Jealousy and Truth

Friedrich Schiller was a German playwright of the 18th century who delighted in making up behavior by historical figures that simply never happened. And he did it so well that even today, other dramatists prefer his false version of events to the truth. And so does the audience, whether it be for a play, a movie, or as I recently saw, an opera. Take, for instance, the dramatic meeting between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth Tudor, her cousin and Queen of England in the 16th century. Schiller wrote a scene in which they met privately and talked. But it never happened. The two women never met face-to-face even though Elizabeth had Mary as her prisoner under house arrest for 18 years. Why write a scene about historical figures that never happened? Because Mary Queen of Scots was a tragic beauty, whose story still fascinates centuries after her life ended. Because Elizabeth Tudor was an amazing monarch, a woman who managed not to be ruled by men despite the times in which she lived. Because we want to get close to the essence of these far-off figures. And because it’s dramatic to see a person hurl her true thoughts directly at the head of another person who is standing before her. Much more dramatic than culling the random, carefully written words of contemporary diarists and observers and then drawing a painstakingly hedged and historically accurate conclusion about Mary Queen of Scots’ opinion of her cousin. This entirely made-up scene became pivotal in Donizetti’s opera, “Maria Stuarda,” in which the two queens jealously attack each other, supposedly over the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth’s rumored lover. In the opera (not in real life), Leicester is more personally interested in Mary than in Elizabeth, and that makes Elizabeth jealous. And sparks the dramatic confrontation scene. But Leicester is a convenient stand-in for a complex group of jealousies: Elizabeth was famously personally vain. But Mary was famously beautiful. Elizabeth’s mother, Anne Boleyn, had been convicted of adultery (probably falsely) and beheaded. Elizabeth lived in the shadow of her mother’s harlot status her whole life. And Elizabeth herself had been declared a bastard at age three, disinherited, and treated badly. She very nearly lost her head under her sister’s reign because she was the sort of threat to her throne that Mary Queen of Scots later became to her own. Meanwhile, Mary’s mother was of good repute, and a staunch fighter for her crown. And Mary herself was raised in the luxury of the French court, a petted future queen of France who casually claimed Elizabeth’s throne as the only legitimate heir and Roman Catholic claimant. But Elizabeth later successfully ruled her country, whereas Mary had been unable to, and had in fact fled it after her nobles ousted her from power. Jealousy is an emotion common to most people, and thus it’s easy to grasp in a mere few seconds of theater. When Donizetti used jealousy over a man as the way to couch the rivalry between Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor, he was perhaps cheapening the complexity of their conflict. But he was also making it fully human and pulling it back from the realm of religious differences and political games. And when I watched Mary lash out at Elizabeth and call her a harlot to her face, I had an epiphany. This is what Mary really believed about her cousin. And this is what Elizabeth knew everyone thought. It’s the heart of their conflict, the reason why Elizabeth had to execute Mary. The scene is theatrical genius. At MyRomanceStory.com our writers are not writing operas or historical plays, but we try to do the same thing dramatically with our stories. We choose a few words between a hero and heroine to stand for many. We look for the essential conflict, and ignore trivial details. In real life, arguments between people often can continue for days and weeks, with flare-ups now and again, and lots of passive aggressive acting out. People just don’t say what they are feeling or thinking. But there isn’t space in a novella-length story for this kind of extended dance, for the pouting and sulking in which people so commonly indulge. Our heroes and heroines have to get to the meat of what is bothering them, and quickly. So in our stories, we show people confronting their issues head on. Just as Mary Queen of Scots confronts Elizabeth Tudor with her bastardy in Schiller’s play and in Donizetti’s opera. Schiller’s imagined scenes and Donizetti’s imagined jealousy over a man work dramatically to tell a story with underlying truth. So do our pithy bits of dialogue and carefully selected confrontations. Every word moves the story along, reveals the nature of a conflict, or confronts it. (With the exception being, usually, lovemaking.) It’s not that our characters have little to say to each other. It’s that they have to say it as effectively and as dramatically as possible. Donizetti uses jealousy over a man to incite the insecurities of both queens. In our novellas, we try not to use the jealousy card, which has been overused in romances. We go straight to the truth card instead.

Romance Cover Styles

I’ve just visited a fun web site, The Silver Age Marvel Comics Cover Index, that’s oriented to comic book fans, but it might be of interest to romance readers who want to know more about romance comics. It displays a limited selection of romance comic covers just when they were all about to be canceled back in the early 1960s, plus some from Marvel Comics’ glossy late 1960s-early 1970s versions, My Love and Our Love Story, that featured their most talented artists. Also, and this is always a hoot,there are covers of Millie the Model, Patsy Walker, and other “girl comics” that had nothing to do with serious romance and everything to do with comedy. Girl comics were, like Archie Comics, the sitcoms of the comic book world. Even today, you can pick up any Archie title and read the same ridiculous adventures of Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica and the rest of the gang. Every issue of Millie the Model was the same as every other issue, featuring rivalry between women, outlandish clothing drawn in a cartoony style, and silly plots. This is not the only place to view romance comics covers on the web, but it's got a nice mix. Admittedly, if you come at this kind of web site from being strictly a romance novel fan, it could be an acquired taste: You have to get past the hairstyles of yore and the outdated clothing. And the hats and gloves that women had mostly stopped wearing even when these comics were published. So the site might appear to be just a bit of historical trivia. But think of it. Newsstands were jammed with romance comics in the later 1940s and throughout the 1950s. The primary colors and simple artwork on the covers of these romance comics matched the lurid and bold artwork featured on paperback novels also sold at newsstands, novels by sensational writers like Mickey Spillane. Those usually featured a chesty, half-dressed blonde on the cover. Romance comics had the same blondes with red dresses on their covers, too. But usually more covered up. Compare the situation today. Today, paperback novels meant for a male readership seldom have people on them. They often are dark colors shot through with eerie lighting effects. Sinister symbols abound, a favorite being a swastika. There are no blondes. Meanwhile, romance novels covers show glamor men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns. Or vignettes of bucolic middle-American life, with pregnant women and babies sitting on front porch swings. Or hero shots of sexy male ranchers, cops, or firefighters. Yet both kinds of books are sold in the same places. Newsstands hardly exist anymore, but now paperback novels are found in every drugstore and discount emporium. And even in bookstores. Originally, paperback books were considered too plebeian for bookstores, as were comics. Now these complementary popular fictions are still to be found together, and their covers don't have to shout at pedestrians strolling past. Plus you can buy a latte on site and sit in a comfy chair to read them.

NaNoWriMo

It’s not too late to sign up for NaNoWriMo. The National Novel Writing Month is happening November 1- November 30. Right now. Having trouble writing your novel without a contract in hand? Get a structured deadline by joining NaNoWriMo (no fees, no personal info except a valid e-mail address required) and be in an online community of 90,000 hopeful novelists, all writing their hearts out in the month of November. Feeling lonely just you and your computer? Join NaNoWriMo and discover fellow sufferers in nearby and far off places. Post about problems. Ask research questions. Vent about your unruly characters. There are forums for all, and you can start your own threads, too. Or do you yearn to meet other writers without the expense of conferences and seminars? Join NaNoWriMo and become part of various write-ins being held all over the country. The NaNoWriMo goal? Write 50,000 words in just one month. In 30 days. Well, now you’ve only got 25 days. That’s a mere 2,000 words a day. Or put another way, a mere eight pages of double-spaced typing. On some word processors, even fewer pages. You can do it. Writing so much and so fast can lead to light-headedness, which might explain some of the trash talkin’ challenges issued by NaNoWriMo regions to rival regions. Maryland has a challenge going against a Texas group, for instance. To win the battle of words (literally, the word count), those writers have rounded up a posse of ambitious wordsmiths, some of whom are promising to write at least 75,000 words or even 150,000 this month! And the good news is that many of these writers are returning from the NaNoWriMo last year as winners. They wrote their 50,000 words then, and they expect to write another 50,000 words this very November. They know it can be done. Kind of lights a fire under you procrastinators, doesn’t it? What’s the reward? Obviously, you’ll have all that manuscript, those lovely 50,000 words to edit and rewrite come December. No rewriting now, please. Just steam ahead, unedited, unburdened by second thoughts. If a character takes a wrong turn in Chapter 2, don’t sweat it. Just keep writing. Maybe she’ll straighten up by Chapter 10. Or maybe she’ll develop into a whole new person. Lots of surprises await you if you’ll just sit down (or stand up, Hemingway did) and write! Does the NaNoWriMo org offer a prize? Sure, a certificate. It can hang alongside your certificates for completing seminars, or showing up at camp, or whatever. If you need that kind of validation. They even have an ingenious method of verifying your word count. You scramble your manuscript and send it to be counted, not read. Their computer counts the words and then dumps the manuscript. And if you are completely untrusting, you can just post your daily totals. No hassles. The purpose of NaNoWriMo is to help you, the would-be writer, write up a storm. So go to it!

