Write Like Someone is Waiting

We’ve all heard the term “Dance like no one is watching.” The ability to let go and just feel your way through, feel the joy of the action, of the movement without a care about how you look, what anyone sees or thinks of you.

When it comes to writing and deadlines, though, that’s never proven very helpful to me.

Deadlines (for me) are tough when no one is watching them. Waiting on them. If it’s just you, yourself, and no one else to hold you accountable, it’s easy to well, not. There’s a show I need to binge-watch.

Maybe you’re that self-disciplined person who can refute a bad day, an exhausting day, or a day where every word feels like pulling teeth with “I have a deadline in mind, and I will meet it.” If you are, I may not want to meet you. 🙂

If you’re not, we should grab coffee. (Virtually, of course.)

See, I need an emotional connection to a deadline. A person who needs the book. Who depends on the book. An editor who will yell at me if the book is not in her hands. 🙂 (My editors never yelled.) Someone who wants the book. If there isn’t an agent or editor imposing that deadline on me, or another author waiting on my book for that boxed set, then I have realized I still need an external reason to meet that goal, and make myself write those words.

The odd part of this is that writing makes me happy. I love it, I love diving into a story (or even an article), feeling like the right words are there or making them right. So it begs the question, why is it so hard to stay motivated?

So I’ve decided to write like someone is waiting.

This is the new direction I’m going to try and motivate myself. But it can’t be just a random someone. It needs to be someone— one person— who will connect to the book I’m writing as much as I do.

Yup. My reader for this is a her. I’m imagining her at the bookstore, searching for something, for my book. Not necessarily my title with my name on it, but what’s in my book. What it says, what it means, what it might make her feel.

I’ve had lots of reader comments about previous books, but there were three that really stood out to me, that really stuck in my head and made me feel like my book was meant for them.

With Something About Her, a reader sent me an email after she read the book and told me that a scene in that book, where my hero Michael believes he’s lost his daughter, resonated deeply with her. She’d been in those shoes and her comment was that the feelings were spot on, connected with her and made her connect to the characters.

With Cloaked in Danger, another reader wrote to me and said that I had captured her experience with PTSD perfectly. (Given that I couldn’t actually call it PTSD in my regency-era set romantic suspense, it meant the world that she recognized it and that I honored her experience.

With A Rogue’s Deadly Redemption, the reader told me that she identified with my books because my characters were real. Lily, my heroine, is a bundle of insecurities, and so many of us women can relate to her in that way.

With each book, I was fortunate that a reader told me how they connected, how much it meant to them…and it helped me write the next book. And while it’s been a while since my last Willoughby Family series book was released, I’m back at work on the 4th book in the quartet. Cordelia’s story, and I have to believe that the reader who needs her story is out there, too. Maybe it’s even you.

If you’re a reader, what’s the last book you really connected with?

If you’re a writer, do you have a reader in mind when you write?

I’d love to hear in the comments. ⬇⬇