New writers:
When you’re first starting out, understanding solid story structure can be a major challenge. I consistently read manuscripts from budding authors that are wildly disorganized to the point of being nearly incomprehensible. But this is to be expected if you’ve had no experience or education related to storytelling or content organization for nonfiction pieces.
Because of this, I encourage you to embrace the use of templates.
Some authors believe there is only one way to write. And, if you don’t do it that way, you’re not “really” a write (whatever the hell that means). These same people will often tout that the use of templates is somehow problematic for a writer.
But templates exist for a reason. And, through working with new writers on a daily basis, I understand how important it is for people to do what works FOR THEM, regardless of how / if it works for me or some celebrity author who could write “Hi” on a cocktail napkin and sell a million copies.
Templates help you structure the elements of a story or the content of your nonfiction book. That’s it.
Think of them like muffin pans.
There are a dozen, evenly-spaced depressions of the same exact size. This is how you know that, once baked, you’ll be removing a dozen muffins from your oven, as opposed to a dozen strips of bacon, a dozen donuts, or a dozen bundt cakes.
Even though you have this “template” for muffins, that doesn’t mean you can’t make baked goods with it that people will be salivating over and can’t wait to buy. However, this “template” also doesn’t guarantee that whatever you put in it will taste good (dog shit, broken glass, dirty mop water, etc.). With this same template, you could create cranberry-orange muffins, brownie-batter cupcakes, or even jalapeno cornbread muffins. All very different items, but all using the same mold.
So, if the particular romance genre you’re writing in has a template that includes two people meeting in an interesting way / place, those people initially hating one another before growing to like each other, and then those people overcoming interpersonal or environmental hardships in order to fall in love and live happily ever after, you can use that template as a way to organize the content of your own book.
This same structure is used to write thousands of enemies-to-lovers romances all over the world. And, being the most lucrative genre on the market, those same books using that same template are making their authors a decent living in many cases. Each author may use this same template, but the details that vary are what make the story feel fresh and keeps people wanting more.
One version of this template may involve a tall, Cuban man and a short, Japanese woman fighting each other in court one week and finding themselves on a class action suit together the next week.
Another version of this template could follow the story of a mother-of-twins electrical engineer falling in love with her own housekeeper whom she can’t survive without because of the long hours she works at her new startup.
A template is there to help you not have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to understanding what readers expect from a genre like yours. Taking less time to give your readers a satisfying experience gives you an advantage over other authors. This means you work smarter, not harder.
Get more info on templates by reading the Templates lesson.