You reveal to the world that you are about to become a published romance writer and outside of your supportive and long suffering family and friends, you’re likely to experience one of two reactions:
Did you say sex, baby? Fifty Shades of Grey was grooovy.
Or you will meet the other kind – usually at a party with others and they will say:
Just as soon as I’ve finished reading James Joyce, Dostoyevsky and Odyssey in the original Greek, I’m going to write a literary opus, not trite commercial fiction.
Just like music snobs abhor pop music, literary types tend to look down on romance writers because it’s ubiquitous, popular and pervasive.
And not liking something that is popular, profitable and yes, still quality fiction means having to justify the dislike, so an entire mythology has to be developed around it. Anne Gracie does a brilliant job in demolishing those myths.
But let’s take a look at one of the most common complaints – romance is formula driven.
As Anne explains:
Romance is genre fiction and like other genres, has its conventions. Yes, romances must have a happy ending. Does this make it boring and predictable? Not in the hands of a skilled writer.
We read crime novels, knowing the murderer will be discovered in the end. Sometimes we even know who the murderer is. Does this make the novel boring and predictable? No. Otherwise the books would not keep selling.
I might have another analogy to describe this. Better still it’s a visual representation. Take a look at the following set of images:
Somewhere… beyond the sea…
April showers brings May flowers
Sink a boot into those literary snobs.
If you click on the links and read the content carefully you will discover that is all the same, including the headings. The web site is called CSS Zen Garden and is designed for web developers to show that despite having the same ‘bones’ you can create original web site designs by the application of independently developed style sheets.
This describes romance, and indeed genre writing in a nut shell. Sure there are conventions to follow (in the same way that every musical piece ever created started life as a combination of eight notes), but these conventions in no way detract from the unique, intelligent influence of a creative storyteller.
Everything ever created – from a novel, an opera, a painting, a bridge, a building or the world as we know it has to follow a certain structure, a certain set of principles without which the result is chaos. In the case of engineering, not following these principles could be fatal.
And if you want the last word against those literary snobs, you can always quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: