Why Romance?

The perfume that she wore was from some little store
On the down side of town
But it lingered on long after she'd gone
I remember it well

And our fingers entwined like ribbons of light
And we came through a doorway somewhere in the night

Her long flowing hair came softly undone
And it lay all around
And she brushed it down as I stood by her side
In the warmth of her love

And she showed me her treasures of paper and tin
And then we played a game only she could win
And she told me a riddle I'll never forget
Then left with the answer I've never found yet

How long, said she, can a moment like this
Belong to someone
What's wrong, what is right, when to live or to die
We must almost be born

So if you should ask me what secrets I hide
I'm only your lover, don't make me decide

The perfume that she wore was from some little store
On the down side of town
But it lingered on long after she'd gone
I remember it well

And she showed me her treasures of paper and tin
And then we played a game only she could win
And our fingers entwined like ribbons of light
And we came through a doorway somewhere in the night

[“Affair on 8th Avenue,” Gordon Lightfoot]

     As I'm somewhat...old, most of my musical favorites are from decades long past. Gordon Lightfoot is prominent among them. It’s a pity he’s not better appreciated today, as he was one of the most accomplished lyricists of his time. The lyric above is a good demonstration of his romanticism.

     Lightfoot’s romantic lyrics never fail to evoke the romantic in me. (His contemporary “competitors” mostly evoke alimentary disturbances.) His imagery is unique and uniquely memorable. It puts me in mind yet again of a saying attributed to William Faulkner: that every novelist is a failed short-story writer, and every short-story writer is a failed poet. But this morning it also has me thinking about the question that forms the title of this piece, which is really a special case of a far more general question.

     To be maximally kind, most romance writers aren’t very good. That’s part of the reason contemporary romance writing features so much sex. The author knows she’s incapable of eliciting the sense of great, loving passion from her characters – see can see the lack of it in her own prose – so she falls back on something most of her readers can relate to: the physical experience of two persons coupling. Yet it’s not sex but the emotion of passionate, all-consuming love, at a height that most people will never experience in real life, that the reader is there for, which makes the substitution of sex for passion a cheat.

     The yearning to experience a strong emotion is why any consumer of fiction, in any genre or form, is there in the first place.

     Yes, I’ve written about this before. Yes, it’s something that “should” be “obvious”...though given how many hacks are out there churning out bad fiction – fiction whose primary impact is more emetic than dramatic – at mind-boggling rates, my habitual codicil that “obvious” means “overlooked” seems applicable.

     Now, I don’t think my own drivel is any great improvement on the Thundering Herd of Semi-Literate Poseurs with Word Processors. But every now and then, I’ve hit that special note for someone, and have been rewarded with a personal note of thanks, or a review like the following:

     Science fiction writer John C. Wright had something to say about this to us who lament our tiny readerships and pitiful revenue streams:

     I write for that one reader I will never see, the one who needs just such a tale as I can pen, in just such a time and place, some rainy afternoon or dark hour, when providence will bring my book into his hands. And he will open it, and it will not be a book, but a casement, from which he will glimpse the needed vision his soul requires of a world larger than our own, or a star in a heaven wider and higher than ours, a star aflame with magic more majestic than any star mortal astronomers can name.

     I humbly but strongly suggest you write for that unknown reader also, and not for worldly praise, or influence, or pelf, or applause. The world flatters popular authors, and the clamor of the multitude of brazen tongues is vanity. It is dust on the wind. The unknown reader will greet your work with love. It is a crown of adamant, solid and enduring.

     You will never meet that one reader, not in this life. In heaven he will come to you and fall on his face and anoint your feet with tears of gratitude, and you will stand astonished and humbled, having never suspected.

     And the key to it is emotion. Laura Schultz found in The Sledgehammer Concerto the emotional experience she seeks from her fiction reading. How many other readers received – or failed to receive – that experience, I’ll never know. But one did, which made the labor of conceiving and writing the book entirely worthwhile.

     Which makes the “sex instead of passion” tendency among contemporary writers of romance even more deplorable.