The Shape of Things to Come

At my dentist’s the other day, I wondered why he wasn’t playing the usual 1950s rock and roll he likes. He said indignantly, “There’s no 1950s music left!” Broadcast radio today is very straight-jacketed and owned by very few companies. Somewhere, some executive issued a memo, and now it’s nearly impossible to find a station that plays anything older than the late 1970s mixed with newer “oldies.” Ever the fixer, I suggested subscription satellite radio, which has separate channels for various decades of music. But my dentist pointed out that they don’t carry news, and so then he wouldn’t find out about local traffic jams that might be keeping his next patient from arriving on time. Sure, he could tune to the news channel, but he doesn’t want to hear all news. So he’s stuck with regular radio and music from an era he dislikes: Disco. This happens to romance readers, too. Readers who do not want to read romances with a lot of sex or bad words in them are pretty much stuck these days. They can pick from a slender selection of category romances from a few publishers. They can read inspirational romances, but the narrowly focused evangelical Christian kind of story doesn’t usually appeal to a reader who is Jewish, or Episcopalian, and so on. They can try YA (young adult) books, but these are often about teenagers who are in the throes of adolescence and not ready to settle on a lifelong mate. The seeming solution is to read older romances. But then the reader is stuck in a time warp, with topical stories or themes that proceed along old-fashioned lines. This can be fun, but it’s also limited. I myself have enjoyed reading contemporary romances written many decades ago, in which heroines lost their fortunes because of World War I, or the Depression. But sadness over not being able to wear silk underwear, speed around in a roadster, and dine at the Ritz seems more and more alien. These are historical romances already. It’s not that these antique romances did not have any sensual component or real romantic or social issues. They did. The dreadful choice of being rich or being a shopgirl still resonates in our modern culture, only today it is the choice between launching a career and being forced to work at Wal-Mart. The emotionally embroidered romances of Ethel M. Dell and her ilk in the 1920s were pretty frank sexually, without being detailed. The heroine in E. M. Hull’s groundbreaking novel, The Sheik—the big romance of the 1920s era—gets abducted in the desert and her captor has his way with her. Yep. Forced sex. These stories eschewed specific sexual details and instead used hyperbolic emotionality. But the relationships were resolved along conventional lines of the day. She marries her Sheik, who turns out to be—just like Tarzan—a long-lost British aristocrat. Very conventional and true to the prejudices of its day. Back then, even a real-life adventurous person like Alice Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr., the famous science fiction writer), after a youth spent on safaris in Africa, was expected to make her debut and just marry well and be done with it. It’s doubtful that romance readers looking for less sex and less bad language also want less opportunity for their heroines. Later last century a more prudish streak occurred, and a goodnight kiss suddenly was all that ever happened between a hero and a heroine. Mary Stewart’s couples in the early 1950s, even the pair who were exes in Wildfire at Midnight, never shared more than a kiss. (Stewart’s heroines never seemed to be doing much, either. They were sometimes teachers on vacation. Occasionally and most memorably in Nine Coaches Waiting, a governess. But mostly, they appeared to live off inherited money.) During this era, heroes and heroines seemed farther apart than ever, especially as so many supposed romances tended to be more about spies and mysteries than about love. And if they did focus on romance exclusively, the heroes were drawn as domineering pigs. The writing style typical for this kind of story was laconic, making a few words stand for many, and forcing the reader to fill in the gaps. This kind of style still works quite well in a murder mystery or a tale of suspense. But it is unlikely to satisfy a reader who doesn’t want a lot of cursing and sexual