The advice that changed your writing

I’ve read or tried to read a large number romance novels, many of them poorly written. I’ve lost count of the number of books I’ve thrown at the wall after one chapter or even one page. All the writers of romance I know say the same thing and the comment is shared across manuscript length and genre. A lot of unsatisfying books are being written, published, read and discarded.

There’s also a massively greater number of wonderful romance novels that satisfy readers all over the world.

In writing my stories I didn’t want to add to the number of unsatisfying stories.

Important books for me in developing as a writer were The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Campbell 1949) and The Writer’s Journey (Vogler 1998), a writing guide based on Campbell’s monomyth. The twelve-stage journey based on Campbell’s mythic studies across cultures describes the personal growth, or life principles, of the hero in earliest storytelling and provides a means of sense-making of the experience of life by the reader. The more a reader is able to relate to the characters and their journey the more satisfying the reading experience.

I’ve tried to use the journey of the hero to improve my own writing.

What’s your pivotal craft book?