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     All the above is essentially prefatory to this: I was recently privileged to read an advance copy of Margaret Ball’s soon-to-be-released Regency fantasy romance Tangled Magic. It’s set in the same fantasy-Regency milieu as her marvelous novel Salt Magic. If anything, it’s even better than its predecessor: more magical and more romantic, though with many humorous and ironic sub-threads woven into its fabric. If you have a romantic bone in your body, this book will find and thrill it for you. Keep an eye out for it.

     Bravo, Margaret! At last, someone else who understands the point of all this suffering! And with that, it’s time to get back to my own steaming-pile-of-crap-under-construction. Have a nice day.

Love And Danger

     Once in a great while, I’ll write a short romance. On even rarer occasions, I’ll write a romance novel. And when it seems fitting, I’ll incorporate a romantic subplot into a fantasy or science fiction novel. So far, my readers don’t seem to mind. Indeed, many of them have commented approvingly.

     Mind you, I don’t do “bodice rippers.” These are also known as “sweet savages,” in the tradition of the Rosemary Rogers novel that inaugurated that particular subgenre. I prefer greater realism...well, when not writing about anarchist colony worlds, alternate Creation myths, or bizarre developments in biotechnology. I consider love too important to be other than realistic about it, no matter how many young women and middle-aged spinsters dream of being carried off by dashing buccaneers or ravished by devastatingly handsome vampires.

     But there’s this about love, or at least about romance: Danger tends to render us more susceptible to its lure. So there’s a natural place for romantic themes in stories that feature some sort of adventure.

     I see no reason to explore the psychology of the thing. What I have in mind on this 74th anniversary of the Normandy invasion is the gradual infusion of romance into the “dangerous” genres over the past few decades. It’s stirred up a lot of dust, especially among “traditional” aficionados of those genres. Many of them have reacted negatively, as if “their” readers’ habitat were being invaded by something that doesn’t belong there.

     I don’t get it, myself. The yearning for love is one of the most powerful of the human drives. According to Maslow, it comes in just after the quest for security – and I’ve sometimes wondered whether the two drives are really distinct. Why shouldn’t it have a place in stories from the “dangerous” genres?

     The subject has become especially heated in discussions of fantasy and science fiction.

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     What constitutes “real” fantasy or “real” science fiction is a debate to which there is no final answer. The arts are like that. (I may not know anything about what I like, but I know art.) Consumer preference is all that matters; if it sells, that’s sufficient justification...at least, to the creator thereof. Still, you can encounter a squabble about the issue at any F&SF convention. Sometimes they’re organized as panel discussions. Sometimes they’re “organized” as fist fights.

     I’ll allow that when a genre becomes popular, writers that aren’t selling well will be tempted to try to wedge their stuff into it: square pegs jammed into round holes by main force. I recall a rather humorous story from an agent about a writer of Westerns, a genre that’s been on the skids for some time, trying to rewrite his most recent Western as an SF novel. The protagonist even strove to head off the bad guys at the Horsehead Nebula. This is good for a giggle, and perhaps for the occasional parody, but not for much else.

     But merely to incorporate a romantic element into a novel is no sin. Indeed, many a rather dry story has struck me as demanding an admixture of emotion. It often comes down to the questions “Why does the protagonist (or antagonist) do what he does?” and “What is he looking for?” If these questions aren’t answered adequately, the relevant figure is under-characterized. Under-characterization is almost always a failure by the writer to connect the character to the most important human drives, the ones we all share whether or not we manage to satisfy them.

     (A brief digression: Some drives can be transformed from a constructive and approved form to a destructive and highly disapproved form. I don’t have a word for this. The term for the opposite is sublimation. But consider if you will the character of Tiny from On Broken Wings. I submit that Tiny displaced his yearning for love into a need for dominance. I’ve known real people like that. End of digression.)

