Ahead of the February 11 Residence 11 Desire Summit on Sex and Relationships (get tickets here!), we’re conducting a series of livestream interviews with Summit speakers. You can watch them live or after the fact on our YouTube channel, Facebook page or Twitter account, and ask questions for our interviewees.
Watch our interview between Editor-in-Chief Rachel Kramer Bussel and Kansas City-based bestselling romance novelist and USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestseller Sierra Simone, who will speak on the Writing the Modern Romance Novel panel at Desire Summit. Simone’s notable works include Priest, American Queen, and Misadventures of a Curvy Girl, and, with Julie Murphy,A Merry Little Meet Cute. In the interview, Sierra Simone discusses how she went from being a librarian to a successful romance author, become famous on TikTok for her romances, why she’s chosen to write many queer and polyamorous romances, utilizing both self-publishing and traditional publishing, and offers advice for aspiring romance authors. Find out more about her at thesierrasimone.com
Below are some highlights from our Sierra Simone interview; some answers have been condensed for space and clarity.
On how she got started writing romance:
I had kind of a sideways door into reading romance because I didn’t start out sort of jumping right into romance. And I do remember really vividly when I was like 11 or so, my step-grandma came up to me one day, and she had a brown grocery bag full of Harlequin romances. And I mean full, like they were stacked deep, side by side. There were probably 30 or 40 books in that one bag. And she said, I have seven bags of these in the guest bedroom. Take as many as you want home.
I remember looking at the covers and immediately intuiting that there were no dragons or vampires anywhere in there, and that’s primarily what I was interested in. I think 11 was probably still the tail end of my animorph days. None of them changed into animals, so I was like, No thanks. I’m good.
So I look back at that and [wonder] hey, my life would have been really different if I would have taken that bag of books. But instead, I read books that aren’t categorized as romances, but stirred a lot of romantic feelings in me. So Interview with the Vampire, Clan of the Cave Bear. Lots of V. C. Andrews, lots of Stephen King, lots of books about King Arthur, Jane Eyre. All of these stories had really powerful romantic themes, but they weren’t traditional romances and there generally isn’t a happily ever after.
So it wasn’t really until I was a young mom and someone had given me that Sylvia Day series with the cufflinks on the cover that I read my first contemporary romance. And after reading that, I think I was just ready for it. I was ready for that kind of story [with] normal people who aren’t vampires, or aren’t living 40,000 years ago.
At the time I was writing young adult dystopian fiction, which is very heavily influenced by romance. The romance subplot is not even a subplot. It felt like a really natural segue to start flexing my fingers into writing romance. But one of the things that I loved about it was what I loved about fanfiction when I used to read fanfiction in high school and college: a romance was iterative. People would find an archetype that they really liked, or a theme that they really liked. There was no, Well, you’ve written about this one character archetype once, I guess that’s your one brooding hero story that you get, now you have to find something new. No, in romance authors can [say], I write only brooding heroes, I write only tortured Navy SEALs, I write only grumpy sunshine, and that freedom [of] I’m just gonna do it over and over again, and every time I do it, again, I’m going to find something new and exciting about this kind of story was amazing. Especially coming from young adult, where, at the time, I was writing in the early teens, there definitely was this feeling of you need to bring something new to the genre.
It was so nice to go to a genre where new is fine and good, but we also love the things we love, and we can’t get enough of them. If you’ve ever meet a reader who’s just discovered a new trope that they love, they’re not like, Well, I’m done with blue aliens because I read one blue alien book. They’re like, No, give me 23 blue alien books right now.
On writing queer romance:
It really is kind of an intuitive organic process for me. I think that there are a lot of authors who are writing from maybe a more outer layer of themselves. And I think those books are amazing, so this is not a pejorative, like that there’s some sort of high art and low art depending on what layer of yourself you’re writing from. I don’t buy into any of that.
But I do think that for me, when I’m writing, I’m really sort of pulling from my bone marrow when I write. So the stories sort of organically evolve into the way that I understand sex, the way that I understand love, which is fundamentally queer. That also a recursive process, because it’s through writing through the last eight years, really like nine if we count when I really started writing the Markham Hall series, that I have been writing characters who are queer, and then that in turn has helped me understand my own queerness better.
So it is this like feedback loop, where using the text really helps me understand myself better, and helps me understand desire better. I feel that way as a reader that every time I read a book, especially a really powerful one; it helps me excavate something of myself. And even if that’s just a tiny sliver of myself, every book I read helps me understand more about myself and the people around me. There’s this study that they’ve done, I think it’s actually a series of studies [using an MRI machine], where they’ve shown that when you’re reading fiction, your brain is lighting up with what you’re reading. So not just the part of your brain that processes words and language, that’s not the only part that’s lighting up.
If you’re reading about a character eating food, for example, then the parts of your brain that are understanding taste and smell and texture are lighting up. If you’re reading about a character kicking their leg, then the part of your brain that controls kicking your leg lights up. Your brain is actually not super sophisticated when it comes to separating fiction from real life. So when you are reading a book, you really are having a full scenario of empathy. You are in an empathy gym, building up your empathy, that I think is so powerful as a reader. [That’s] what I crave.
