*Spoiler alert. None of the epiphanies happened at midnight, I just thought it was a cool title.*
It’s time for a confession: I have been struggling hard with the first draft of Trouble With the Truth (my 2024 release and the third book in the Penn Warren University series). Man, I thought I struggled with What Kind of Fool, but it has been nothing compared to the heartache TWTT is giving me.
This time last year, I think I was about halfway through the draft of WKOF (so about 30k words) and I haven’t even hit 15k for TWTT. The process has been a total slog. It was supposed to be my NaNo project back in November, but I think I only managed about 3,000 words, which was a slow start and a slow month. I definitely know what happened. My son and I both got sick at the beginning of the month (and him with the flu and croup) so that sucked away about about two weeks. Buh-bye November.
Then we had all the winter holidays and darkness of December and then January rolls around and I am just lost in blah-ness. Maybe it’s seasonal depression. Maybe it’s just the unending pressures of work and parenting and just existing in the world today.
Whatever the underlying cause, I was stuck on Trouble. (I did manage to ferry some energy into a different project, but more on that later.)
Last week, in an effort to do literally anything to break myself out of this writer’s block, I ended up ordering about five new craft books/writer’s resources, LOL. That shopping dopamine hits hard, y’all.
What did I get?
The Writer’s Block, which is the shape of a literal block and includes over 700 ideas and prompts to inspire your writing.
The Artist’s Way Workbook, which is a companion workbook to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while, but alas, it hasn’t happened yet.
AND T. Taylor’s 7 Figure Fiction bundle, which includes 7 Figure Fiction, The Universal Fantasy List for romance, and The Official Butter Workbook.
I blew through 7FF and then set immediately to reading the UF lists for romance…and I tell ya…MIND BLOWN.
If you’re not familiar with Universal Fantasy, it’s basically the concept that there are UFs in everything we consume (books, movies, shows, etc.) that make them universally relatable to the audience.
And then there’s what Taylor refers to as “butter” which are the tasty bits that make that media compulsively consumable.
I won’t delve any deeper into the concepts here (because you should really read Taylor’s books and I may or may not be explaining them correctly) but, after reviewing possible UFs, it was like a light bulb went off in my brain.
I hadn’t figured out the “butter” of my book yet, or why readers should care or want to read it. I knew a lot about my characters, their wounds and backstories, but I hadn’t found that magical sprinkle, sprinkle yet or what made them so special together.
After I made a list of Universal Fantasies for my book – BOOM – the ideas just started flooding in. I suddenly had a list of scenes and a way forward out of my writer’s block.
And I know the reasons why (hopefully!) readers will nom nom this book right up.
Happy Writing!
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