     Romantic possibilities can be approached from either of two directions. For example, one of the most striking characters in recent thriller fiction, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, regularly wrestles with his own yearning for love. It manifests in just about every Reacher novel. He encounters an appealing woman in the course of the action. At some point they connect emotionally (and usually physically as well). However, by the end of the tale Reacher’s determination to keep moving prevails over his need for intimacy. It gives him a strange, anti-romantic dynamism that’s part of his appeal. I keep wondering when he’ll meet the girl whose appeal for him is enough to get him to give up the road life. I’ll bet a lot of Reacher addicts do.

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     This is on my mind because of the book I’m currently struggling to write. It’s a sequel to Innocents. It also features several of the characters from my futanari stories (“A Place of Our Own,” “One Small Detail,” and “A Daughter of the County”). The story treats with the current foofaurauw over transgenderism, with particular attention to the sociological and psychological aspects. Inevitably, it must address matters of love and sex...and inevitably, I’ll get a few reviews such as this one:

     Unsatisfying mil action, unrealistic romance. Marty Sue hero who ends up forced to do the thing he wants but knows he shouldn't.

     Let’s just say I’m braced for them.

     I know a few high-octane writers – indeed, some very good ones – who shy back from those subjects. They prefer to concentrate on things they know better: technology, combat, political and social strife, or what-have-you. I appreciate the importance of “writing what you know.” I certainly wouldn’t counsel anyone to write about what he doesn’t know. But I’d suggest to those writers, and to many others who share their aversion, that that doesn’t invalidate romantic themes and motifs as elements in stories such as theirs. They might want to try wetting their feet in those waters. It can do quite a lot for one’s powers of characterization.

     After all, what moves a man to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor more often than love?

Romance In Science Fiction

     This is a subject about which some writers get defensive, and others become apoplectic. It’s become a front-burner issue over the past few years, as unprecedented numbers of women have begun writing books heavy with romance and romantic themes, but nevertheless are billed SF.

     No, they haven’t gone to the “bodice ripper” cover styles yet. And let’s be judicious about dismissing all such books as “romances disguised and marketed as SF.” Some of them are quite worthy. They merely contain more romance than earlier, predominantly male SF writers injected.

     I have to declare a particular bias here, as my books are “cross-genre” too. That’s why I had to go independent: the conventional publishing houses have so much difficulty marketing cross-genre work that a writer of such has to strike them as the next James Michener to have a decent chance of getting their approval. (The odds are somewhat better for a writer who: 1) writes explicitly for a susceptible demographic, such as teenagers; and: 2) conforms to one of the trendy fads: e.g., vampires.) So I have a certain sympathy for lady writers who find themselves drawn powerfully to opportunities to insert romantic motifs into the topically neutral genre of science fiction, as lady writers have been throughout history.

     I suppose the question is which “feel” predominates: the idea-and-adventure oriented “feel” of SF or the emotion-oriented “feel” of romance. There’s a fat gray area in there, which is why the fusillades over it have been so furious.

     What frosts a number of fannies in the “SF world,” if it’s at all proper to speak of such things in the wake of the Sad Puppies controversy, is that the writers of romance / SF hybrids, including some whose books might have borne the Harlequin Silhouette sigil a few years ago, have acquired considerable popularity, and their fans have become active within SF fandom. In consequence, a substantial cohort of voters for the major SF awards now give their votes to such books, which some of the older, “traditionalist” writers and readers have come to resent. A few of the “traditionalists” have been vocal about it, on occasion to their own detriment.

     Ultimately, of course, for conventionally published SF it’s entirely a matter of bucks for the publishers, and of course the tastes the readers exhibit with their purchases. Publishing is and will remain a business, and businesses exist first and foremost to make money. That’s not a slam against publishers, merely a recognition of the realities. Therefore, they’ll continue to publish books they believe, on the strength of the sales of other books, will sell well, and will ignore books that don’t accord with those parameters. The fires of the controversy will be hottest when conventions and awards are involved, as such things have been important to a writer’s sales in the past, and though they’ve proved less so in recent years, the future is...well, the future.

     Indie writers don’t have such problems; we only want to write and gather readers. Those of us who don’t dream of conventional publication and the riches of Croesus, at least.