Successful authors mystify us with how easy writing seems to come to them. Some people believe people are born with the skill to write or they’re not. However, writing is a skill that can be learned. Even the best writers have improved from when they started.  Nearly every writer I talk to shares the same tips and hacks for improving as a writer. Here are a few of them:

1. Write Regularly

You don’t have to write every day, but it’s easier to stay in the flow of your work and in the habit of writing if you do. I write every day if I’m working on a book unless it’s a holiday, birthday, or a family gathering. If you can’t write every day, write as frequently and regularly as possible.

2. Read Regularly

Writers are readers. Read a variety of books to expose yourself to different styles of writing. Most writers avoid reading in the genre they’re writing in as they’re writing. However, when you’re not writing, you should absolutely read in your genre so you can stay up-to-date on the latest trends. Consider keeping a reading journal with quotes, your impressions, and other observations you make that can help you in your writing. I often write words used in situations I hadn’t considered using them in. For example, the word shimmer in a love scene.

3. Don’t Edit as You Write

Nothing slows down the creative writing process faster than switching to editor mode. It can also make you doubt your abilities.

I’m convinced writing and editing use different sides of the brain and can’t work simultaneously. You might think you can in the same way you think you can multitask. The truth is, you’re doing one or the other.

When you write, focus on getting all the ideas in your head on the paper, regardless of the quality of writing, spelling errors, missing punctuation, and everything else that can be wrong. When you’re done writing, then you can revise.

4. Accept that First Drafts Suck

No one who makes a living writing publishes a first draft. I saw a Facebook Live with Nora Roberts in which she indicated she had four to six revisions before her books were published. The good news is that the more you write and get critiqued, the better the first drafts get, but they’re still not publishing quality.

Just accept that your first draft will be messy and ugly. It will have weak words, passive voice, clichés and all the stuff you’re told not to use. But the first draft isn’t the place to worry about them. Revision is.

5. Get Feedback

The more you do something, the better you get at it. But in writing, you need to know what areas you’re weak in and how to strengthen your prose. So writing regularly and getting critique are crucial to improvement. Critique and editing have vastly improved my writing. Hands down, they are the top two reasons I get paid to write now. I highly recommend joining a critique group. If you can’t find one and would be interested in one through Write with Harte, let me know.

Getting critique can be hard. You need to listen for the constructive criticisms and tips, and avoid feeling like your book is being attacked. But if you pay attention, you’ll learn easy ways to instantly improve your writing. Some of these tips you’ll internalize and use them as you write your draft. Others you’ll use when you revise. Check out Write With Harte’s post on 7 Tips to Dealing with Critique Feedback

Intimacy is often used as a euphemism for sex, but intimacy isn’t just about sex. Whether your book is steamy or sweet, intimacy lets readers know the couple have something special with each other.

Read text version below video:

What is intimacy?

There are six types of intimacy, which offer creative opportunities for writers when developing a romance.

1. Emotional Intimacy:

At some point in your novel, your characters need to have emotional intimacy. While this isn’t limited to romantic relationships, in the romance novel, it shows the deep feelings of trust, respect, and love binding our characters together. They feel safe to share their deepest desires, secrets, fears—their deepest selves. It’s usually expressed through communication.

2. Intellectual Intimacy:

This involves the level of comfort in sharing of opinions and ideas, even if they differ from their partners. In a romance, it would be shown by the characters feeling free to think for themselves, and believe their opinions and beliefs are valued, even if they’re different.

3. Creative Intimacy:

This involves feeling comfortable in expressing passions and interests. They don’t have to be shared passions or interests, but each person in the couple needs to feel safe to express their creative side.

4. Experiential Intimacy:

This all about shared experiences that connect people. It can be created through working together, or simply living life with another person (family, roommate, friends, etc) and having shared memories. The inside joke comes from experiential intimacy.

5. Spiritual Intimacy:

While this could include religious connection, it goes beyond that to shared values and beliefs. This is common in sweet romances. However, differing values or beliefs can make for conflict in any type of romance.

6. Physical Intimacy:

You might think this is sex, and while it could be, that’s not all it includes. Holding hands, hugging, cuddling…any loving touch is physical intimacy. Both steamy and sweet romance can have physical intimacy. The difference is that steamy will include sensuality and sex, whereas sweet romance focuses on the emotional connection of a touch, not the sensual.

What I like about the above types of intimacy is that by including some of them in my romance, I can increase believability in my characters’ coming together. Sex isn’t love, so they have to have other opportunities to bond emotionally as well. In fact, sweet romances focus highly on these other forms of intimacy (experience, spiritual, intellectual), but so too should romance with physical intimacy.

By providing other opportunities for intimacy, either through shared experiences, values and beliefs, or any of the other forms of intimacy, you deepen their connection.

The other day, a writer I follow on Facebook was gushing over a book on how to use universal fantasy to sell a book. Interestingly, the next morning, my ghostwriting client requested that our next book use universal fantasy concepts. At that point, I bought the book, 7 Figure Fiction: How to Use Universal Fantasy to Sell Your Books to Anyone by T. Taylor, and spent the next few hours reading it and taking notes.

T. Taylor has created a book that provides an interesting way to conceptualize what draws readers into a book. The ability to pull readers into your story is especially important for romance writers in which having readers feel connected to characters and go on the emotional roller coaster ride that is involved when falling in love is our job.

What is universal fantasy?

Taylor immediately points out that universal fantasy is not a trope. She explains that a trope is what your story is, whereas universal fantasy is why it is good. It’s why readers feel things and connect with your books. She refers to it as “butter,” which is the ingredient that makes food tasty, rich, and more satiating.

