Auld Acquaintance

At this time of the year, most of us have just given presents, written cards, or e-mailed all our friends and our relatives with the season’s greetings. Sometimes the lists have to be pared. We have fallen out of contact with someone. Or their lives and ours have diverged and we find we have nothing much to say to each other. Sometimes we wish the list could be pared, as the same negatives may hold for family members, but we still struggle to keep up the link for the sake of family unity or peace. And then of course there are all the business gifts and cards that are given to be polite or to promote our work relationships. These fall off naturally as we move from one situation to another. But probably the saddest removal from a holiday list occurs because the person has died. This happened to me when I was just out of college, and a dear friend crashed his little car fatally in a snow storm. (He’s the reason I have driven the car equivalent of a truck ever since.) Just this year I had to remove the name of an elderly cousin, the last remainder of a connection to a part of the country that our family now no longer occupies. And I was looking through some old folders and found correspondence from a writer who has since passed away, and from another who surely has as well. Shredding their letters gave me pause. I didn’t want to erase these traces of their presence on this earth. One letter in particular seemed full of wisdom and intelligence. This lady had a writing track record and had considered writing romances, but had concluded that it wasn’t for everyone. She also felt that much of the critiquing that takes place within Romance Writers of America chapters was useless. Many writing groups have these critiquing subgroups. They exist for the simple reason that editors at publishing houses do not have the time to give would-be authors detailed feedback about their writing. The problem is that the opinion of another author is not necessarily the opinion of an editor or, more importantly, of a reader. I was reminded of the difference between a reader’s point of view and an editor’s when I looked at the cover of an old sweet romance from a big name romance publisher. It was a pretty cover, which is why I tore it off and kept it when I threw the book itself in the paper recycling bin. (If you’re shuddering at this action, you may not realize that unsold mass market paperback books are routinely cover stripped and tossed out. And most bookstores do not bother to recycle the paper.) Yes, the cover was charming. But the story was very badly written. It was a typical kind of story and I enjoyed reading it even so. Yet anytime I started to dip into the book, the extremely poor use of language was very jarring. I ended up getting rid of the book on that basis. But most readers would do as I initially did, and note the awkward, stilted language subliminally, but keep reading for the plot and the characters. Most readers of genre material are reading for plot and characters (and locale), not for the beauty or originality of the language. And that’s the reason that the opinion of another writer on one’s writing is not worth much, because most readers are not writers. This letter from a dead lady about the value of romance writing critiquing definitely struck a chord with me. Here was someone whose intelligence and taste fairly leapt from the page. We had been casual acquaintances at best, and I had no reason to keep her letter any longer. But I was impressed by it, and also moved by the inevitability of change. Most of the time, I am an enthusiastic de-clutterer. Ever since I discovered that one can remove reminders of past pain from one’s life by removing anything associated with that time, I have been gung ho about purging possessions. Oh, don’t worry. My house isn’t empty. But I don’t own any crutches or canes from leg injuries, for instance. Bad enough that I had the injury; no need to keep a souvenir around. There aren’t closets full of old clothes, either, although there are a few representative tokens. (Shoulder pads, anyone?) This year I have been purging old paper files. It’s a wonderfully freeing experience. I even figured out what to do with old greetings cards that were so pretty that I had been reluctant to chuck them (scan them, and toss them out anyway). And now I am working through the correspondence, just at the time of year when old acquaintances are remembered and toasted. So, here’s to those ladies of romance who have passed to the next level, whatever it is. May their words be remembered even if the physical evidence must vanish. I hope your writing made you as happy as reading it made me.

Bah, Humbug

Finished your Christmas preparations? Turns out you can thank the Victorians for Christmas Day becoming a big deal as a family celebration. Prior to their time, there wasn’t the major compulsive present exchanging and family feasting in our country on that day. The Victorians are about as well known for excess as they are for sexual repression, so I guess it makes sense. It just seems odd that we have them to thank for this nearly intolerable pressure to buy, buy, buy. And eat, eat, eat. And here’s a surprising reaction to A Christmas Carol, that Dickens favorite that is supposed to remind us that you can’t take it with you, and you might as well be generous with your money now, and all men are brothers. I read an opinion piece recently that maintained that Bob Cratchit was a poor money manager since he spent everything on family entertaining! (I think Scrooge was talking.) Have you noticed the debt service and diet industries revving up for the January money and weight miseries? They are now an established part of the Christmas cycle. First, we are exhorted to spend and eat, then we are exhorted to stop spending and stop eating. This situation is known as satori, when two opposing concepts try to meet in the middle. It either drives you mad, or lifts you to a higher plane of spiritual existence. I doubt if I have reached a higher plane, since I still love to cook up a storm at the holidays. Specifically to bake. Today I made nine dozen oatmeal raisin cookies and a mince pie. And tomorrow—yes, I know it’s madness—I am planning on making five dozen chocolate chip cookies. It all started with a mistake in adding an ingredient, and snowballed from there. Now I have to find people to eat the excess baked goods. Hopefully, people who will not feel they must then repay me by giving me fourteen dozen cookies and a pie in return. Romances seldom dwell on these moments of holiday mania. No, in romances, the heroine makes the correct quantity of twelve kinds of cookies, puts them lovingly in hand-decorated baskets, and then personally delivers them to lonely elderly folks. (Presumably, to elderly folks who don’t have diabetes or high blood pressure.) Romance heroines also don’t go shopping at 3AM the night after Thanksgiving to score deep discounts on electronics for vast lists of relatives and friends. And they don’t faint in January when they start getting all the credit card bills, the way real-life people do. Romance heroines also don’t generally gain fifteen pounds in the six weeks of partying from Thanksgiving through New Years, either. That’s why romance is fantasy. Yet I have noticed that romances taking place during the holidays dwell lovingly on all the decorating, present-wrapping, cooking, baking, and other family rituals. And since such rituals are highly idiosyncratic, different in every family, they are quite entertaining to read about. Shopping is mentioned, but it is not usually described at length. Nor is the issue of overspending on gifts mentioned in romances. But mistletoe and holly, Christmas trees, and the angels on the top get lots of play. Romances can be positively Victorian in their gush over holiday traditions. Which actually makes sense considering that romances are sometimes castigated as affirming old-fashioned values. But in romances, the excess is all tied in to feelings. In real life, the excess is sometimes about putting in too much sugar. That’s how my four dozen cookies turned into fourteen.

Romance as Suffering

Here’s something I bet you never realized. Romances with happy ever after endings are a very modern concept. There has been a lot of discussion in romance land lately about how boring and stultifying it is to always have a happy ever after ending. But romances didn’t always end happily and they didn’t always get to a happy ending without a lot of pain and suffering along the way. Yes, one of my favorite types of romance, the tearjerker, is completely out of fashion these days, and it’s kind of strange when you think about it. Most of the classic romances in history have been tragedies. They didn’t end well. Marc Anthony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot—well, you can understand why that one ended badly. But you get my drift. What we think of as classic romance was unhappy romance. And romance stayed unhappy. Yes, it is true that Jane Eyre did marry her Rochester. But Clarissa was undone by Lovelace and died. Poor Lucia di Lammermoor went mad and killed her bridegroom on the wedding night. And died. The lovers in "Swan Lake" reunited only in death. And Rhett Butler walked out on Scarlett O’Hara (which was getting off lightly, compared to these other classic unhappy endings). But those of us who have been reading romances written in the past few decades are not used to anything but a happy ever after ending. Oh, we’ll accept them in classic literature, and even in classic films. There’s a wonderful article by Marlee MacLeod on GreenCine.com describing the history of the three-hanky motion picture, or weepie. Also known as a tearjerker or soap or sudser. Movies have paralleled novels in telling about some very unhappy love affairs. [[SPOILER ALERT. I’m about to give away some endings.]] Now Voyager, published in 1941 and written by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote the famous tearjerker Stella Dallas, was made into a Bette Davis movie, so it is still fairly well known. An ugly duckling from a wealthy family finally manages to shed her awkward social image. She falls into love with an unhappily married man. At this stretch of time, I don’t remember all the details, but I think that he was married to an invalid, the kind of woman that only a cad would try to divorce. And back then, divorce was not easy to obtain and still carried negative social consequences. So at the end, the two frustrated lovers agree to keep it platonic, and they light their cigarettes on one match. And that’s it. That’s as close as they come to a sexual expression of their love or to being together in the future. That’s their big (un)happy ending. The Age of Innocence, published in 1920, written by Edith Wharton, was recently made into a movie by Martin Scorsese. It told how a man was so constrained by his upper crust social sphere that he dared not consort with the interesting married woman he came to love, and he even urged her not to get divorced from her brute of a husband because it would be scandalous. So he lived a lie his whole life, married the wrong woman, and when he was a widower, still refused to reunite with the woman he loved. Because he sacrificed love on the altar of social smallmindedness. It certainly wasn’t a happy ending. The Prisoner of Zenda, published in 1894, and a number one bestseller in its day full of rousing action, ends unhappily. The hero saves the day, saves the king, and falls in love with the princess. But the princess, although openly admitting she loves him, chooses duty over love. And so the hero returns to England and his love marries the king, and all they ever exchange is a once-a-year love token. This should be a downer, and it is. But both the hero and heroine behave so nobly that their lost love is seen as a fine sort of suffering. Various more obscure writers of the 20th century, such as Ruby M. Ayres, Kathleen Norris, Temple Bailey, Faith Baldwin, and Netta Muskett told weepy stories of loves that did not go well. The chief element in these romances was suffering. In many of them, the heroine had a strong sense of being alone with her miserable feelings. The other aspects of her life were as dross because she couldn’t be with the one she loved. She just suffered and suffered and suffered. In some of these stories, circumstances kept the characters from confiding their feelings. In others, they talked about them endlessly, but obstacle after obstacle (usually family duty or social consequences) got in the way of being together. If they did have a fleeting period of happiness, it was set up in such a way that everyone knows it can’t last. Such as in Three Weeks, by Elinor Glyn. I can remember one story that went on and on, with the heroine suffering every step of the way and in every conceivable manner. It was great. (Well, actually, I remember the reactions I had; the details and even the name of the story escape me now.) Romances today just don’t go in for such extended suffering. Women still have enormous responsibilities, but the responsibilities don’t force romance heroines to give up on love. It isn’t necessary for a heroine to reject the man she loves to take care of her aging mother, or her young siblings, for instance. Societal roles are much more fluid today, too. Men don’t stand on their pride and refuse to marry women who have more money than they do. (Actually, I’m not sure this was ever true. But in fiction, it used to be a terrible barrier.) Women’s social lives are not determined by their reputations in the same way they used to be. Single mothers abound, and the worrisome issue of having been seen with the wrong person and thus condemned to social shunning just isn’t an issue for most people in our society. The suffering part of romance today is cut short. Instead, the stories focus on how the main characters solve their conflicts. And the conflicts are usually as much interpersonal and internal as they are external and forced on them by others. Thus, a modern Ruritanian romance would have action and adventure and conflicts between the hero and heroine, and yes, concern that maybe the princess can’t marry the commoner. But by the end, something gives, and it all works out. It’s probably a good thing that modern romances are so optimistic. But wait a minute. People have been complaining about happy ever after endings. And the current rage is the paranormal romance, in which at least one main character, or both, are dead. Or rather, undead. Or else they are werewolves, condemned to a life of being hunted and misunderstood, and...hmm. Maybe the suffering romance is still with us after all.

Possibly the Worst Cute Meet Ever

I just remembered a manuscript that I read many years ago, and I can't resist sharing. But so as not to sully my prior blog entry, I'm making this a separate one. Yes, I once read what possibly was the worst cute meet for a hero and heroine EVER. He was being treated at a VD clinic. For those of you reading this in foreign countries, that means he had a sexually transmitted disease and had sought medical assistance at an establishment staffed by public health doctors. And the heroine happened to be part of the medical/social worker team. There several very good reasons why this isn't a good opening for a romance. I'll bet you can guess at least one of them: 1) Introducing a hero who has had the bad luck or the lack of discrimination to have contracted a sexually transmitted disease does not make him appealing to a reader. In fact, it makes him repulsive and makes the reader question his morality. Most such diseases are accompanied by rank symptoms, too, which are off-putting. Plus, the idea of dangerous and disgusting results from having sex is anti-romantic. 2) A person seeking treatment at a public health clinic typically has no money. A romance hero ought to have his life together enough to be able to afford to visit his own doctor. Instead, imagine him sitting in the clinic with the hoi polloi for hours, just another number waiting to be called. A hero ought to be larger than life, not caught in the machine. 3) This cute meet is the opposite of cute. It might be considered realistic, which is not the preferred tone of a romance. I mean, come on. Who daydreams about meeting a man with gonorrhea? Nobody! Venereal diseases are generally considered to be dirty secrets or embarrassing plights. They are not the stuff of which romantic fantasy is made. 4) This opening gambit runs the risk of seeming funny to the reader, like a bad joke. A romance is not supposed to be a bad joke. Cynical realism is a quality that romance writers and readers actively avoid. While I and most romance readers don’t want to see a lot more broken down car, fender bender, or other cliché cute meets, this one isn’t an acceptable substitute. We’ll take the stupid mixed-up hotel reservation ploy over a nasty sex-related disease anytime. Sorry. I couldn't help talking about this. Because even many years later, I am still wondering what on earth possessed that writer to think of such an obviously unromantic way to start a romance.

The Cute Meet

The cute meet is a cliché of romances. It goes something like this: The heroine is having a bad day. Not only has she snagged her absolute last pair of pantyhose already, but she’s late for an important business meeting—probably a job interview for a job she desperately needs in order to support her orphaned nephew, her ill mom, or the like. As she’s walking along the sidewalk, a car splashes her all over. Her clothes are soaked. Ruined. She yells invective at the driver, an arrogant-looking man in a sportscar. A few minutes later, still dripping wet and looking like she was pulled backwards through a barn, the heroine doggedly arrives to have her interview. Of course, it’s with the very man who splashed her. And maddeningly, he doesn’t refer to their first meeting at all. But he does hire her, although she keeps having to prove she’s competent because she made such a bad first impression. The unfairness of it all! Or here’s another version: The heroine is distracted, and she pulls out into traffic without looking carefully. She slams her beat up old Volkswagen into a luxury or a collectible antique car. Out comes the owner, hopping mad. She and he have words. A few minutes or days later, she meets her new boss: Same guy, and now he’s determined to get back at her for her lack of respect for the injury she did to his prized possession. An office duel ensues. Or how about this scenario: The heroine is dragged to a loud party, either at a bar or at a stranger’s house, and out of nervousness, she drinks too much. As a result, when a stranger and she hit it off, she lets up on her usual stern morality and goes along with a seduction. For a while. Things are getting hot and heavy when she panics and stops them. She and the man have unpleasant words. Soon after, he turns out to be her new boss (is this beginning to sound familiar?) or the new owner of her ancestral home which her useless brother has gambled away while somehow also indenturing her as a servant to the new guy. The hero treats the heroine as if she’s a slut, and she is too proud to explain that she’s a good girl. But he secretly is wildly in love with her. Then there’s the opening scene in which a heroine is driving alone in a storm, stupidly not having checked the weather report in advance because she has been too busy crying over some problem. It’s either blinding rain with scary lightning thrown in, or incredibly heavy snow with ice. Either way, she loses control of the car and ends up in a ditch. At this point, a handsome a) trucker, b) cowboy, c) mountain recluse, or d) sheriff comes to her rescue. Although she intends to hole up and avoid all men, she and he begin a relationship instead. Ah, and then there’s always the vacation cabin story. The heroine has been loaned or has rented the use of a cottage, an unused family apartment, or the like. She arrives late at night and throws herself into the first bed she sees. In the middle of the night, she turns over and there’s a strange man in bed with her, or trying to get into the room. Screaming and carrying on ensue. The man claims he has an equal or better right to the place. They end up sharing close quarters because she is too impoverished or desperate to have an alternate option available. What is the point of all these cute meets? Obviously, they start stories with a dramatic bang. Literally, if it’s a fender bender. The hero and heroine share a dramatic scene of open emotion, often angry, before they officially meet. Some titillating nudity may be involved. They say or do rash, impetuous things. They each see how the other person behaves, as just one human to another, shorn of the privileges of money and power. This opens a world of possibility to an otherwise buttoned-down character. But there are many reasons not to start a romance with a cliché cute meet. For one, they are incredibly contrived, because they depend on stupidity, on coincidence, and on lack of awareness of one’s surroundings. For another, they often introduce main characters who should be admirable as unkind or unsympathetic. And for a third, how important is it to know how nasty a loved one can get with a total stranger? Not very, really. In a happy lifetime relationship, how one’s spouse reacts during an unusual situation such as a car crash is not important. What if the man always flies into a rage? Or the woman always bursts into tears? What difference does it make to day-to-day living? None. Because cliché scenes such as the ones described above have been repeated ad nauseam, the cute meet has fallen out of favor in recent years. That doesn’t mean they don’t still happen. We have our fair share in our stories at MyRomanceStory.com. Yes, it’s always a struggle for a writer to find a plausible way to introduce the hero and heroine to each other. It’s even more of a struggle to come up with a reason for the two to live or work together and yet still have enough conflicts to sustain a story. But the contrived conflict of a cute meet just isn’t good enough anymore. A strained contrivance like getting into a bed not noticing someone else is in it is not good writing. Writers can do better than this, and readers now expect it of them. I do like the cute meet in our “Gone Batty,” in which the heroine has herself delivered in a barrel to her boyfriend’s house—only she ends up popping out, scantily clothed, at the wrong house, in front of a complete stranger. It fits with the rest of the story, which is about a heroine who is actively trying to push out of her boring comfort zone. That’s a lot different from starting a story with a heroine steering her car into a snowy ditch. What kind of heroine steers her car into a ditch in a snowstorm? Every kind. And that’s why the cute meet has to be dragged from the realm of cliché into the realm of unique, character-driven behavior. And out of the ditch of mundane contrivance.

Location, Location, Location

When I look for a romance to read, the author’s choice of locale matters to me. And to most readers. It isn’t enough to describe a romance hero as a haughty Spaniard. It’s important to describe Spain, to show the place that made this man this way. A story about a coolly remote Frenchman would not be the same without descriptions of his world, be it a fancy chateau and vineyards, or a major city such as Paris. And what about those wild and crazy Aussie men? To leave out the country that made them is to leave out a major part of understanding who these men are. The same applies to heroes from Texas or California. Not only are people from these states known to be idiosyncratic and colorful, so are the states themselves. I once read a manuscript submission whose story took place in Alaska. But the characters never went outside. They hung around in coffee shops. For all the local color they provided, they might as well have been in any chain restaurant in some no-name city in some bland state. None of the majesty, beauty, isolation, or ruggedness of Alaska or the individuality of its inhabitants came through. What a lost opportunity! The writer could have recovered from her error if she had described how isolated parts of Alaska become in winter, and how the moose wander in the streets, and how inhabitants congregate in warm indoor spots. And then the writer could have described what the landscape outside looked like during that season. And how the weather affected people’s moods. And what they wore to get from one warm indoor location to another. All of these elements would have given the story substantial visual and emotional heft. But alas, the writer did not use them. People pick a story to read not just because of the characters and their situation but also to participate in the locale. Readers like to be armchair travelers. A story that happens in Paris, for instance, gives the reader the opportunity to enjoy or learn something about Paris without any of the trouble or expense of going there for real. Plus, if the characters are local inhabitants, not just visiting, their knowledge of the territory and its social ways brings the reader in close. And if the main character is a tourist who meets and interacts with a local beyond the ordinary level of a tourist, the story gains even more depth from its location. There’s a difference between a story that occurs on the standard tourist route of a country, and one that explores something more personal. For instance, island cruises around Greece typically hit the same selection of islands. So if a story follows that exact itinerary, it runs the risk of being too obviously just the story of a standard tour of a country, and nothing more. On the other hand, if the reader has already been to that country and those places, the common tourist sights might seem pleasantly familiar. So the jury is out on whether going the extra step of seeking out-of-the-way venues within a locale is necessary. Still, the use of location ought to show some creativity. I read another manuscript in which the characters were in Tahiti and they had a picnic. Nice. They were outside at least. But just a picnic? Couldn’t the author find something else to have them do, something special to Tahiti that they could not do back home anywhere in the US of A? The location ought to be used to its fullest. In real estate, the humorous but true mantra is “location, location, location,” meaning that it is the most important element of a deal. In a romance, location isn’t quite that important. But how the writer treats location can make or break the reader’s enjoyment of the story. And ignoring or slighting it leaves a story flat and often unconvincing. It’s like seeing a play on a stage without any sets. The reader should not be expected to imagine Alaska, or Paris, or Tahiti. The writer should describe the location and make it an integral part of the story.