improve what you’re doing.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash