Author: writer_admin

Ideas are Variables. Use your own personal flavour.

personal flavour

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

The Idea is everything. Or is it? When working on some art project, the idea, the first concept is the most important. It’s what make us hooked on the work.

But…

All have been done one thousand times. Plus one.

I grew up listening to my father say: “It has all been done before” or “there is nothing new, because everything has been invented” or “We just need to see the variables” or “there is a finite quantity of musical notes and we are bound to find similar combinations in different songs“.

All different iterations of the same thought: It is all finite and it’s a matter or reorganising the material we have to work with.

Or is it?

I still struggle with these teachings, as my insecurities play their part in the evaluation process of the ideas for my writings.

And even though I agree with the principle of this (we have a group of stuff that we use in repetition), I’m not quite convinced about the part that it has all been done before. After all, between his time and mine lot’s of new things got worked on and created.

And I’m not convinced because it lacks the personal fingerprint, the noninterchangeable factor that each one of us puts in all that we do.

We keep evolving and there are things today that didn’t existed back in the (his) day. So I figured there is no argument there.

The same goes for all literary creations. New versions of old stories keep showing up and there are good iterations, bad, awful and so-and-so.

There are repetitions and do overs but are they similar to each other? Or is there novelty in them?

And does this matter? Does it matter how many times somebody reiterates the story of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’? Or that the retelling is being made?

I confess that, I have been caught mumbling my dislike about the lack of originality, and constant reiteration of the same stories. This process of recycling the same old entails a lack of novelty that frustrates me, when there are so many choices out there for making new films, books, and art in general.

But the truth is, there are different ideas, concepts, ways to create something. There are different views that we can take on an old matter.

Okay, we do not start from scratch. We have concepts, reorganisation of ideias, our own experiences and inputs, that we tap into in order to create an art work.

We do not start from an empty vessel…

…or toddlers would be creating full symphonies at the piano, and writing new future classic stories.

But it’s our time in this world, our own personal flavour that makes us grown upon an idea, and infuse it with our own way of work it into a specific creative work.

This is why some creators are so well attached to their initial ideas. They believe in the uniqueness of them, detached from the surrounding world.

They do not share them, afraid they would be stollen and maybe done better by other creator. (Ego scam right here, isn’t it?)Even if it’s not in their best interest to keep them secluded.

Yes, plagiarism happens. And there is a big fish pond out there, just waiting to take advantage of any crumb tossed into it. Mainly in some quick and easy scheme. More usual than not, it get’s eaten pretty quickly and disappears for never to be seen again.

But for the bigger part of my experience, a good idea isn’t fundamentally new. Somewhere, somehow, it had been imagined before. Even if it is a quite clever idea. Clever ideas do not mean successful art pieces.

The idea per se isn’t worth much if it’s not masterly executed.

More, it might be fairly new, and interesting, and well executed, and still end up in the trash can of humanity (of our fellow readers), for a multitude of possible factors.

A fenomenal idea isn’t any guarantee of a well accomplished art work. But it’s a start. And backing up that start with good working skills, a personal style, and some natural tendencies to network, and sell, it might be a success as any other with the same characteristics.

Is it special? Hell, yeah! For the creator, it’s always special.

For the world? Maybe not so much. Not at first and maybe not ever.

But with time, effort, and a grain of magic, it could transform itself into a worldly special.

Having great art concepts, interesting ways of exploring the idea, different backgrounds and experiences to support sources of inspiration, and contributing references, being moved by the need to create good work and devote ourselves to it, is as important as having a great idea.

An example of a frequent failed experience: to successfully transpose an art work into a different means of presenting it.

I was at the movies the past weekend, as I took my daughter to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023).

We loved it.

***

Let me be clear, so you know where I come from in this subject: I dislike playing highly stressful games. And to me, they’re all that: highly stressful.

They make me lose my calmness, and get me riled up, when there is no logical reason for it. I just don’t handle stress well.

So I do not play video/computer/phone games EVER.

Exceptions were made, occasionally – after I experimented some games and got myself hating the activity, – to Tetris when I was a pre-teen, and the recent Words Of Wonder game, that I enjoy moderately, but rarely play on my phone.

I do like board games, and again, Scrabble is my favorite, even though I rarely play it.

