How Writing Romantasy Taught Me to Trust My Intuition as a Mom

I did not expect plotting fictional women to change how I parent two real ones, but it did, in a way I only noticed in hindsight.

Heroines who hesitate lose the plot

Every craft lesson about romantasy heroines comes back to the same note: hesitation reads as weakness, instinct reads as strength. A heroine who trusts what she already knows, even when she can’t prove it yet, is the one readers root for. I started asking myself, mid-parenting-decision, which kind of character I was being in that moment.

I stopped needing to justify every instinct

On the page, a heroine doesn’t need a committee’s approval to act on what she knows. I noticed I was still asking for that approval constantly as a mother, from books, from other parents, from anyone but myself. Writing women who trust themselves made it harder to keep not doing that.

The dark moment taught me to sit in discomfort

Every romance has a point where you can’t fix it yet, you just have to survive it. Parenting has a lot of those too, the decision that won’t resolve cleanly tonight. Writing the dark moment, over and over, trained me to stay in that discomfort instead of panicking out of it.

My kids are watching which heroine I am

They don’t read my books yet. But they watch how their mother makes decisions, and I’d like them to see someone who trusts her own read on a situation. Writing women who do that first is, it turns out, good practice for being one.