Tell Your Story: A Guest Blog by Amanda Ashby

First up I’d just like to say a big (and very jolly) happy second anniversary to Routines for Writers. As a writer who has a very bad routine, I’m a big fan of anything that can help motivate writers to…well write!!! However, today I thought I would take my author hat off and tell you about my other job running the teen/children’s desk every weekend at my local library. I’m not a librarian by trade but I do have an English degree and a love of all things books.

However, it wasn’t until I started the job that I discovered the only thing I love more than reading books is to see other people reading books, and so working in the library is a bit like a dream come true (though, if my bosses are looking, if you really wanted to make it the perfect job, a chocolate fountain wouldn’t go astray).

Anyway, the most important thing that I’ve learnt since I’ve been at the library is that while every reader is after a different book – ‘I love vampires’, ‘I hate vampires’, ‘I want horses’, ‘don’t you dare show me a horse book’ – the one thing that they all have in common is that they have NO INTEREST AT ALL in how the book is written.

I know.

It’s horrifying. Scandalous even. But I can assure you that I have never yet met a customer who has asked me for a grammatically correct book that has nice margins and a good font. They don’t care about dangling participles or if you’ve written the book in first person or third. As for tenses, I doubt they’d know one if they fell over it, but the thing that they all agree on is that they want a GOOD STORY.

I think as writers we get so caught up in the nuts and bolts of the craft – trying to please potential editors, beta readers and contest judges – that we can lose track of the fact that we’re not writers, we’re story tellers and quite frankly, a reader won’t care if you break every rule in the book as long as you tell them a story that they want to read. To them these books are their friends. I constantly have customers explaining book plots to me – but not like an author would, where they mention GMC or character arcs or foreshadowing, but rather, they talk about the stories as if it was something that had happened to their friends. It’s personal.

Oh and here’s another completely encouraging fact. They don’t all want to read the same story. Like I said before, some want vampires, some wants horses. Some want vampire horses (okay, not really, but hmmmmm, a future trend perhaps?????). The thing is that it’s so easy to get swayed by trends or trying to write for the market. But never forget that publishing is one of those odd industries that doesn’t know what it wants until it sees it. So try and find the story that you truly want to tell and then have faith that there is someone out there who is looking for that exact story.

Don’t settle for less. Publishing can be a hard business so if you’re going to crack it, it might as well be with the sort of story that you really want to tell! So my challenge to everyone who has stalled with their writing and who is trying to get restarted: find your story and tell it the best way you can. Learn your craft, but not because it’s ‘the rules’ but because it’s going to help you tell a better yarn. You’re not writing to get published, you’re writing so that when a reader comes up to me at the library and asks me to recommend the perfect book to them, I can recommend yours!

Oh and seriously, if my bosses are looking at this, I wasn’t joking about that chocolate fountain…

Amanda Ashby was born in Australia, has spent eight years in England and currently lives in New Zealand. When she’s not moving country, she also likes to write books. (Okay, she also likes to eat chocolate, watch television and sit around doing not much, but let’s just keep that amongst ourselves, shall we?)

She has a degree in English and Journalism from the University of Queensland and is married with two children. As well as writing, she works part-time at the children/teen desk of her local library, which basically means that someone pays her to talk about books. Her debut book, You Had Me at Halo was nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers Choice award, and her current book Zombie Queen of Newbury High was listed by the New York Public Library’s Stuff for the Teen Age 2010 as well as being nominated for the YALSA popular paperback 2011. You can also follow her blog.