Bleeding onto the Page

There are just as many schools of thought on writing strategy as there are books. Over the last seven years since I began to publish professionally, I’ve heard everything from “give them what they want” to “write your heart” – which, incidentally are sometimes mutually exclusive. If you study, really study, commercially successful novels, most follow the romance formula: Person A meets Person B, Person A pisses off Person B, they fight, they make up, they live happily ever after. This is pretty much every romance novel ever written—what makes each individual novel special are the details.

Lately, the people who advise me in such things have been telling me that my books are too hard. People read books as an escape—they want to read things that make them feel good. My books don’t really fall into that category. This idea is backed up by the people at GRL who told me that Aaron or Robbie are on their to be read list, but they’re scared to start them, or they need to be in a certain mood to read them. So, this led me to start working on other things: the Working Boys series (an experiment in writing something not quite as emotionally terrorizing), the Butt anthologies (I can do funny, right?), and other anthology stories that took some of the sting out of my more serious novels.

Those works stretch me as an author, they take me outside my comfort zone and let me play. But in my heart, when I go back and open Word and start my next novel, it’s with a broken boy in my ear telling me his story. It didn’t take me very long to figure out that I was telling my own stories through someone else’s voice. Aaron, Julian, Ben, Ethan, Brian – they’re all me in some form, they’ve all gone through the things I’ve survived in my life and came out on the other side.

The interesting part of that is that people respond to them. When Aaron did interviews for a few of the book tours in that series, people thanked him. They thanked him for his courage—even though he’s not real. He’s real for them. I’ve gotten hundreds of emails over the years from readers who have been helped by my boys—guys who were scared to come out and read the Little Boy Lost series, women who have been sexually traumatized and identified with Ethan’s hope and recovery, guys who have endured horrific childhood abuse who understand why Aaron doesn’t want to be touched. I email them back, every single one, and remind them that they aren’t alone. I empathize with their pain, not just sympathize with it.

This year, I’ve been nominated for the M/M Goodreads reader’s awards 11 times. Aaron and Spencer are up for most amazing M/M couple ever. I’m up for favorite author. My boys win Rainbow Awards and they are talked about in places like RT Magazine and USA Today. They may not sell like hotcakes, they may not linger for years on best seller lists, but they’re remembered. When readers flip that last page of Aaron, Aaron doesn’t just leave them—he lingers in their hearts, in their minds, for years. When they realize at the end of A Heart for Robbie that Robbie lives, they cheer for him, they cry for him, they take him back to their lives.

That is my goal.

So, to the age old question, popularity versus permanence—I say write your heart. Own your pain. Own your power. Conflict is the essence of a good story, draw from your own. Open yourself up and bleed across the page, you’ll be surprised what happens. Not only do you gain some of the most amazing, most loyal readers—your heart is lighter for the release of your pain.

Award winning romance novelist, J. P. Barnaby has penned over a dozen books including the Working Boys series, the Little Boy Lost series, In the Absence of Monsters, and Aaron. As a bisexual woman, J.P. is a proud member of the GLBT community both online and in her small town on the outskirts of Chicago. A member of Mensa, she is described as brilliant but troubled, sweet but introverted, and talented but deviant. She spends her days writing software and her nights writing erotica, which is, of course, far more interesting. The spare time that she carves out between her career and her novels is spent reading about the concept of love, which, like some of her characters, she has never quite figured out for herself.