Write the book of your heart. We’ve all heard it, right? What it
usually means is this: ignore the market and tell that story that’s inside of
you. Write the book that won’t let you go, the one that drives you and inspires
you, the one whose characters have come to be old friends. (Actually, make that
family members, as they’ve been living with you for years.) We’ve heard it from
agents, from editors, and from each other. Write
the book of your heart. And far be it from me to tell you otherwise.
However, it is worth
reiterating the following:
1-The BOYH is often your
first book, with all the amateur trappings that come with first attempts.
2-Your love for the BOYH
can blind you to its weaknesses and render you deaf to constructive criticism.
3-The BOYH isn’t always
a fit for the market.
The book of my heart got me an agent. It even got
the attention of an editor at Berkley. What it didn’t get me was a publishing
contract. It had charm. It was funny. But it wasn’t ready, plain and simple. So
I went back to the drawing board, and basically wrote a more sophisticated
version of the BOYH. And that didn’t sell, either.
It was then my agent
put a question to me—what kind of writer do you want to be? The words appeared
in my brain like a message from a Magic 8 Ball: a published one. She offered me the opportunity to write a cozy, so I did a genre hop from women’s fiction and
landed squarely into to mystery territory.
Writing that first mystery
began as an academic exercise; I approached it pragmatically. This is the book that will get me published,
I told myself. This would be the book of my head, not my heart. (If the book of
my heart was a love match, the book of my head was a marriage of convenience.) But
as I got deeper into the story and more involved with the characters, a
wondrous thing happened—I fell in love. I started that project by using my
head, but ended up putting all my heart into it.
Don’t get me wrong; I
still love my first book. It will always be the book of my heart. And I’ll get
back to that book someday. Because eight years and four books later, I know
exactly what it will take to make it better, maybe even publishable: a cold eye, a sure hand, a warm heart—and
a cool head.
