Chick Lit Is All About The Journey-Cathy Yardley

The interview with Cathy Yardley has been posted at www.waukegan.org.

The destination of a romance novel is the love story- will they? And when will they? But, chick lit doesn’t focus on the end result, but rather the journey that the woman takes to get to that destination. The premise of the story is not always about finding love but about a woman finding herself and overcoming some personal or public obstacle.

Writing romance novels gave Cathy Yardley the insight into developing her first non-fiction book, “Will Write for Shoes: How to Write Chick Lit.” She used “How to Write a Book Proposal” by Michael Larsen as a guide to prepare the proposal.

In non-fiction and in fiction, when Cathy sits down to write she already has a good idea of where the story is heading. Of course, not every one works the way Cathy does and outlines the structure of a story before the writing begins. Some people are “pantsers,” Cathy says, and are able to develop the beginning, middle, end of a story seemingly off the top of their head….or by “the seat of their pants.” Perhaps it’s from years of reading, or just a terrific sense of pacing, but some people just seem to know intuitively how to structure the plot for a story. For the rest of us mortals, Cathy says that an unplanned story can easily run into trouble after a few chapters that go no where, a resolution without a conflict, or an ending that is just a dead end.

Cathy’s first writing break came when she entered a contest sponsored by the
San Francisco Chapter of the Romance Writers of America (RWA). RWA provided her with a chance to meet writers up close and discover they are people, too. The group also gave Cathy an opportunity to attend conferences, workshops and join critique groups with other writers.