The Romance Writer
by Barbara Bretton

Picture this scene: you're in the ballroom of a fancy hotel. There's a cocktail party in progress marking the start of the annual American Medical Association convention. Two doctors meet over the low cholesterol cheese dip. "I'm a cardiac surgeon," says the first doctor. "What are you?"

The second doctor smiles and says, "I'm a dermatologist."

"Oh," says the cardiac surgeon, looking vaguely disappointed. "So when are you going to become a real doctor?"

What's that you say? Too far-fetched? No intelligent human being would treat another intelligent human being in such a condescending manner.

Oh really? Guess again. Substitute the words "Romance Writer" for "dermatologist" and tell me if the scenario doesn't sound familiar.

I have a theory that at any given moment of the day a romance writer somewhere in the world is being asked the immortal question, "So when are you going to write a real book?"

We all have our stock answers to that particular question. 

"Three hundred pages seems like a real book to me."
"The Library of Congress thinks it's a real book."
"Well, it sure seems like a real book when I cash my royalty checks."

Any flip, convenient turn of phrase designed to change the subject FAST. 

And we've all been there. No matter how committed we are to our work, no matter how we tell ourselves that the number on the spine is a marketing ploy and not proof we've been numbered and branded like cattle at an auction, the implication of that question--WHEN ARE YOU GONNA WRITE A REAL BOOK--resonates within each of us.

We're asked to defend our choice of reading material, our profession, whether we make too much money or not enough. Decisions made by multi-national conglomerates are laid at our doorstep as if we were responsible for the Playboy pictorial rejects that pass for cover art. Many of the marketing practices in use make brilliant sense from a publisher's point of view, but the numbers on the spine scream "unimportant" to the uninformed--or to the disinterested. The fact that a specific number of new books appear on the stands at regular intervals, identified more by line than author, sends out a powerful message. The fact that some damn good fiction is published each month is obscured (at least to the uninitiated) by the publishing method. Let's face it: there's a huge percentage of readers out there who will happily go to their graves avoiding books with clinches on the cover or numbers on the spine.

Which is something I didn't understand when I sold my first book.

This was February 1982--what I call the Jurassic era of romance writing. RWA, if you'd even heard of it, was in its infancy. RT was only an issue or two old. Not only were there no answers out there for aspiring romance writers, most of us were too naive to know the questions.

The good news was that I'd sold a book. 

The bad news was that everyone in the world had an opinion of the type of book I'd sold. The women in my writers group couldn't wait to explain.

No offense, Barbara, they said. You know what we're talking about, don't you?

I discovered that I had written one of those books, a romance novel, a LITTLE book. Those books you practice on before you write a real book. Clinch books. Sex books. Bodice rippers. Lusty tomes. Books with numbers on the spine. Formula fiction. Predictable fiction. Boy meets girl stories. Simple books. The books people snicker over. Soft porn for bored housewives. 

TRASH.

Trash? How could that be? The same rules of good storytelling applied to me as applied to Robert Ludlum. My editor put me through my paces. Harlequin copyeditors nitpicked obsessively over voice and point-of-view the same way copyeditors at Knopf nitpicked over Anne Tyler's manuscripts. It had never occurred to me that there was any difference between writing a romance and writing a mystery or a science fiction or a hardcover mainstream. It took the same effort, the same commitment, the same leap of faith that comes with having your name on the cover for the world to see.

Since then I've come to liken the newly-published writer to an atomic blast: nothing around the bombsight will ever be the same. 

You quickly discover that a struggling writer is a marvelous conversation piece at cocktail parties. A romance writer with a book on the stands is something else entirely. Your life becomes public property. Intelligent people, decent people who would never think to ask these questions of their doctors or lawyers or plumbers will ask a writer about her sex life, her yearly income, and when she's going to quit writing romance and churn out a real book. Writing romance is viewed as "writing lite." To many people you're sort of published...and sort of not. 
And, in the beginning, we answer them. We're so new at it, our emotions are so close to the surface, we're so damned eager to be loved and accepted that we answer their questions. God knows, I did. Somehow I believed that when I signed my first contract I relinquished my civil rights and I answered even the most outrageous question with courtesy and honesty.