***

I enjoyed The Super Mario Bros. Movie immensely. It has color, action, plot, strong and evolving characters and I know it had a lot of game references that were kind of lost on me (even if my daughter was giving me some tidbits on that).

I specially loved Princess Peach, doing all kinds of fighting exercises in her gown, riding a motorcycle, and basically leading the way. That’s a badass Princess over there!

Also, loved the depressed star, Lumalee:

“In an Insane World, the Sane are called Insane.” – Lumalee

Lumalee…

But how many good ideas like this end up falling short?

Inspired in great works, how many films (reiterations of some art form or another) end up frustrating people’s expectations, for a lack of something in the making process?

It isn’t just the idea behind it. Because the initial idea is known to have had success previously under some other form. It’s something in the current work, in its process, in this particular project, in the people infusing it with a new life.

It’s this specific vision, for this particular iteration of the work, that doesn’t work.

For The Super Mario Bros. Movie it did work beautifully. Game to movie resulted in a very good entertainment moment.

But just look at how many Spider Man movies have been made, to finally achieve some measure of success – even if, to me, it still seems very far from my best experience from those comic books. (Nop. For me, they still haven’t nailed it.)

While working on our special kind of art-poison, listening to our instincts is paramount.

It’s not just having an idea but expanding upon it. It’s working in finding our personal style. It’s knowing what we love and let it lead us to a good iteration of the idea. It’s devoting ourselves to our process. It’s never giving up as long as we see the magic in it.

And having compassion for ourselves as creators. Find common ground between what we know about ourselves as artists, and what we need to be and do.

Ideas are great. Developing the mastery is a messy trip.

But we are here for the long haul. True?

So let’s keep having creative ideas and working on them.

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

 

Meanings in our writings and please our readers intensely

subtext and symbols

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

A clock isn’t just a clock. It’s a symbol of other things that permeate the story. 

Mentioning a season isn’t just how’a the weather or to place a story in time. It has meanings, and connotations with life itself, human life spans, among other things.

Our references, all the things we read and watch, live and learn, bring us to the threshold of deeper meaning and purpose in the stories we write.

This reminded me of a personal story…

In my high school senior year, one of our Portuguese Language class assignments was the reading, and study, of a particular theme in a Portuguese Classic work. We had to write a paper, and present it, in front of the whole class.

The book contained a lot of themes from which to choose from: plot, characters, places, symbols, and other sorts of fundamental pillars, that served as building blocks for that particular story.

I admit, it was rich in possibilities.

But, truth be told, I hated that book.

It was long and boring, I couldn’t understand half of it, and so dull that I kept falling asleep before the first twenty pages were up. It was a painful read for the time… and I took the class a second time, to improve my grade and have the chance of a better access to college. So, I suffered the boringness twice.

I guess it doesn’t matter which book it was, but for this story intents, I’ll leave the link here:

Aparição by Vergílio Ferreira and the youtube movie trailer. ‘Apparition’ as a direct translation.

I don’t believe it was ever translated to english. It didn’t made it to the worldly stage, like Saramago’s work, for example.

And the shock I felt as I discovered it was made into a film!

The book blurb goes as follow:

Aparição is a novel by Vergílio Ferreira in which he discusses philosophical theories connected to existentialism, written in the first person.

Need I say more?

The movie trailer got me curious to see which parts of Évora I do know… and that’s about it for the current me book reader.

But, back to the subject at hand.

Can you guess what I chose to study and present a paper about?

Symbolism, of course! In both years. And, no, I didn’t cheat on the second paper.

I will not pretend to have been interested in it so much that I went back to the existentialism theories and construct upon those. No. I wasn’t so great at philosophy either but, I was good at the Creative Writing part of it though.

So, I stuck to the more immediate symbolism of the different objects, ambiances, and words used in the text. Grouping them into different types of symbolic representations and delivering a multitude of possible meanings, and how those served the text in itself.

Looking at it from the symbolic perspective was fun. And it was the only theme I could have dealt with at the time.

But still, I didn’t go too deep, alluding more than actually stating through text. Yes, the animosity between me and that book got me little to nothing invested in studying it. I was sixteen at the time so…

But this experience with symbols, symbolism and layers upon layers of deeper meaning, got me hooked.

