Liz's Little Book

I have a very special guest on my blog today - one of my all-time favourite writers (and I'm speaking about reading as well as in person - I have a shelf of her books and they're what I reach for whenever life is tough, because she takes me to another world and puts a smile on my face for the right reason).

I'm delighted to introduce Liz Fielding.

A hero has to be strong, tender, a man who would never let down the woman he loves. But he has to be flawed. If he were perfect there would be no story.
— Mollie Blake’s Writing Workshop Notes from Secret Wedding by Liz Fielding

Mollie Blake is a woman who knows what’s she’s talking about. I created her for my novella, The Secret Wedding and I’ve been listening to her advice ever since.

I really, really wish I’d had someone like her to hold my hand when I set my sights on writing romance in… Well, it was a very long time ago. It would have been wonderful to have her easing me through the agony of getting the story in my head onto paper. Alas, back then there were few “how-to” books to turn to in the UK, there was no internet and I’d never heard the words “critique partner”. I didn’t actually know anyone else who was writing anything. I was on my own.

I learned by doing, by writing, being rejected, reading the writers I wanted to emulate. It was a long, slow and very steep learning curve but the one thing you need if you want to be a writer is single-minded determination. My fourth submission, An Image of You, was — with a lot of help from an editor who saw something in my writing — published in 1992. Since then, I’ve had a wonderful career with more than sixty books in print.

My Little Book of Writing Romance is a straightforward writing romance primer. It’s the book I wish I’d had when I was fumbling through my first attempts at writing fiction, a hand in the dark to new writers struggling with the stuff it took me years to learn. And when you make it into print, please do email me to share the joy. Mollie and I will do the Snoopy dance for you.

Liz Fielding’s Little Book of Writing Romance is available as an eBook download from Amazon and for all other devices except the Nook (we’re waiting for Waterstones to stop messing about with their apostrophe and get on with it). Molly Blake’s story, The Secret Wedding, is available as a free online read.