Amanda T. Fox

            Being a writer and author comes with its own set of hardships, but the one hardship that often gets overlooked is the anxiety that can come from writing a book, especially that first one. Writing Frosty Nights, my first full-length novel, came with fears I had no idea I would have. Suddenly, I found myself feeling stuck with writer’s block simply because I wanted to write that scene down, but I didn’t want to risk putting off my readers by being too soft or going too hard. It took longer than that to write my Rogue series, because as where Frosty Nights was a lighter, more holiday-oriented book, I went hard for my rogues, going for a darker romance.

            It took a while before I realized that writing a book geared towards my readers wasn’t the way to go. Writing for others, with what we think they want, makes it difficult to focus on how we want the stories to go, and let’s face it, it’s our story. So, when we start censoring ourselves for our readers, the odds of being happy with our novels is slim, and if we don’t like our books, how can we expect our readers to?

            The way I pushed through it was a mixture of a couple of things. For one, I read a few books from an author I love who writes in the dark romantic fantasy and paranormal romance genres. She wasn’t afraid to go as dark and twisted as she wanted to with the books she wrote, and she is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Reading her books and seeing her successes gave me the confidence to know that even if I go a bit darker in my books, there is an audience out there who will enjoy it.

            Another way that I combatted my anxiety over what to write is to get in the mindset that when I’m in the process of writing the story, no one else can read it. Not my husband, not my kids, my friends, unknown readers, no one. It’s just me and my stories, and whatever happens, happens. Once I got that through my head, it became easier to let the story flow, and often, what I thought would be going too far in my books really wasn’t as bad as I had originally thought.

            These stories, while being created, are meant to be a safe place where anything can happen. It’s where we let our imaginations run wild, and when we suddenly try to restrict that creativity into the box of “what do the readers want to happen”, we often end up stuck without a story to tell. As is so often said, it’s far more important to write the story that you would want to read than it is to try to write based on what we think our audience wants. We, the writers, are the only ones who know how the stories go, so don’t let anxiety over what you want to write stop you from writing the story that you want to create.

            You’ve got this!

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