20 Things I learned at the Festival of Romance

I went to my first Festival of Romance at the weekend. It was great chance to meet Charlie Cochrane, JL Merrow and Stevie Caroll, as well as meeting Patrick Darcy for the first time in real life. Here’s some things I learned during the weekend.

1. That it’s really important to ring-fence some time each week to write.
2. That all writers get to a point during the book when they think it’s awful and it can not be finished. You must forge on beyond that point.
3. How differently everyone writes, and how that's absolutely fine, whatever works for you.
   
4. Just write – write straight through to the end of the first draft. Do not pass go, do not collect £200. Do not stop to edit, do not go back. Reach the end.
5. When you reach the end, leave it to rest for a month, and then come back to the story.
6. Something called ‘fast drafting’ is where you draft so quickly it taps into your subconscious creativity and ignores the part of the brain which edits and doubts.
7. It’s important for writers to read different genres of writing...
8. But you must also retain your own voice as a writer. I always struggle with this ‘voice’ thing. I suppose it’s like how you only ever think other people have accents, but you don’t think you have one yourself. I don’t really think about my writing voice, but I’ve been told it’s quite distinctive.
9. To write romance you have to believe in love and romance.
10. Writers should write the books they want to read, because then you’ll love it, and you have to love it if you’re going to work on edits for it over many months/years.
11. That an hour was not enough time to peruse the books and talk to the authors at the book fair. I kept telling myself I’d come back to buy books, and then it was 3pm, we were all thrown out and I hadn’t bought any books. No matter, I have the starts of my Christmas list of some books for my stocking.
    
12. The importance of having your three minute pitch about your novel, and knowing the story iside out.
13. I met some lovely authors who I’ve connected with on social media, which now means I am even more distracted from writing by my twitter fee.
14. That digital first publishing is revolutionising the world of fiction with no genre, word count, restrictions
15. How important it is to ‘have lots of irons in the fire’ with writing projects at different stages, so you’re not waiting for the email to ping from a submission you’ve sent
16. That I need to look into Hootsuite and getting a Facebook page for myself. Rest assured, I will sort this. 
17. Write what your voice fits, or ‘if you have a snappy modern voice, don’t write historials.’
18. I leaned there’s a genre called ‘post chick-lit’ or ‘hen-lit’ which is most definitely NOT the same as ‘mum-lit’ another genre which was a new one on me until a few weeks ago
19. How much I enjoy talking to other writers about their books, their *process* films they enjoy, anything and everything.
    
20. Self publishing is not an easy route to being published, and you learn so many new skills doing it and that it all comes down to the magic three: cover, title and blurb

Were you an author at the Festival of Romance? What did you take away from the weekend? As readers, is any of this news to you? I’d love to hear from you.

Until next time,

Liam Livings xx