Finding That Old Feeling...

We have a special guest on the blog today, multi-published authoer Liz Flaherty is here! Liz is talking about the feel of books and finding our own feel in our writing. Liz's current release "Home to Singing Trees" is out with The Wild Rose Press.

Have you ever thought about the "feel" of books? Not just when you’re writing them, but when you’re reading them, too. I know they’re classified, genre-ed, and sub-genre-ed to where there shouldn’t be any surprises when you pick one up, but it doesn’t always work out.


There is a prolific, multi-MULTI-published romance writer who writes warm and fuzzy, family and community, small-town books. She’s extremely popular, has great covers and wonderful titles, and even lives (and places her stories) in a part of the country that fascinates me. This is all right up my cooking-baking-sewing Midwestern alley. However—and here’s the biggie—I absolutely cannot read her books. Her voice doesn’t speak to me. Her stories do not feel right when I read them.

Another writer lives in the same part of the country, is prolific, too, and writes the same sort of book. I pre-order her releases so I don’t even have to wait an extra day. Obviously her voice does speak to me. Even better, her stories feel right. They inform, they entertain, and they make me laugh. And sniffle. Sniffling’s important.

A visitor at church yesterday told me she loved my weekly newspaper column, Window Over the Sink. “It makes me feel,” she said, “as though we’re sitting at the table together, talking and drinking coffee.” Well, I was in church, where we learn about humility, but I was absolutely thrilled with what she said and humility didn’t have a whole lot to do with it.

This then is what I want when I write and also when I read. I want to be friends and neighbors with readers and with the characters who populate the stories I read and write. I want to feel comfortable at the table with coffee and conversation. I want, even though it’s a word often applied to a genre I don’t write and seldom read, cozy.

What do you want to feel when you read and write? Edgy? My friend and CP D’Ann’s work makes me want to lock my doors! Sophisticated? A writer I once knew wanted her heroines to all be slender, rich, and glamorous because she wanted to read—and write—about life as she wished it was. Fantasy fiction is huge in today’s market. So is suspense. And there are many, many wonderful writers in any type of fiction you can think of.

Even in your chosen genre, though, do you like the feel of some of it and not of the rest? Does a book your friend has read until it’s dog-eared make you want to fling it against the farthest, hardest wall?

I truly think that we, as writers, feel things very strongly; it’s nice that we also feel them differently. And that we know different isn’t a synonym for wrong.