I know some people choose a word of the year to set their intentions for the next 12 months—if you are a person who does this (or if you want to be a person who does this), I want to suggest that your watchword for the year should be TRUST.
Why TRUST? For one thing, it feels like it’s in short supply in the romance industry at the moment, if you’ve been following the RWA debacle (extensive recap here, each twist more unbelievable and horrible than the last).
But more importantly, trust is one of the most valuable things you can cultivate in your writing practice. If you’ve been with me for a while, you’ve probably heard me go on about this before. Trust yourself, trust your reader, trust your words, and you open up a whole new world of possibility to take your writing to the next level.
What happens when you don’t have trust in your writing?
Without trust, everything kinda falls apart:
You might start second-guessing yourself and your abilities, consciously or unconsciously (more often the latter)—if you don’t think your reader is going to pick up what you’re putting down, you’ll start filling in the blanks for them, bulking up your prose with unnecessary information, and committing one of those so-called cardinal sins of writing, telling instead of showing.
In telling the reader things that they should be able to figure out themselves, you talk down to them and coddle them instead of giving them the opportunity to uncover the plot of your story organically. I believe that there’s an unspoken covenant between authors and readers where the author should respect the reader’s ability to read critically—the goal is not to break this promise to the reader.
In terms of your own writing, not trusting yourself means you’re probably shying away from big moments and big opportunities to level up your skills. On the Fated Mates podcast, Jen Prokop and Sarah MacLean often talk about books that are “hunting for big game,” i.e. doing important work to elevate the romance genre. You can’t hunt for big game that if you don’t have the confidence in your ability to do so.
So what happens when you do have trust?
Here’s the domino effect of having trust:
Your writing gets leaner because you’re not having to overexplain things—you know your reader will get what you mean. (If you’re still worrying that they might not, this is why you get an editor; your editor will tell you if there are any pieces missing or if there are things that you have to colour in.)
Because your writing is getting stronger, you get more confident in your abilities—which is HUGE just in general and great for combatting that pernicious writer imposter syndrome that everyone has.
And because you’re confident, you start taking more risks with your work, and THAT is where things get interesting. ’Cause, look, let’s be real, this is a genre built on tropes, which means things can sometimes feel a little same-y. So doing something different makes readers and reviewers sit up and take notice—and we don’t grow if we don’t innovate, whether it’s within ourselves or within our work.
I know trust is scary (if you write romance, you’ve probably put your characters through fear of trust, so you know exactly how scary trust can be), but it pays off. So trust yourself, your reader, the people you work with, and your writing, and see where it can take you this year.