I have read books on it, and watched college lectures about it, and pinpointed examples of good, not so good, and poorly written symbolisms, always sharing the opinion of those who favor symbolism as part of a more meaningful construct, rooting fictional stories into deeper meaning.

[For years that I have been eyeing a Dictionary of Symbols that costs a small fortune]

We write to connect people. We write stories bringing our experiences and personal reflections to the plots.

Symbols and working with other levels of meaning, gives meat to the bone structure of these stories.

Understanding how certain words may allude to particular themes gives dept, and some complexity to our stories, and to every other artistic representation.

It’s not just listening to a catchy tune, but understanding the lyrics. Not just watching a movie, but capturing the ambience and the mood intended. It’s looking at a face, in a painting, and recognising the expression in the eyes. It’s not just quoting a phrase of some random book, but scrape the fluff, and connect with a representative meaning.

A clock, a meal, a particular time of the day or night, the season of the year, a facial expression, an action, a lack of action, a physical place… all have meanings, and can be worked into our story as representative details that help compose a really great piece of storytelling.

And it’s fun to locate those pieces of deep meaning in our stories, and make them work for the success of the plot, and for the possibility of bringing our art to a new level of mastery.

Intelligent people connect through meaning. And readers are in the intelligent game, aren’t they?

I believe they are. 

And so should we, the writers, be.

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

Find what you love and let it kill you… or live it

find what you love

Why do we develop certain feelings toward some stories? Movies? Music? Series? Books?

Why do we keep going to them, and finding references, pinpointing meaning, and seeing snippets of them in other places?

Dreaming while awake, recognising mesmerising connections to something that became ingrained in our minds… or something like that.

Why do we fall in love for a piece of art in ways that keep us bound to them? Keeps us believing we are crazy to love them, and don’t seem to find any logical explanation to be so connected, no matter all its short-comings?

Why do we love them so much, even if we see some stuff that aren’t usually to our exact taste?

Why do we see something and feel so connected to it, that it seems impossible to live without expressing its truth in us, and in our own life and work? Even through objects that we use, or look at, in our daily life?

What is it that struck a cord so deep that we are willing to overlook all it’s flaws, to forget all the others, to devote to learning more, seeing more, connecting more to it?

How this gift from another gets into our hearts, under our skins, and keep us bound to it, no matter what?

More

How can we reproduce this feeling in our work? How can we make others love this creation of ours so much?

Is it a random occurrence? Is it designed? Can it be done again?

Can we find cult vibes in our own work? I don’t think the creator ever sees those in his own creations, but I may be wrong…

It’s not too frequent to be swept off my feet and into dreamland. But it does happen. And it always leaves me unhinged.

Don’t get me wrong. I like it. There’s nothing quite like finding something that fills me with this devotion beyond any rational construct of mine.

And if we could take Bukowski’s thoughts on this, not about lovers as is his theme, but about other things that fills us with these feelings, we would gladly let ourselves expand to contain the object of our love, until we were no more what we have been until then.

“My Dear,

Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.

Falsely yours”

― Charles Bukowski

Puns apart, for the subtext related to romantic love, this idea of letting what we love kill us, because we will die anyway, doing all the things we do not love, at whatever the pace these things take a hold on you, feels true. [It’s Bukowski, why wouldn’t it feel true?]

To find this all consuming feeling in something is truly a gift. Something to defile the numbness of the big life.

I’ll leave you with a snippet of my latest connection … click here… What will I do with it? Let it kill my misconceptions and fill my creative self… and enjoy it.

Beautiful Imagery and our best work

images

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

Imagination and Imagery are intimately connected. It’s the power of combining images, transforming them into our particular reality, and even going beyond that.

Writing is constructing images in our heads and in our readers minds.

While building a story we recur to different strategies to visualise how characters, locations, and objects, will appear to our readers.

I do believe that, all that we can see in our minds will translate into a page in the most effective way we can imagine, if we just put the work behind it.

I also believe that usually this happens in ways we can’t perceive objectively. It’s kind of a shadow work that occurs inside our minds, fuelled by all the collected inspirations.

The act of describing what we are envisioning, letting what we absorb come through, will make reading a lively experience.

This means building ideas about how the elements will be, and master its materialisation on the page. Whatever the story, in whichever genre we fancy.

How we find imaginative inspiration?

Some of us, writers and imagery builders of sorts, have a fondness for reading and imagine things in our own way.

