Love's quivering prose: in defense of romance novels

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1993 by Augusta Wynde

THREE YEARS AGO I was a bright and cocky college student who had just gotten engaged. In this blissful state, I decided that writing a romance novel would be an amusing and lucrative project. How hard could it be? I'd read Barbara Cartland novels by the cartload when I was twelve, and I remembered them as engaging but simpleminded little formula pieces. I was a good writer -- all my professors said so. The fact that I had never written so much as an adequate short story didn't slow me down for a minute; surely it would be no trouble to throw together four hundred pages of purple prose and heaving bodices. I gave myself six months.

Three years later, just as blissful but slightly less cocky, I am married and have just finished the third or fourth rewrite of that first romance novel. Along the way, I met several hundred romance writers, ran thousands of pages past my critique group, and discovered there was more to romance than purple prose and heaving bodices.

The most common misperception about romance is that it's about sex. What it's really about is conflict between the hero and heroine. The conflict may be external (she's Norman, he's Saxon), internal (he craves security, she risks her life every fifty pages), or a mix of both. The hairier the conflict, the more satisfying the bond between the lovers once they finally work it out. Whether the romance is a "short contemporary" (250-page novels set in the present) or a longer historical (they can run to 400 pages or more), the writer's goal is to make the reader feel, "If they could go through that, they can survive anything."

Most romance writers pull this trick off without much formal training. Although many have some college education, I've never met a romance writer who had a degree in creative writing, or who had spent much time receiving the wisdom of literary elders at summer writing conferences. Romance writers place stories in True Confessions, not in "little magazines." Like most romance writers, I taught myself to write fiction with the help of critique groups, a handful of books on "how to write romance," and the monthly workshops or lectures put on by my local chapter of the RWA (Romance Writers of America).

The RWA has mounted a campaign against what I had found the most embarrassing aspect of romance fiction: cliched, purple, or just plain leaden prose. RWA holds contests and workshops to train writers to use modifiers sparingly, avoid the passive voice, and banish the cliche. The quality of writing in most romances now roughly equals that of commercial fiction in general -- which is to say it still needs work, but it's come a long way. Most romance authors now write at least as well as (and often considerably better than) Dean R. Koontz, Tom Clancy, or David Brin.

Despite this improvement, romance is still the smutty joke of the publishing industry, even when compared with other genres. This fact makes most romance writers a little defensive -- there are only so many times you can hear what you write described as "that crap" before getting testy about it. Reading bad detective novels is considered mildly eccentric; reading romance novels is evidence of irreversible vapidity. The New York Times Book Review regularly reviews mysteries, and occasionally reviews science fiction, but never reviews romance; the very idea seems almost embarrassing in its silliness. Many people I meet are surprised that a "supposedly intelligent woman" could consider writing romance.

There are several reasons romance is so widely and deeply scomed. Sexism is an important one; the fact that romance is read, written, and edited primarily by women makes it easier for people to find the genre frivolous and unintellectual. Romance is also denigrated for being unrealistic, formulaic, morally simplistic, and sexist. None of these makes much sense when examined carefully, because the real reason lies in something far more fundamental: what romance is about in the first place.

Romance shares its lack of realism and its moral simplicity with all other genres. Spy novels and westerns typically show far less moral ambiguity or respect for realism than romance does. Romances are no more formulaic than most thrillers. And the notion that romance is sexist, considering the invisibility or flatness of women characters in much genre fiction, is laughable.

The charge of sexism springs partly from the prevalence in the 1970s of lurid historical romances --"bodice-rippers" -- in which a woman is raped by a hyper-dominant male, with whom she then falls in love. Bodice-rippers marked the point at which the sexual revolution hit the mainstream for women, and they show the usual frenzy and distortion that come after the lifting of long-term repression.

Historical novels of the nineties treat violence against women very differently. (Sexual violence is virtually taboo in the short contemporary, although it can occasionally be included, always offstage, in what's known as a "social problem" book.) We still write about a few testosterone-addled heroes, and occasionally, especially in a novel set in a particularly violent period, they do rape our heroines. When they do so, they are typically driven by cultural and historical context. Invading conquerors rape; it is part of the job description, and such a fictional hero will usually find the matter distasteful but necessary. It's not politically correct, but it's not historically inaccurate, either. Whatever the plotline, rape in romance novels is not romantic; it is part of the seemingly irresolvable conflict.