Later in the blurb portion of the book, she suggests readers pay attention to parts of a blurb that spark something inside that makes them imagine themselves in the same situation as the character. That is the real essence of universal fantasy. 

The best way for me to understand and describe universal fantasy is like the difference between regular POV and deep POV. One is surface level storytelling, whereas the second immerses readers into the story. Here, tropes are regular themes readers enjoy while universal fantasy taps into deeper desires, wishes, and fantasies that pull the reader into the story.

Note that in this case, using the word “fantasy” isn’t just about romantic or sexual fantasies. It refers to all the primal, deep-seated desires people have, such as feeling secure, the feeling of belonging, the desire to overcome, the need for excitement, etc. In romance, some of these wishes can be romantic or sexual fantasies such as the sexy billionaire obsessed with the plain Jane or the idea of destined love. But it can be more than that as well.

Another point she makes is that these fantasies are not necessarily things we want to experience in real life. Take Fifty Shades of Gray, for example. If Christian Gray lived in a trailer, he’d be seen as abusive and disturbed. But for some readers, the book taps into universal fantasies that involve being swept up by a powerful, rich, broody, wounded man, who exerts his power, but in the end falls for the one and only woman whose love can save him. It’s dumb in real life, but in the make-believe world, it taps into secret fantasies.

Examples of universal fantasies include:

• Swept away from a boring life to a life of luxury
• The bully who really loves you
• Most popular guy chooses you
• Wounded character
• The makeover
• True love match
• Badass woman
• Comebacks

There are more, but you get the idea. These are the themes or story archetypes that tug at readers’ heartstrings.

How to Write Universal Fantasy into Your Novel

The good news is that you probably already use universal fantasy in your stories even if you haven’t consciously decided to use it. If you’re using a trope, you probably are including a universal fantasy because tropes tap into universal fantasies.

In her book, Taylor illustrates the concept of universal fantasy using fairytales such as Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella, highlighting the universal fantasy archetypes such as being plucked from a dull life into one of riches. From these examples, it is easier to get a sense of what universal fantasy is. However, it’s more difficult to figure out how to translate this concept into executable writing craft. Simply deciding that you’re going to use a universal concept such as a genuine love match doesn’t mean that it’s going to resonate with your readers.

Taylor offers advice to use universal fantasy in your plotting, blurbs, and even your ads. I think she is spot on to recommend tapping into these archetypes in your writing and in your marketing. After all, you have to reach readers emotionally to get them to buy.

The one place I felt the book fell short was in explaining how to write in a way that taps into universal fantasies. Simply listing the universal fantasies you want in your plot, chapters, and scenes doesn’t make them happen. How do you string words together that reach a reader’s desires?

Here are my tips to writing universal fantasy:

1. Use Taylor’s advice to make conscious choices about the universal fantasies you’re using in the book plot, as well as by chapter and scene. Even if you’re a pantster, you can determine the universal fantasy you’re tapping into when you sit down to write. Again, you probably already use a universal fantasy, but by being conscience about what you’re trying to tap into gives you the focus you need to write in a way that reaches readers.

2. Understand what it is about the universal fantasy that resonates with readers. Why do some reader, like me, love second chance books? The second chance trope taps into a universal theme of one true destined love. What do readers love about that? That’s what you’re trying to tap into when you’re writing a romance.

3. Use deep POV, which gives readers an overall immersive experience. This includes avoiding unnecessary words, reducing dialogue tags, showing not telling, and limiting all experiences (thoughts, feelings, etc) to the POV character.

4. Use sensory details, especially emotional ones. If you writing in deep POV, you’re already using sensory details, but I want to highlight it because you reach readers’ deep-seated fantasies through emotion. This is where show not tell is crucial. Readers need to feel everything a character is going through: the yearning, the anguish, the ache, the bliss, the hope etc. Telling the reader that the character is heartbroken isn’t the same as writing about the pain of heartbreak. Writing with sensory detail so that readers can envision what is going on and feel all the feels is where universal fantasy exists.

What are your thoughts on universal fantasy?

If you’ve been spending any amount of time reading blogs or in writing groups, no doubt you’ve heard of National Novel Writing Month, more affectionately called, Nanowrimo. Nanowrimo first started in November 1999 with the challenge to write 50,000 in 30 days. Since then, writers around the world use October to plan, and on November 1st, begin the daunting task of writing a novel.

Over the years, many Nanowrimo books have become bestsellers, including Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell, Wool by Hugh Howey, and Cinder, Scarlet and Cress by Marissa Meyer (yes, all 3 were written during a single Nanowrimo). Of course, having a six-figure traditional publishing deal isn’t the only marker or success. There are countless more Nanowrimo books that are published, many of which sell well for their authors.

In 2011, Nanowrimo launched Camp Nanowrimo as an extension of the November Nanowrimo. Two camps are held each year; one in April and one in July. The BIG difference between November Nanowrimo and Camp Nanowrimo is that in November, the goal is to write 50,000 words of a new, not ever started, book, whereas, in April and July, you can choose your own project. That means you can write:

• A novella
• A short story
• Poetry
• A play or screenplay
• Revise a manuscript
• Or, my favorite use of Camp Nanowrimo, finish something already started

You can set your own goals whether that’s to write 100 words or 100,000 words.

In essence, Camp Nanowrimo is a challenge designed by you to help you achieve whatever writing goal you have now.

For 2021, I plan to finish Come to Me, book four in the Southern Heat series that was supposed to be done in June. I have many words to write and I’ll be out of town for part of the month, but I’m determined to get back on track with my writing, and what better way to do that than with a challenge.

If you’d like to join me, or just support me, you can do so through the Discussion Forum in the Accountability Group.