Sometimes, this ability gets us to have a book turned into a movie just because the imagery used was totally wrong from what we had envisioned.

Others, find it useful to look at correlated art works and give our imagination a hand at picturing worlds, creatures and even human faces.

There are a few theories about this brain ability of ours, categorising people into types of learners, just by figuring out our abilities to retain information and, therefore, use it in creative ways, accordingly to our main senses of vision, hearing and touching.

I found that, for me a mix and match of all of these, work in different projects and situations. So I learned to use visual aids, and well as hearing and touching.

In some projects I use music. In others, drawings and pictures. With more, or less, emphasis on each aid, according to what I feel is most needed for me to capture the full experience I need.

Because to learn about these characters, and this world, and these objects and locations, I need to attune myself to their particularities. And this is only possible if I keep my sources of inspiration in an expanded mode. Always looking, always alert, always integrating fun little snippets of information that might seem to be just there for the taking. Just so I have some places from which to draw inspiration from.

Where do I find some inspirational imagery?

Just looking at other people’s rendition of something, a picture, a drawing, a digital art work, a description, a capture of some sort of inspirational material, allows me to let me own imagination guide me into my own world building, with all it entails. Browsing through Pinterest, DeviantArt, a Google search on Images tab, can get me some much needed help on figuring out some writerly things.

How do I use it in my writing process?

I use it for inspiration, to build up my mental muscles on the much needed imagery.

Exposing myself to beautifully composed images, to gruesome battle outcomes, to twirls of abstract imagination, will get me content enough to start thinking about my own creative processes in my stories.

Also, I use it for writing exercises.

To have a prompt, and to build upon that little morsel of imagery is a pleasure, and alleviates me from having to start with the dreaded blank page feeling.

Just like painting uses references, the  writing practice also can, and should, do it. Imagery serves us as guides in this unthreaded wordy land.

Is it beneficial to my writings?

Yes. It is indeed. My imagination needs all the aid she can get. My writing efforts benefit from everything I throw at them. All the little unsuspected efforts we can make to help us write more and better are welcome.

If we find a notebook full of clippings is the way to go, we should try it out; or a mood board hanging on the wall; a Pinterest album full of scary pictures; a reference book on imagery; a subscription to a travel magazine; or any other way of collect those images we will be recurring to intentionally, in order to make our writing process smoother and more inspired.

Standing in the shoulders of giants has its downside?

Do not copy. Do not steal. Do not use without permission. Do not go into that unimaginative, hurtful, dishonourable lane.

Reconnect the dots of all you have learned and add to the work already done. Be inventive, resourceful, creative in your own right. You can do the most beautiful, your own, work. And it will feel good to do so.

Be careful of the difference between gathering inspiration, to work out added value, and the already mentioned problem above.

Gather from all types of different sources and think: I am the sieve through which all comes in, and only a small combined part of it mesh and comes out.

Allow myself to be the changing factor, the added value, the combinatory and creative force behind whatever I create.

Will it be easy?

Is anything worthwhile easy? I don’t think so.

Was any of those drawings easy to make? Any of those books we read? Any of those creative breakthroughs?

Easy and Worthwhile are opposites, aren’t they? 

Having these processes available to tap into, allowing new inspiring imagery and information to come through, working out the effective ways they can serve my writing efforts, trying to be receptive to all inspiring tendrils is part of the fun.

All we can do is allow our minds to translate into our work the images we had envisioned. All we must do is ensure that the reading experience will be the best we can make it. And that all these inspirational processes work out for the best in each page we write.

So that our reader truly gets what we were aiming for: the best story possible. 

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

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References:

Considerations about Building Worlds

building worlds

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog.

World Building is hard, fun, messy and an inspiring cluster of moments to be had, while writing a story.

To create a full, well developed, verisimilar picture of a new society, in whichever form and size, means we have to be ready to explore.

And we explore by imagining some complex interactions, rules and possibilities of functions and purposes. We explore by asking ourselves ‘What if?‘

World Building is also very fun, and we can have a great time imagining and developing some physical, personal and social landscapes in order to make a certain story work.

Building a new world usually means that we want it to be special and unique.

But sometimes, we have all of these ideas, already seen in other books, series and movies, that makes us doubt if we are indeed writing something new or even good enough. Making us doubt of what we intended to create, and getting us not to put enough time in working out the particulars of that special world.

