On Saturday,
August 18th, I delivered the luncheon keynote speech at Siren
Publishing’s first ever Romance Convention. Several people have asked me for a
copy of the speech, so I’m including it in full here. Thank you to David and
Diana for a wonderful weekend. I enjoyed meeting my fellow Siren authors and
all the fans who attended the convention and book signing.
~~~
I feel so bad
for all of you since I’ve never delivered a keynote speech. You get to be my
guinea pigs. I’ve sat through many, so I promise to make this brief because I
know this is totally cutting into cheesecake time. First off, I would like to
thank Diana for inviting me to speak. Siren Publishing gave me a voice so it
feels right and proper that this is my first speech of this type. I wouldn’t
exist without Siren, so my deepest thanks go to Diana and David. I think we all
are grateful for having this amazing company that accepts our voices, our
unique characters, and stories.
I actually Googled
the words “keynote speech” in preparation for today. You’re lucky that when I
asked the computer masters how long a keynote speech should be and it told me
forty minutes, I was like–what? That is not going to happen. I’m going to be
quick and hopefully make a little sense. Yeah. I’m not so sure about that last
part, but I’m going to give it a go.
I thought I
would talk a little today about a question I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves.
We might ask it a whole lot. What is our place in the publishing world?
Publishing has
rapidly evolved in the last several years. Unlike music and movies, publishing
remained the same for hundreds of years. After the printing press was invented,
centuries went by before publishing was forced to truly change. The advent of
the e-reader and the dominance of Amazon have opened new paths to a career that
for hundreds of years had only one. Writers today can sometimes feel like
they’re on the Mayflower, pioneers in a new, spectacular and uncertain world.
For those of us who choose to not take a traditional route, the path can be a
difficult one, and I’m not talking in strictly professional terms. There can be
a personal cost to following our dreams. Especially in this room, we understand
the stigma of writing genre fiction. I can go down the list of all the ways we
get marginalized. We write fiction. We write genre fiction. We write women’s
fiction. We write romance. We write erotic romance. And then—holy crap—I write
it about two guys and a girl or three guys and a girl, and they all like to get
tied up and spanked.
Yeah, there’s not
a lot of respect out there waiting to be given to us. If you joined up hoping
to get constant reaffirmation of your talent, you’re in the wrong place. We
writers rapidly discover that a deep belief in our worth is required to
survive. Sometimes this feels like a thankless job. Like there is no real place
in the world waiting for us. I’ve struggled with this for my whole career. I’m
sure I’m not the only one. I’m sure most of us thought we would make it big and
we would only need to write one book a year and then lounge around in our
mansions. And we rapidly discovered that the publishing game is a long game and
we must make up the rules.
How do we judge
success? How do we know when we’ve made it? Is it when we finish our first
novel or when we publish it? Are we successful when we get a review declaring
our book the best ever? Or is true success getting the ones that rip us apart
and still sitting back down to tell another story? Do we need the New York Times to validate our voices?
Or do we simply need to know that our words are important to someone.
I’m going to get
totally clichéd on you now. But there’s a reason things become cliché, because
they are so true. Robert Frost wrote a poem. You all were probably forced to
read it, even memorize it in high school. The
Road Not Taken. It’s about anyone who was born or who chose to be
different. It’s about anyone who takes the path not marked and delineated by
those who walked before it, the path without road signs and maps dedicated to
it. The final lines are the most important to what we’re talking about this
day.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one
less travelled by. And that has made all the difference.
I remember
reading that poem in high school and thinking it was full of such excitement.
The road less travelled by could only mean adventure. Years and experience have
given Frost’s words texture and layers they didn’t have for me before. There’s
a reason one is less travelled. This road we’re on is hard. Our job is to put
our souls on a piece of paper and hope that someone, somewhere connects with
it. We don’t get nice little progress reports. We get torn apart on Goodreads
for all the world to see, those bits and pieces of our souls placed under a
microscope and judged based on whatever today’s criteria is for proper writing.
We knock on New York’s doors and most of us never even get the courtesy of an
answer. It’s the nature of the business. Always has been. The people who get
published are the ones who will reach the widest possible base of readers. The
rest are relegated to trying over and over again to find something the
gatekeepers will deem worthy of allowing through.
But then the
e-revolution occurred and now the choices are plentiful, the roads diverged and
widely varied. It can make a writer’s head spin. Traditional press. Small
press. E-first. Self-published. Where is your place? Where does your voice
belong? What is the importance of the erotic romance writer?
