Books of the Heart

You'll hear a lot of authors tell you to write the book of your heart. Well, what the hell does that mean?

For me, a "book of the heart" is one you feel like you have to write, regardless of what's hot in the market. It's the book that won't shut up inside your head. The one whose characters feel so intertwined with you that you need therapy. ;-) (Please . . . if I ever went to a therapist, I think he or she would run shrieking from the room.)

I've written 20 books, give or take. I have genuinely liked all of them. But some were books I wrote to fulfill two- or three-book contracts, in a specific genre, and I may have liked them--REALLY liked them--while writing them, but in some sense, they weren't organic. That is, I knew I had to write another romantic suspense and so . . . plot, characters, book, voila. Others--my heart books--were these books that, even when it was horribly inconvenient, they demanded they be written. The Roofer is one of those. Spanish Disco was another. In both cases, I abandoned other manuscripts entirely to work on them.

A book of your heart does NOT, though, mean they are easier to write. For me, I often wrestle with tougher themes, or with darker material . . . or I am just exhausted by the pace with which the book is pouring out of me.

Here's another thing about books of the heart. You write them often without really thinking they might sell. You write them because you have to. For the last ten months, no one in New York has been looking at chick lit. Even though I still have another RDI to come out next year, the market itself got so glutted, so belittled by the media and even writers themselves, that you couldn't sell a comedy to save your life. BUT . . . I had a very funny proposal--I'd written about 50+ pages of a book that I thought was hysterical. In fact, when I re-read it, I still laugh out loud. My agent sent it to two houses, and one editor said, "Very funny, but we aren't buying ANY chick lit. It's done. Over. The end." But this book was a book I really wanted to write. So you know, I just thought, so what? It's NOT chick lit, it's a comedy, but you can't sell comedy--but sooner or later, people will want to laugh again. And guess what? All of a sudden, there's new interest. It may sell. It may not. But that's besides the point. EVENTUALLY it will sell, and in the meantime, I laugh as I type.

So write the book of your heart. At least for me, this is what I mean when I say that.

Thoughts?