Charlene Teglia

I have been sandbagged by exciting ideas over the last couple of days. Sadly, the market for alien warriors and futuristic supersoldiers in romance is limited. My brain has gone so SF lately. Nuns and Huns was only the beginning. I even broke down and joined SFWA because I could see the handwriting on the wall. When all you want to write about are aliens and monsters and people with superpowers, you maybe belong in speculative fiction.

Honestly, I think I've gotten by in romance as long as I have only because I wasn't writing traditional romance; I wrote in the erotic niche market where futuristic supersoldiers and alien warriors and yes, even Nuns and Huns, fit right in. The real problem is that I've yet to find NY publisher who wants alien warriors and futuristic supersoldiers. Monsters are an easier sell. I haven't exactly exhausted the possibilities, though. If my brain wants to write this stuff, I have to go with it and find a way to make it work.

Why? Why can't I just do something smarter, more marketable? Um, because I can't. I've tried the "write this, it's what will sell" route, and I discovered something about myself in the process. I didn't fully understand it until I watched
Temple Gradin's TED talk, though.

I write the movies I see in my head.

Apparently this is not normal. Apparently most people do not think in pictures. (Lest you think this makes writing a book easy, sometimes I can see the scene perfectly and yet I cannot get the language right. So I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and cry and rewrite some more and beat my head against the wall and rewrite it again. Writing a book is hard work, no matter what your process is.)

What I've learned is that while I can create the right atmosphere to ask for a specific type of story and get the movie rolling when it doesn't happen spontaneously, it has to be an idea that is innately "my" kind of idea to begin with. If my initial reaction to a "you should write this" is "but I am not excited about that" or "who would want to read about that?" or "my God that's revolting", it's not my kind of idea. My kind of idea makes me go "ooooo. YEAH!" And the movie machine is off and running.

It takes excitement to get a story off the ground*, and if I don't find it exciting, interesting, a story I would want to read, writing it is going to be an enormous struggle. And since writing a book is hard to begin with, why set myself up for an impossible mission I won't even enjoy?

These are the things you learn through experience; what your process is and how it works, what you can and can't change about it, what kind of story is "your" kind of story and what kind you shouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, no matter how much money somebody might be willing to pay you to write it. And why you are going to find yourself gearing up to write about futuristic supersoldiers even though Everybody Knows they don't sell.

Maybe to write the ideas I love, I will have to go write another genre, like YA. Or even straight SF/F. This is not the end of the world. What would be the end of the world, or at least the end of my creative world, would be turning off the movie machine instead of being entranced by the amazing, wonderful fact that I have one and using it. 

Also, I am now gripped with the idea that somebody should be getting graphic novels and comic books into schools for autism-spectrum kids above the picture-book age. Because a kid who thinks in pictures will have an easier time reading if they can "see" the story too.

Meanwhile, I need to gently direct the movie making mechanism back to the current works so I can clear my schedule for things like spring break and summer break. Now that it knows I will write the SF stuff later, it'll cooperate.

*The flip side to this is that things can happen to kill the excitement when the story is in a vulnerable unfinished stage. I'm actually contemplating going back to writing everything on spec and selling afterward to keep this from happening.