After I’d been at it for a while, enough at all events to determine who were my favorite authors – Penny Jordan, Carole Mortimer and Betty Neels – I settled down and thought of a story. It had to have a girl and a man and they had to end up happily ever after. In between first sighting and the riding into the sunset, they had to resolve a conflict. Those were my parameters. I then mulled over the second valuable piece of advice shelled out by the Harlequin website – love what you write.
I wasn’t so sure about that part. I mean, after all those weeks of reading, I could see why so many people loves these: they were comforting in a way. This was a world where you knew you were going to have a happy ending, no worries. They let you explore the big emotional highs of hate, anger, jealousy, fearn and love for a short period in which you could either translate all of those feelings which occur in your real life to this imaginary world where everything retains the capacity to turn out perfect or you could immerse yourself in this character’s feelings and feel them for yourself.
But I wasn’t sure whether I could learn to love it, especially when I had to write it. Anyway, I opened up a fresh page of Word and began.
The first thing I learnt was that I was a condescending jerk. Romance novels might be considered fluff, but they're hard work. You need to keep on top of dialogue and you need to tell a story cleanly and simply in about 30,000 words and you have to rework plotlines and characters that might seem hackneyed to you but learn to overcome your prejudice and deliver in such a way that it doesn’t come across as cheesy to the reader.
Tough job.
It didnt work out in the end – after struggling manfully with everything, the structure defeated me... I needed more to work with, what with my rambling style and my addiction to million dollar words and frankly, I was a little uncomfortable with the sex scenes. Erotica isn’t in my immediate future, I'm sad to say. Repressed Indian chicks will eventually exhibit their repression at some stage. I sniff.
Article comments
1 - Anna
Great essay!
2 - Amrita
Thanks Anna!
3 - Scott Butki
This is a great piece, Amrita.
4 - Nancy
Good article!
My best friend is absolutely addicted to romance novels. She must have thousands of them. She could probably open her own specialty bookstore some day & live lavishly off the proceeds of out-of-print Rare Bodice Ripper titles that other women will be ripping each other's bodices off in order to grab for themselves. I personally can't stand them. Betty Neels. Ugh! If I ever come across a similarly hackneyed, trite author again - her and her obnoxious studly Dutch surgeons, talk about your 'Mary Sue' novels - I'm going to hurl. And Babs Cartland! God, that woman ought to be hung as a disgrace to literature of any kind - except fortunately she's dead. I think. But considering the last photo of her I saw, that might be in question.
What I hate about these things is that in general the quality of the writing & the plots are SO BAD. I mean, they REEK. They're the stuff of the wet dreams of 14-year-old girls. And as the Greek philosopher said, there's nothing new under the sun, especially in the realm of romance novels.
That said, Amrita's right: they're a HUGE business, and any aspiring writer with a more realistic POV than artistic hubris will swallow their pride & set to work to make it into the writers' stable of one of these very successful publishing houses, especially Harlequin, the creme de la creme. AFTER you've made your first million with nasty Dutch surgeons, you can be true to your artistic impulses; in the meantime, start writing those romances.
Same, BTW, goes for cover artists. Are you good at painting portrait gowns, godlike swains, and heaving bosoms? Then start submitting to the romance publishers!
5 - Scott Butki
I don't think I could stand to read romance books, let alone write them, because they seem so formulaic.
Which is, I guess, part of the appeal - you read it knowing what you will get.
One woman told me she reads romances to make up for the romance missing in her marriage.
6 - Sela
I followed a link to this article and am alternately pleased and dismayed. Pleased that at least someone discovered that writing romances IS hard work! And dismayed that some still think they get churned out by a machine.
I'm a romance writer and reader. Happily married, thank you very much. I think where folks sometimes get the impression of rote writing is by only reading "category" romances, which is where Harlequin/Silhouette is unsurpassed as an industry giant. While they make up a huge chunk of the romance market, there are hundreds of titles that come out each year from major publishers such as Kensington, Dell, Avon and others. These "single title" romances have a much larger and varied scope than is possible to explore in the category books, which have very strict guidelines.
Before you dismiss all romances, please expand your reading list. Right now, many varieties of cross-genre novels, i.e. sci-fi romance, fantasy romance, and romantic suspense are very popular.
Enjoy getting to the HEA! (That's romance jargon for Happily Ever After)
7 - Scott Butki
Not to mention the slash fiction genre.
8 - Victor Plenty
Excellent comic timing there, Scott. I already knew your line was coming up; it was what drew me into reading this thread in the first place. But when I arrived, its perfect placement made me bust out laughing anyway. Well done!
Of course, it helped that the rest of the conversation turned out to be interesting reading in its own right. Maybe I oughta read some romance novels to learn what women are looking for.
Then again, since I'll never be a billionaire, and I'll never look like Fabio, all I'd really be learning is precisely why, in much greater detail than ever before, what women are looking for isn't me.
9 - Scott Butki
Always happy to make someone laugh.