How to come up with remarkable ideas for our World Building?

Learning about other people’s creative processes might give us a glimpse on how their new ideas came to be. It might help us discovering our own process to invent our own strategies to uncover our imaginative process.

I suggest that you watch the documentary ‘Abstract, the Art of Design’ for a great glimpse of other people’s creative processes.

But, more frequently than not, we see their processes as a confluence of different factors, including their own unique reality and life experiences. And, let’s face it, we can’t replicate that. All we can do is live our own life experiences and use them the best we can.

So, looking to other people’s creative processes teach us an invaluable lesson: Use your beliefs, inner thoughts and fears to create our Story Worlds.

There’s a constant need to look around and analyse how we see the world, how we react in certain situations, what we believe in and how those beliefs have changed over time.

There is great potential here. Not just for the things we would like to advocate in behalf of, while writing our stories, but also looking frankly at our hidden agendas, those thoughts we find uneasy and some of them even shameful.

And then, there is fear.

Fear can be our ultimate telltale sign that we need to work on that through a story. Not as a way to deal with it, even if it could be that, but as a spark of inspiration from which to build upon.

When we are writing Fantasy, being in a dystopian novel for example, we may construct a more believable story if we tap into our own experiences and thoughts.

I guess we all have came into contact some pretty messed up world views, peer pressure, or non-sensical beliefs. We might as well put them under a new light and scrutinise if any of those would fit our story just right.

Building a brand new world is, and cannot be in other way, connected to how we experience the reality we live in.

We may set the action in a far away galaxy, in a totally different body, or even in a totally different existential and corporeal plane, but we all start from the same reality in which we live in.

My father used to say that “all the things that exist are from this world. We cannot invent anything that we hadn’t already seen or experienced in this world.”

I agree with that. We can only reimagine what we have seen or experienced in some way. And all of it came from this world we live in.

We cannot think outside-the-box, if we have no ideia of what exists beyond it’s confinements. For example in sci-fi stories, assuming there could be something existing outside what we know, and having clear notions that there are rules to the functioning of this world in which we live in, we can only extrapolate into how things could be in other worlds.

Initially, we draw inspiration from the knowable in order to build a new world, somehow inventive, by reapplying the old and conveying things in a new format. And then we go deeper into the rabbit whole, if we can. We conjugate different ideas, crisscrossing from distant experiences and knowledges.

It’s not just having some knowledge but learning to recognise it’s potential and integrate it.

We use what we’ve got, specially if it’s a cross between a chihuahua and a fountain pen, or an ugly feeling and an online game, or chicken legs and a house foundations. Any one of these fortuitous connections may give us that idea that will make our story special.

World Building doesn’t mean just physical location. It envolves people, traditions, cultures, belief systems, interactions, associations, objects, daily tasks… all of the things that we experience in our own existences adapted into this new world that we are creating.

Because a martian would never walk like an earthling, would he? Or an addict would never rationalise some random thought in the same way that someone without that particular addiction would.

There are different knowledges to be pursued and other connections to be made between the simplest thing in that particular world. And our job as storytellers is to make those connections if we can.

So on we go into other worlds in order to discover our own.

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

***

References:

What are you writing next? Who cares?!

who cares

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog!

Maybe we can take all of this (world, life, work) as something dense, difficult, hard to accomplish. Or maybe we can declare fu** ** and say to ourselves ‘Who cares?’

To accept the pressure of having to write the next story is daunting. And not just if you are a known author. If you are a newbie, or a somewhat published author, it’s hard to accept the responsibility of having to write a new work.

To keep it in perspective, and for our mental health well-being, maybe we have to put ourselves in a ‘Who cares?’ mindset.

Instead of writing the next plausible and expected story, how about saying fu** ** and start working in a new genre, or an unsuspected book, or a poetry collection, or a biography.

Because, who cares?

Who is going to come to our home and demand us to write this or that? No one. Who is going to wait impatiently for our second book on a series? If we are lucky, maybe a few. Who cares about which work is out first, as long as we keep making them?

What I know for sure is that, if we pressure ourselves into the point of breaking, we will not write another story ever.

So, who cares?

It’s just me. I care about what I write. I give a fu** about what I’ll be writing next. I suffer the pressure I put on myself in an unimaginable way.

