Dee Savoy

I had planned to write a rather frivolous post about the hunks on Dancing with the Stars today–until I happened over to Dear Author. The day’s post about the trivialization of serious issues in romance intrigued me, since this has been a criticism of mine about the genre since I first started reading it. In romance, tragedy is often nothing more than a plot device to get the hero and heroine to a certain place in the story, without adequate consideration of what real impact such experiences have on people.

This is how the post starts out:

A legitimate criticism of romance as serious literature is it’s often cavalier treatment of important life topics. Too often, war, separation, human indignity, are treated as plot devices, conflict mechanisms, and not given the attention and treatment those important issues deserve. How many romance books are thought provoking? How many challenge your personal concepts of right and wrong? How many portray multi hued individuals as both heroic and villianous? Surely within the umbrella of the romance genre, there is room for these books.

I can’t argue with anything that is said here, which does not mean, in my opinion, that no romances deal with important issues head on, but, in my opinion, fewer than should do. In other words, if you’ve got a protagonist recovering from a bad marriage, missing child, breast cancer, rape, whatever, or you’ve got a character who’s a soldier or cop, nurse or counselor, they experience life in particular ways that are often glossed over rather than exploited properly for the verisimilitude of their story.

This to my mind doesn’t mean every story has to be heavy or heavy handed. However, if you’re going to bring up the heroine’s unkind personal history, or whatever, let the effects of it reverberate in her life on a deeper level than making her wary of the hero’s attentions. Almost any serious event injected into a character’s life produces a constellation of effects. These can be explored even if you do it in a less than grave way.

I know that I had a hard time writing my hero for Soldier Boys. The story was supposed to be light and airy, so I kept it that way as much as I could. However, the guys a freaking marine sniper, and after reading even minimally about these guys and giving him the background that I did, I knew I couldn’t divorce the story from the realities of the ongoing war and keep it in any way beleivable. So I didn’t. The result is a deeper story, I hope, even though it is also really, really hot. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it works.

But I also don’t think that romance is alone in glossing over serious events or issues. The more suspense and mystery I read, the more I become aware that every genre has its way of trivializing that which it isn’t prepared to deal with. Ever read a sex scene in your average testosterone-filled thriller? Either it’s one of those wham-bam- excuse me while I come, ma’am, deals where it’s over in two seconds (doesn’t say much for the hero if you ask me) or it’s the sappiest bit of crap that no romance writer could get away with in a million years.

The truth of it is, there is room for shades of gray in every genre: true exploration of the human psyche and human emotions in every genre; contemplation of right and wrong and just in every genre and when we gloss over it or exploit it not for what it is but what we want it to be, we do both ourselves and our readers an injustice.