Or romance woes part 2
Let me start by saying I love romance, both reading and writing it. When I started writing, I didn’t consider writing anything else. With as much sorrow, murder and general mayhem as there is in the world, I loved the idea of a book with a guaranteed happy ending. But lately for me (and for many others) the bloom on the rose has begun to wilt.
Recently a woman I know and respect greatly who writes both romance and mainstream said to me, “one thing about romance is that you can put all kinds of stuff in there that no one would buy in a regular story.” Although true, this statement encapsulated my recent disaffection with romance.
I could live a thousand years and be happy if I never saw another secret baby, marriage of (in)convenience or great misunderstanding that lasts an entire book when a single conversation will do. It’s the romance equivalent of the stubborn family that refuses to leave the possessed house after the demon screams, Get out.” You want to take these people and shake them until some reasonable human motivation and action kicks in. If these folks acted like normal people, the story would last about ten minutes.
I also admit, I see less of this sort of thing than before, but it irks me more. Sure, as I’ve said before, romance is fantasy. We want the hero to be strong and sexy, the heroine to be pretty and bright. They meet, are attracted, fall in love, all while some reasonable facsimile of real life unfolds around them. The end.
It is not the hackneyed plot elements that romance readers hunger for. It is the emotional intensity between a man and a woman that you don’t find in other sorts of novels, not even many books marketed as love stories. That’s the fantasy readers buy into, not the idea that any reasonable person would succomb to Old Aunt Hattie’s irrational posthumous demands without first trying to break the will.
Considering that romance is leaching readers (especially younger ones) to other genres such as women’s fiction, chick lit and the like, which do not bear the same stigma (or the same sense of unreality) that romance does, maybe it’s time we did away with some of the more contrived elements of the romance genre for good and focused more on great, emotionally charged stories and leave the cliches behind for good.