But I also find that as a writer, each time I write, I am working out my empathy and building myself out as a human being even more, or incarnating into myself fully is what I probably should say. It’s a process that comes naturally and what I did find was when I really first started publishing in the beginning of 2015, it was a slightly different environment. When I published American Queen in 2016, which was my first really overtly polyamorous book– it’s flirted with in my historicals but in American Queen the central storyline is a polyamorous storyline.
The response I got from the two men in that in that triangle was pretty negative. So I had a lot of readers who really liked it, and then I did have a lot of readers who were really homophobic about it. And now in 2023, I am so blessed that I can publish anything and my readers are here for it. I write FF, I write MM, I wrote Thornchapel which was MMMFFF.
The beauty I think for a writer is that if you are writing yourself, your identity, if you’re writing along the liminal, if you keep doing it, I find that you do build a destination. You do start building a readership who resonates with what you do. I couldn’t have made any other storytelling choices because unfortunately, I am not as cutthroat commercially as I would like to be. But the silver lining to maybe choosing stories that on the face of themselves weren’t as commercial or mainstream as writing straight MF is that over time, I’ve built a readership who likes what I do, they like how I approach romance and desire.
It’s hard to give advice, to [say], Yeah, you should do it. Just endure , fussy emails and bad reviews, [and] then it pans out eventually. But truly I do think it does. The more honest you are with your own storytelling voice, the more that your readers, the readers who are matched to your kind of storytelling from birth, will find you.
On her advice for aspiring romance authors:
I guess I have anti-encouraging words, which which are, I would caution anyone who’s in the beginning stages, and I’m going to assume that exploration stage is coming with input, you’re probably looking at books about how to write a romance novel, or you’re reading blog posts, or you’re watching YouTube videos about it. So what I would brace myself against is any advice that comes with a really strident or prescriptive tone.
I started creative writing in college, but I also afterwards immediately wanted to write YA novels and was just gobbling up all the advice I could about writing books. What I didn’t know at the time was that, you know, when someone has a vested interest in becoming an expert, or when their experience comes from writing a very different kind of book, their advice might not always be applicable or as valuable. So if someone is a self-appointed expert, they probably are going to have a really prescriptive tone about how you should write a book, how this romance should start, where the beats should be.
All of that is fine general advice and I think a good gut check, like if you’re writing a book and feel like nothing’s happening, I’m gonna go back and look at this beat sheet and see, should I have had something happen here? That’s a great gut check. But when the advice itself is treating a fundamentally non-formulaic process, which is the art of creation, like it’s a recipe, I think that only works for 10 to 15% of authors.
I do think that there are people out there who thrive at recipe writing, that gives them the structure they crave, and they like something replicable. It really just gels with the way that they work, that’s great, and they’re gonna do fine, they don’t need me. But for everyone else who might just feel like they tried something and it only half worked, they’re still looking for that one thing that’s really going to unlock their ability to write, I would say the problem is not with you, it’s with the idea that there’s one right way to do anything.
So that’s my one bit of anti-encouragement. Be wary of anything that sounds super prescriptive that this is the way a book should be, you have to do this to write a good book. I feel like that is not the point of books. We could probably all point to a book that we read in the last month [where] we’d [say], This breaks the rules, and I absolutely love it.
My other piece of anti-encouragement is, I always joke you can change your name and start over again, which is what I did. But I feel like within that joke, what I really mean is no one book has to bear the weight of perfection. So the book that you’re working on now, it does not have to be perfect. It does not have to contain every thought about love and desire and sex that you’ve ever had.
The great thing about romance is that it is an iterative iterative genre, which means that you can write 20 books on the same theme, and romance will welcome you and thank you for it. So it’s okay if one book isn’t everything that you want the book to be, because you’re going to write the next book, and then the next book. Maybe you’ll get a little bit closer to having it be everything you want to be or maybe you’ll be able to say this part of one thing that you weren’t able to fully encompass in the first book. So letting your work in progress be what it is without having to be this singular, perfect whole, knowing that you probably have 10 or 20 books in you, if you’re going to write in romance for a while, I think is really freeing. It’s okay if this book isn’t everything, because you’re gonna have more books where you can have your oeuvre be everything, not just one title.
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About the Desire Summit: The Residence 11 Desire Summit, sponsored by sex toy companies FUN FACTORY and Blush, intimate audio platform BLOOM, romance novel publisher Avon Books, and yoga teacher training company Ganja Yoga, will feature extensive educational sessions with over 20 diverse authors and subject matter experts across psychology, physical intimacy, technology innovation, sexual health, music and narrative storytelling. Speakers include, writer Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, author of The Sex Lives of African Women, polyamory expert Kevin Patterson, author of Love’s Not Color Blind, sex educator and dating expert Erin Tillman, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestselling romance author and TikTok favorite Sierra Simone (Priest, American Queen), Mia Hopkins (author of Tanked, one of The New York Times’ best 2022 romances, romance novelist Suzanne Park (The Do Over, The Christmas Clash), and Taylor Hahn, author of swinging novel The Lifestyle, among others. Keynote speakers will be intimacy coach Zoë Kors, author of Radical Intimacy: Cultivate the Deeply Connected Relationships You Desire and Deserve, speaking on 6 Questions That Will Get You Instantly Connected to Anyone, and sex educator Dirty Lola, who appeared as a sexpert on Netflix’s The Principles of Pleasure, speaking on The State of Modern Dating. Get tickets here for the Desire Summit.