A lot of people
will answer that last question for you. They’ll tell you that you don’t have a
place or marginalize you as cheap-thrills fiction. They don’t have to read you
to know who you are. Some of you have lost family and friends over what you
write. Some of you hide this piece of your soul from everyone, your writing the
only outreach for something fundamental inside. And some of you will stand up
and not allow your words to be pushed aside and shoved to the bottom of the
heap, taking the pain so that those writers who come after us have an easier
way. These struggles are exactly what connect us to our audiences. Being brave
enough to travel this road can be the very thing that pushes our stories over
the top to do the most important thing they can—to connect us to the greater world.
For every time someone pushes you down, for every writer in some group who asks
you to leave because what you write isn’t really romance, remember this. There
is someone out there who needs to hear your story. There is someone who feels
alone, who believes no one understands them until they find a story they can
sink into and discover a character who lives and breathes their existences.
This is the true power of fiction, and every reader deserves a story that
becomes comfort food. The dark voices grow so much quieter when one person
writes to you or walks up to you at a conference and says, “thank you.” Your
book made me laugh when I was going through a divorce. I saw myself as your
heroine. Or in my case, that moment when I realized my voice could be important
was when a woman walked up to me at a signing and told me my books got her
through chemotherapy.
No matter what
anyone tells you, your voice is meaningful and important. Take your work
seriously because someone out there needs to read it. Take stock of yourself as
an author before you sit down to read reviews. Find that core of yourself that
is unchanged, unmoved by criticism because it is built on faith, faith in your
words and your stories. Faith in yourself. Faith in each other.
We are writers.
We don’t have to be friends, but we do understand each other. The women and men
around you are the ones who know what this path is like. They know what it
means to struggle to place words on a page that move with purpose. They are the
ones who have stood at that great gate that once allowed few voices to pass and
left the rest out.
They are the
ones who tore that gate down. When the publishing world barred the road, this
is the generation that got out a jackhammer and plowed a new one.
So that is the
answer. Where is our place in publishing today? It is a blank page waiting for
our stories to be written on it. You are the gatekeeper, the architect of your
dreams and your career. You are the arbiter of your success. Build your dreams
as high as you can. Put your words out in the world and know that someone
somewhere is grateful. For all those who would look down on romance, I would
say that there is enough evidence that the world is a gritty, perilous place.
Sometimes we need to be reminded that it is rich and beautiful and that love
exists when we reach for it.
Take this time
to be around those who understand, to refresh yourself so Monday you can go out
and do what this generation of writers was born to do—change publishing
forever. That is our place in this world.
Thank you all
for listening.
~~~
Sophie, Thank you so much for posting your speech! I'm even more jealous of the writers who were in attendance now. You are absolutely right, we all have a voice and we should seek everyday to hold our chins high and reach for the stars. You are one of the writers that inspired me to submit my manuscript, and it is now published with Siren. Thank you for putting your words into action!
ReplyDeleteSophie - what a wonderfully (Is that a word?) inspiring speech. I don't write but I'm an avid reader. I have been reading since I discovered the power of a book to take me to a place outside my head into someone else's world. That was around the 3rd grade. Sometimes it's fantasy/sci-fi and sometimes romance but every time it's a pleasure. I was fortunate to discover your writings last year and those have lead to many more wonderful authors to enjoy. So thank you and keep writing.
ReplyDeleteWonderful speech!
ReplyDeleteAs a reader I am looked down on because I read romance/erotic/genre novels. I used to get annoyed by this..now I just think.. "whatever, you don't know me and you don't know why I choose to read what I read"
I have a degree in and used to teach French..so I've done more than my fair share of reading the classics and "literary" books (I also did Eng. Lit for A level).
I had to leave teaching due to my deafness getting progressively worse..this led to severe depression and the only things I found that I could read were "Mills and Boon"...they were fantasy and they were easy reads.
Last year I was given a Kindle...and I discovered the joy of menage and erotic fiction. They're not the only books I read but they are wonderful for those times I'm depressed or in pain...they take me to another world and feed my imagination.
Sophie, you and your fellow Siren authors have given me so much pleasure over the past year...please keep on writing....you all rock!
Hugs xx
p.s. some more Julian would be lovely!!! lol
Thank you for posting this. I was there in person to hear it, but I'm glad it's here to read whenever I need fresh inspiration and affirmation. :)
ReplyDelete