HOW TO WRITE ROMANCE - Lesson 2: Secrets of the Romance World

It's now been almost a hundred years since the birth of the modern romance novel, when British publisher Mills & Boon realized that their hardcover romantic fiction was outselling most of their other publications. From that small start, the industry has exploded – as you learned in your last reading assignment – until it's now one of the few niches in publishing where an author can make a living solely by writing.

Not all romance authors get rich; in fact, only a few of the best-selling authors do. But many romance writers provide a significant supplement to the family income, and a lot of them are the main breadwinners (if they can write multiple books a year). Compared to what the average author of fiction makes, it's good money.

So let's explore some of the secrets that may help you become a published romance writer.

Love the Books

The majority of romance authors started out as romance readers, enjoying and absorbing love stories. Eventually they began to wonder why a story took certain turns, and then they started to wish that the author had done it just a little (or perhaps a lot) differently, and their own stories began to take form in their minds.

This passion for reading romances is important. It's difficult to write a book at all, but it's nearly impossible to write well in a field you don't enjoy. A book that is written to fit a perceived formula is no more likely to make it to bookstore shelves than a paint-by-number kit is likely to land in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But even within the romance genre, there is a wide range of possibilities - something for everyone. If you especially like reading a particular type of romance, then that's the kind you should be writing.

Today's Romance Nove

The successful writer knows what's being published today, and how it's different from the books that were published last year, or a decade ago. The perception of romance as sweet, sticky, and slightly behind the times was never accurate. Romances have always been on society's cutting edge. And that means the stories editors are interested in buying need to be up to date.
That doesn't rule out using the long-time themes that were discussed in the last reading assignment. Cinderella stories, marriages of convenience, and secret babies will probably always be in style. But the stories must make sense today.

Years ago, Emilie Loring wrote a romance novel in which her hero and heroine were stranded in an isolated cabin for about fifteen minutes. When they were discovered alone together, the fallout from the episode threatened to ruin the hero's political career, so they got married. That worked just fine when Loring wrote it, but it looks pretty quaint in the current climate. Today's marriage of convenience must involve two people who make the choice themselves, not because they're embarrassed by circumstances or because Grandma wants them to marry, but because each of them believes that logically and rationally this is their best course of action.

Even historical romances have changed a good deal in the last few years. For instance, plots of some historical romances published in the early years of the genre involved out-and-out rape. (The term "bodice-ripper," still used as a derogatory description of all romances, originated with the suggestive cover art used on some of those books.) But today's reader finds it much more difficult to believe that a woman could come to love a man who treated her that way, and so even historical romances have acquired some distinctly twenty-first-century touches.

Emotion is the Key

A perky heroine, a sexy and dangerous hero, a "cute meet" (the first encounter of hero and heroine) – yes, those are all good things to have in a romance novel. And we could list a hundred more. But if we simply assembled all those ingredients into a book, what we would end up with is a sort of weird grocery list instead of a romance unless the reader cares about these people and their problems, feels their joys, and suffers their pain.

A wise writer once said, "Show me the pictures in the soldier's pocket before you kill him." Stop and think about that. Any dead soldier on a battlefield is a very sad thing indeed, but it doesn't touch us in the same personal way that it does if we know about his wife waiting at home with the baby boy he's never seen.

Emotion isn't the same as drama, and we're definitely not talking about melodrama here. It's not necessary for every line of the romance to drip tears. But in the words of Howard Ashman, who wrote the book for Disney's Beauty and the Beast, "Every single scene ... should have an umbrella of emotion over it, whether it's warmth or terror or love or drama or even comedy."

In the romance novel, emotion is particularly important. A couple of characters just going through the motions of falling in love might be briefly entertaining, but that story won't stay in the reader's heart. However, when two people risk everything they have and everything they are for the sake of love, the impact of what's happening to them spills over onto the reader. Those are the books that stay on the shelf to be read over and over again.