So, I must not care about who cares because I care too much and shouldn’t take it as hard on myself.

Having true fun in creating a story (life or body of work) is the only thing that should matter. To keep myself light and calm so that my imagination can do it’s thing, without added pressure.

Problems? They will always be there and I have a choice. Let them swamp me or tell them ‘Who cares?’

***

These are some words inspired by Neil Gaiman’s interview in the Tim Ferriss Show. Have you seen it? Did it inspire you to do something? Tell us everything.

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Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

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References: 

Have a Romance Novel within you?

romance novel

Hello all! Welcome back to this blog!

A few years ago I discovered Romance. Not just the sub-plotted thread lines existing in which ever genre that I came across, but the innovative, new born, sub-genres of Romance. 

I discovered that I loved to read Romance and that I went by these books in a short breath time span.

This phase gave me a good perception of what was being created in those years and how some storylines were most attractive to me than others.

I remember crossing paths with Young Adult Romance and Adult/Erotic Romance. I remember the impact of Urban, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance.

But what they all had in common was the Romance part.

Even when the plot was about something else entirely, it was the quality of relationships and the love that bloomed, as well as the griefs and disappointments of an unrequited love, and everything in between, that were the propeller to read more on different genres.

I’m from a time when writing romance was still very frowned upon.

Fortunately I can now say that I am from a time that saw these preconceptions evolve into a more mainstream type of literature and are a bit more tolerated.

Just a bit. Let’s not go crazy over this.

[Was this the reason they were so afraid of? To have a lesser genre to be a big earner? Never mind.]

By now, I’m tempted to list a few of my most impactful reads. ***Should I? Let me know in the comments, if you’re interested in knowing what got into my Best Romance Books Ever.

There had been a great number of romance books written in such an impactful way that I do hope they withstand the passage of time.

A few months ago I came across a few lists all under the reference “Best Romance Novels of All Time”.

I was quite curious about what would pop up if I researched something as broaden as this and it did not disappoint.

Of course we had the classics in there, which contains some of my favorites, but there was also a few of the published (and self-published) ones that are now considered modern genre-classics.

Goodreads produced a list of 639 books on this query: Best Top Romance Novels of All Time . A list which needs to be revised since it has escaped the fundamental criteria for existing.

Criteria: The list is compiled from Amazons Bestsellers in Romance for the peoples view, from Romance Readers Top 100 Romance Novels for a Critique View, And from the Best books From last 10 years lists. Each book has been rated at least 4 star by at least 75 readers.

639! And some of those are series.

Then, it was time for browsing through a Readers Digest Article with the 55 Best Romance Novels of All Time. Last updated in January 2023, this list contains more recent romance novels, from which I spotted a few well loved of mine.

Since this article has the following disclaimer, and it fails to state the choice criteria, I don’t think it to be an unbiased list.

Our editors and experts handpick every product we feature. We may earn a commission from your purchases. 

But its a list, no matter what. A list in which we may find some romance suggestions.

Then it was time to check out ProWritingAid‘s book list. The Best Romance Novels of All Time: Top 60+ Love Books contains a few well known works organised under the epithet’s The Essential Reading Lists: Romance.

Criteria: Top Classic Contemporary Romance Novels. Contemporary is the largest sub-genre in romance. It’s an umbrella term for romance novels set at the time the author was writing—from about the 1970s onwards. You’ll find stories about modern themes, challenges, and society, with most contemporary stories rooted in the real world. We’ve split this list into modern classics and rising stars.

I couldn’t avoid mentioning The Best Romance Novels of 2022 in The New York Times.

As well as The New York Times Best Sellers. [How many of these are Romance?]

I am contemplating doing a WTR list for my own purposes, after all, I love reading romance. I feel I have quite a few classics to catch up, I mainly disregard the contemporary romance best-selling books, and I write paranormal romance, so I should be reading further on these sub-genres across times. And a separate WTR Romance list would be wise of me keep.

For now, I hope you find some Best of All Times Reads in one of these lists and keep reading. Reading is very important if you want to keep writing.

And if you feel you have a Romance Novel in you, it doesn’t matter how many books are on these lists. There is always space for a truly brilliant story. The one you will write.

Please leave a comment and subscribe for more content.

Bye and Keep writing! ✍🏼

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References: