Musings on Romance Writing

If you're just jumping in, I'll save you a mouse-click - we're having a discussion about romance writing. Catch up HERE.

Meg made a comment that I began to respond to, about not wanting to judge romance writing. My comment was so long I thought I'd just post it here. This is an interesting conversation, no?

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I feel the same way, Meg. I don't have a high opinion of the genre but then I feel bad about that. How can I possibly judge? If someone likes it, they like it. Just because you write it, doesn't mean you aren't smart and literary, either. It is what it is. For me personally, it doesn't satisfy because I get hung up on what feels like cheesiness. I like romance to be a lot more complicated and sophisticated and EARNED. In a romance novel, the romance doesn't feel earned; the terrain is too predicable for me personally.

But on the other hand, I will boldly contradict myself and lay down a more honest opinion of romance writing:

Something that bugs the hell out of me in society today is this dichotomy between a proliferation of absolute online RAGE and, on the other hand, a politically correct hesitance to really state your opinion on anything. We soft shoe and tippy-toe in case we could possibly offend anybody.

Here's what I really think. I think that romance novels are a simple type of entertainment with a place and a purpose but that they are in no way, shape or form on par with really great, transformative writing and by that I don't mean dead white men literature but writers like Sherman Alexie, Russell Banks, Anne Lammott, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and I could go on for weeks.

But then, I'm not sure romance writers would equate themselves with writers like that, either. I really don't know. They might read and enjoy great writing too. Romance writers might write other stuff that IS on par with truly great writing. But romance novels are romance novels.

Maybe it is the mark of a great writer that you could put on that hat and write romance but be equally adept at writing something much more sophisticated. Maybe there is a preconception that romance writers just aren't good writers. How can we know that based only on romance novels? We don't know what else they write. But this sells. So they are making money writing what would appear to be "low-brow". Maybe some judgment or prejudice comes from professinal jealousy. These writers are making money hand-over-fist. They sell to the masses. How can anything populist have actual merit?

Well - waitta gol darn minute - aren't movies populist? Are screenwriters not good writers? Well, they surely don't make money hand-over-fist, by dint of statistics alone, but who's to say what good writing is or isn't? None of the writers I mentioned above are making two million dollars a book. Is making less money the mark of a great writer? That seems to be an elitist conclusion, to say the least.

I guess the question for me is this: to write anything well, you have to have some kind of passion for the subject and for the act of writing itself. So it follows, then, that romance writers really feel a passion for the contrived, simplistic, cheesy, over-the-top stuff they write. Or do they? Maybe the joke's on us.

The bottom line is that in the world of writing, there is a great spectrum, from serial, boilerplate romance and detective stories (three words:Mary Higgins Clark) to intellectual and sometimes inaccessible literature (two words: Don DeLillo). Who among us has not been on a plane or on vacation and read something we got at the airport and enjoyed it but later threw it away with some embarrassment? And the bar may be different for each of us: for me, M.H. Clark is a no-fly zone. I just can't read her writing, it's too awful for me. Steven King used to be considered about one notch above Clark but over time, has risen to a much more respectable position. He ain't no literary writer but damn can that man tell a story. And I like him because he doesn't take himself too seriously.

But who am I to say? For some, that itch-scratching is exactly what they wanted and needed in that moment or during that time in their life. When I was a kid, I consumed Nancy Drew books. Total serial writing by a number of writers. I was ten, I liked it, it worked for me. Who am I or anybody else to judge what scratches an itch for a reader? Isn't it all bread and circus?

Here's what for me is the entertaining question: Do romance writers take themselves seriously? Or do they know full well that they are scratching an itch and laughing all the way to the bank?

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