Romance is Feminist Literature

There's an entire school of thought that condemns romance as degrading to women. The books promote fantasy, these critics say, and they encourage the reader – particularly the very young woman reader – to hover and wring her hands while she waits for a man to rescue her and make her life complete.
But the truth is that romance novels as a literary form are actually feminist in nature. Yes, there is generally a marriage at the end. But it's the heroine who really holds the power in a romance novel. To quote Jayne Ann Krentz (who writes romance under that name and also as Amanda Quick), "... the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence, and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male, to his knees." (Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, University of Pennsylvania Press, © 1992, page 5.) The heroine tames the hero, civilizes him, and helps him to embrace his softer and more vulnerable side.

Far from promoting unrealistic fantasies in a young reader, the modern romance novel tells a young woman that she can be successful, useful, and valuable on her own; that there are men in the world who will respect her and treat her well; and that such men are worth waiting for. The wise writer keeps in mind the underlying message of the books: women can be powerful in their own right, and they can use that power to make good things happen.

Writing Requires Practice

The ability to write well is not an inborn talent. Though some writers are more gifted with native ability than others are, even the best have to practice in order to achieve some level of excellence. Writing is a skill, just like playing the violin, hitting a home run, and riding a bicycle are skills. In order to be good at any of those tasks, we must perform them over and over again. The violin student doesn't pick up the bow on the first day and expect to be featured at Carnegie Hall that night. (On the other hand, you don't have to make it to Carnegie Hall or Wrigley Field or the Tour de France to enjoy music, baseball, or sports. These activities can be appreciated at many levels of skill, and so can writing.)

Your first story idea may fizzle halfway through. Your first characters may turn out to be cardboard, your first plot may be a cliche from start to end, and your first reader may look at you blankly and say, "I don't get it." But your second try will be better. Patience, persistence, and practice are the keys to learning to write well, whether you want to be a poet or a songwriter or even a romance novelist.

Discussion

After reading the lecture, try answering some or all of the following:

1.   Can you think of any issues that appear in "today's" romance that may not have been acceptable in romance twenty, or even ten, years ago?

2.   Tell us about something you encountered in a romance that struck an emotional chord for you.

3.   Do you agree or disagree that romance novels are feminist literature? Why?

HOW TO WRITE ROMANCE - Lesson 1: The World of Romance

Sometimes it seems that romance novels are on the racks everywhere you look. Airports, drugstores, supermarkets, discount clubs, truck stops... Hey, you can even buy them in book stores – imagine that!

Stores stock what their customers want to buy, and romance novels account for just about half of all mass market paperback books sold in the United States each year. If we count only paperback fiction, the figure is well over fifty percent of sales. Romance is incredibly popular.

Romance is nearly as popular in other countries around the world. The largest publisher of romance, Harlequin/Silhouette, publishes in 25 languages and in 120 countries from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe. Readers across Europe, Asia, South America, Australia and Africa avidly read romances, even though the majority of the books are written originally in English and most are set in English-speaking countries.

All those love stories add up to half a billion dollars worth of romance novels sold each year in North America alone, more like a billion world-wide. And that only takes into account the original sale. Nobody even tries to keep track of re-sales in used book stores, at garage sales, at thrift shops and through on-line exchanges – but it's safe to say that, on average, every romance novel that's sold is read three times.

A billion dollars in total sales every year is a big chunk of change – and those sales figures mean that romance writing is one of the few areas in fiction where you can actually make a living as a writer. Writing romance novels isn't easy, but you can develop the skills necessary to write (and perhaps publish) your own book. In our romance classes at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, we help many students do just that.

This series of lessons will point you in the right direction, by showing you how to create your all-important hero and heroine and plunge them into their story. But in order to get started writing, it helps to first know about the form -- how romance novels came into being, how they're different from other sorts of books, and what kinds of romances there are. So that's where we'll start in this lesson and in your reading activity.

Why Romance Is Popular

What is the big draw of romance novels? There are just about as many answers as there are fans.

What makes them just as popular with readers in other cultures as in their country of origin? One reason for the foreign sales is that reading romance is a pleasant way for those who speak English as a second language to practice their skills and/or to learn about another culture. For a while, some romances published in South Korea were presented in double length volumes. Instead of including two different books, however, the volume was made up of the same story twice – in the original English, and in a Korean translation.

