Write What You Love and Love What You Write

Otherwise known as: Finding my joy in writing again via romance.

So a few months ago, I decided to try something completely different - to write a romance novel. Years back I'd made some attempts, but hadn't managed to finish one (other than a Historical Undone that got a form R). I'd spent the past year writing novels that I really enjoyed writing and were structurally sound but kept getting rejected, and I was frustrated with myself. The idea of trying out romance again had been niggling in the back of my mind, so I figured what the heck? You only live once. Might as well give it a go.

Writing Just One Week was a bit of a revelation for me. I'd forgotten that sometimes, writing can be easy. Obviously there's always work involved, but the words really flowed for me on this project in a way they hadn't in a long time.

And the end result really helped restore my flagging confidence as a writer. For the first time ever my mom (yeah yeah I know what they say about family but listen guys my parents are the harshest critics EVER. Trust me, handing my stuff off to them is like borrowing Lady Gaga's meat dress and diving headfirst into a pit of wolves) actually blazed through the chapters I sent and demanded more. That's an amazing feeling. Not only that, she forwarded it on to other friends and family who ALSO wanted more.

When I was writing just for myself, I came up with screwball comedies about physics and the nature of reality. But life isn't all about me. When I wrote Just One Week, I wrote it with the fond wish that it would make somebody else happy, and it did. And I think it's a better book - and I'm a better writer - for it.

So what I'm getting at here is: Even if nobody  gives my novel a second glance (though I'd prefer they did, plz and thx universe are you listening), this will have been so completely worth it, even more so than any other novel I've finished.

My Thoughts on Paranormal Romance

Okay, this is a topic that's been coming up a lot recently. There have been already been a ton of great posts like this and this and this , so I'm not going to go over why this trend of psuedo-rapist love interests is a Very Bad Thing.

Instead, I'm going to talk about why I think these books have become so popular.

Paranormal books are (mostly) about escapism, for a lot of people. They whisk you away into magical adventures with magical creatures that you wish you could see and talk to.

Or do you? Most of these books (for instance the Wicked Lovely series by Melissa Marr) involve extremely dangerous creatures who hurl the main characters into life-threatening situations. Often friends or family members die, or at least are put in extreme situations. The main character has to grow up fast and make hard choices.

Do you really truly want to live in that world? Probably not. And yet we gobble up books like Twilight where the main character has her uterus ripped open by someone's teeth.

I think that the romances in paranormal books operate on this same principle. It has to be more extreme than real life. If someone were to hop into our bedroom at night and be like "Oh hai there how ya doin", we would be mightily freaked out. If a guy sexually assaults us, trust me, we will no longer find him attractive. Ever. Real life sexual assault is horrifying and frightening and demeaning.

But in books, this romantic intensity operates on the same principles of all the rape books that were so popular in the 50's and back. Girls like the idea of a boy being absolutely overcome with need for them, to the point where the girl can keep turning him down and he'll come back. In real life this doesn't happen because if we like someone, when they ask us out we go "YES PLEASE AND THANK YOU SIR". There's no chance for a guy to go to extremes chasing us. Books like Twilight and Hush, Hush let us live the fantasy without ever having to be in danger or discomfort.