I was a child then, 33 years old and too young to know better. Well, I'm not 33 any more, and the best part of not being 33 is the fact that I'm a hell of a lot smarter.

You share your heart with each book that you write. You don't have to share your income tax statement or your latest contract or your work-in-progress. 

You don't have to defend or explain yourself to friends, family, or other writers. 

Some people think we need an image. I respectfully disagree. Sure, I hate being linked in the public's mind with Cartland's pekingese and hunk bookmarks. We probably all agree that the public's perception of the romance writer takes more than its share of hits in the media, but I have a feeling that this "image" will begin to shift as more and more romance novels hit the major bestseller lists. In this society money speaks loud and clear and $750,000,000 per year is hard to ignore. 

Do you think mystery writers worry about their image? I don't know about you but I can't imagine Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton sitting around over drinks at an MWA convention worrying if they'll be forever associated with murder and mayhem. Do Grisham and Turow moan into their beer about being labeled lawyer/writers? And more importantly, does the reading public care about any of this or do they just want another good book on the stands? 

We've been around a long time now. Maybe we should stop worrying about our collective image and remember that our personal identities as writers and individuals are far more important. 

An image is a facade. An illusion. What we need is a voice...or actually a collection of voices, all strong, all individual, all fearless. 

And we need to be fearless.

We're the whipping posts of publishing: put upon, knocked around, the critics' favorite source for one-line literary assassinations. PW wants to slice and dice a book? Hey, that's easy. Call it a romance. Better still, call it a predictable romance. We're so much more than that.

We make emotion visible. We give depth and breadth and light to something we can't see or hear or touch. We live at the outer edge of our own emotions so that we can make those emotions come alive on the printed page. 

For a few dollars, we provide our readers with a few laughs, a few sighs, a few hours' entertainment.

And that's the least we do. Sometimes our books have even been known to change a woman's life, to show her a new way to deal with an old problem, to let her know she isn't alone.

Most people stumble over the word Love. We breathe life into it; we describe it in all of its aspects, both the spiritual and yes, the physical. We do the impossible: we write honestly about sex and we do it without the crutch of four-letter words or sly innuendo or embarrassment. 

And we reach people. Millions of people. We make them laugh and we make them cry. We make them remember how it felt to be young and hopeful and in love in a world that is often dark and cruel. We remind them that at least between the covers of our books, good guys win, bad guys are vanquished, and love conquers all.

And most of the time we do it in just a few hundred pages. 

Sometimes we forget that being published is miraculous and magical. When we attend RWA conferences we're surrounded by success. The published and nearly-published and determined-to-be-published are everywhere. Publishing a book seems as everyday an occurrence as brushing your teeth. We forget that to people outside our circle, it's the equivalent of flying to the moon. 

It hurts to expose yourself on paper, to be vulnerable to a thousand strangers as well as your closest friends. We might be writing fiction but our deepest self is visible with every sentence, every word, we write. We create imaginary characters but those characters embody everything that is good--and not so good--about ourselves. It takes perseverance and it takes talent but it takes something else, as well, to pursue this dream: it takes courage.

The courage to stare rejection in the face and try again.

The courage to thumb your nose at the literary establishment that sneers at the books we love.

Contemporary romances are meant to entertain, not change the world but in some ways we're doing exactly that. For twenty years we've been told women can indeed have it all, that we have a right to career, children, and a husband in whatever order we choose. Category contemporary romances have made it their business to show women successfully doing exactly that. Thedesire for love and romance are universals that cut across culture, gender, and the oppressive shackles of political correctness. Critics come and go but there's one thing we can be sure of: our readers are forever.

And ultimately that's all that really matters.


c. 2000 by Barbara Bretton




 

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