But the single biggest reason that women around the world are drawn to romance seems to be the promise of a happy ending. That's not because romance readers are shallow or naive, because they aren't. (The average romance reader is in her thirties, employed outside her home, with a family, a college education, and a household income that's well above average. This woman reads romance to relax – not because she doesn't like other forms of literature, but in addition to them.) And it's not that romance readers want predictable stories they don't have to think about, either. They like to be startled, surprised, and even scared along the way. But they also like knowing that in the end, somehow, everything will work out just fine.

Part of the fascination with a happy ending is that it includes an element of reassurance as well as fantasy. A happy ending makes a promise to you, the reader, that no matter how bleak things look sometimes, in the long run it will all come right. In the midst of difficult times -- whether the trouble is personal, economic, or national -- readers seek comfort. And there's a great deal of comfort to be found in a form of reading material which promises that even very bad situations will end up with very good results, things will always turn out for the best, true love will triumph over problems, and marriages will last forever.

Men, on the other hand (and yes, men do read romances, they just don't talk about it much in public) seem to read the books for different reasons. One man at a romance book signing was asked by the television crew covering the event if he was buying the book for his wife. No, he said. It was for him to read because reading romances kept him in touch with the way his wife liked to be treated.

Most male readers read their first romance because they're curious about what their wives find so fascinating about romance novels. So on a rainy Saturday afternoon when they're bored and there's a book lying on the coffee table, they pick it up to while away a couple of hours. Nine times out of ten, they're amazed to find that: 1) it's not pornographic and 2) it has a plot. And frequently, after they've experienced that first book, they keep right on reading. Occasionally a guy will like the books so much that he subscribes to a romance book club so he won't miss any, but he generally puts down his wife's name instead of his own so the mailman won't think less of him.

Romance Novels Are Not Simple and Predictable

The detractors of romance novels like to think that the stories are simplistic and childish and that they contain no big words and very little plot, just a lot of love scenes separated by filler. The stereotypical view of romance says that there's only one story, so all the authors have to do is change the hair color, eye color, and names, and then they can "crank out" another book.

But as you'll see when you do the activity assignment, there are as many different kinds of romance novels as there are reasons for reading them. Some are set in the present day, some are historical. Some are sweet, some are spicy and sensual. Some are long and complex, some are short and straightforward. Some are dramatic, some are comic. Some are down-to-earth, others feature witches or werewolves or time travel. But each story is unique.

(This lesson's reading assignment covers the various sub-genres of romance, as well as some basic story archetypes commonly found in romances.)

Romance novels are generally small (they're shorter than many other kinds of novels). They're light (they focus on an entertaining story rather than on such things as the evils of modern society). They're easy to read (the story is told in a way which is effortless for the reader to comprehend, to picture, and to understand). But because a story is easy to read doesn't mean it was easy to write. In fact, the more smoothly the story flows, pulling the reader along from scene to scene, the harder the author worked to create it.

The Romance Novel Defined

You will find that all romances have a few things in common – though actually very few – and that fact is what creates the common perception that there's a magic formula for writing them. In fact, the only thing romance novels have in common is a basic structure.

Here it is: A man and a woman, while they're solving a problem, discover that the way they feel about each other is a once-in-a-lifetime love that makes them decide to spend the rest of their lives together.

(Even then, the rule has exceptions: There are gay romances, and there's a new line featuring a younger heroine, which can end with her finding Mr.-Right-for-Now rather than Mr.-Right-for-Always.)

But the most important element common to all romances is that the love story is always kept at the very center of the book. In other kinds of fiction, a romance may be included, but it probably isn't the most important element of the story.

When you pick up a romance novel, however, you expect to experience a love story. The author hopes that you'll enjoy the other action in the book (the mystery, the quarrel, the illness, or the custody battle) and that you'll want these issues to be resolved – but she knows that you want the romance to remain the most important focus of the story.

So, gather up your interest in stories and your fascination with falling in love, and let's start writing romance!

Discussion

After reading the lecture, try answering some or all of the following:

1.   Why do you like to read romance novels?

2.   Do you like reading novels other than romance novels? If so, what are some novels you've enjoyed?

3.   If you are a woman, do you know any men who read romance novels? If so, why do they read them? If you are a man, why do you read romance?

4.   Why do you think romance novels are popular with readers around the world? How might the attraction of romances be different because of the reader's ethnic group or nationality?