detail but who still wants a full-blown romance. What famously happened to romances circa 1977 (and thus, yet another major change in direction in just one century of romances) is that they started to confront the very issues that they raised. Characters no longer spent whole books wondering about each other’s feelings; instead, they talked, argued, and generally expressed themselves. And because people can land themselves in plenty of trouble just by opening their mouths, the stories still had lots of excitement to offer even though conversation often was what moved the plot. This verbal effusion was matched by a sensuous explosion. Where before, a few words were sufficient to describe a hero as attractive, now the stories spent vast amounts of space on small details and on reiterating the erotic effect of one character’s physical impact on another. Thus, the romance gained a level of description it simply didn’t have before except in symbolism. (Ethel M. Dell had lushly emotional descriptions but her physical details were few and discreet.) A third change was thematic. No longer did romance plots generally feature emotionally distant, domineering men whose main goal appeared to be the subjugation by humiliation or violence of a basically helpless (and often naive) heroine. Stories in which the hero and heroine were mostly antagonistic towards each other from across a wide gender gulf —whether they were equals or it was a David and Goliath situation—stopped being the mainstay of romance. In addition to confronting on life issues, heroes and heroines also resolved sexual issues by experiencing a happy sex life. Whatever the plot contortions, they ended up plausibly ready to live happily ever. But as a necessary part of finding this fundamental honesty to the relationship, the door to the bedroom was opened. How or why to shut it? When the details of the sex are not crucial to the development of the story, of course. This is something that each author decides for herself. As younger generations of women launch writing careers, the sexual frankness they’ve always known in our culture might influence them to include details with a different purpose than was perceived by a prior generation of writers. Kind of like including the details of a fabulous dinner out. And maybe no more important than that dinner. Conversely, it could be a good reason for skipping the details. Possibly a younger generation of women is so well aware of their sexuality that they seldom encounter any sexual issues. Thus, no need to open the bedroom door at all. This is seen already in chick lit stories. Their heroines have sex, but it is mostly recreational sex and few details are given. Those are two versions of one possibility, that sex will or can decline as a significant issue in a romantic relationship. There are so many other areas in a relationship to cause conflicts; one only has to read an advice column to realize that the range of potential problems is incredibly broad. I don’t think sex ought to be assumed to be automatically wonderful (or routine) and become taboo again, though. For most people, it is a very important issue. As for the language problem, I’ve discussed that in another blog. While I, too, wince away from coarse language, the reality is that vulgar language usually moves its way up to respectability over time. Some basic words are still as nasty as ever, but plenty more are completely accepted now, though even a few years ago they were shocking. The older a person is, though, the more shocking it seems. I don’t want to minimize how unpleasant this is. But it is doubtful that people who think nothing of saying these words will feel compelled not to write them. Do I have an answer for romance readers seeking stories with less sex and fewer bad words? Or for my dentist who is longing for 1950s rock and roll songs on the radio? It’s iffy. If romance writers themselves do not want to write lots of sex and bad words, then they might write different romances. And if their editors were daring enough to publish those romances, and readers bought them in significant numbers, then the direction of romances being published might turn again. My dentist is out of luck, though. The music of the 1950s is being phased out of corporate radio. And disco, hated and reviled disco, is back.