Romantic

I had some interesting comments on a FB post I made yesterday, and it reminded me that a term as simple as "romance" is one that holds a variety of meanings; as a genre, it can be rather hard to agree on its specific traits. I wanted to expand on that, if I may. And talk a bit about my own approach to romance as a concept...perhaps rather than as a genre. 

At its loosest and most basic romance simply means love story. Love stories can be fully realized, with confessions, and kisses, and consumation; they can be subtle, too, full of yearning, and almosts, and bittersweet potential. Romance can be the fluttery feeling of anticipation; it can be a promise. 

From a business standpoint, romance as a genre (mass-market), as defined by the RWA, are stories that "place their primary focus on the relationship and romantic love between two people, and must have an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending." According to this definition, if other primary elements of a story - action, mystery, political intrigue, or family dynamics, etc. - outweight the romantic storyline in regards to page time and narrative focus, or if the ending is sad, the novel cannot be catergorized as a genre romance. 

This is the only reason I've always hestiated to call myself a romance author. It's about the pie chart of narrative focus. 

Then there's the Walter Scott definition of a romance as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents." 

One of the reasons I always talk about writing is art is because it is. It has been, for centuries. Writing is a way of expressing human ideals, values, dreams, fears, secret desires; a way of reflecting real life, and of reflecting, perhaps, the kind of reality that still feels out of reach. It's entertainment; we read to be entertained. But the beauty of it has always been that, like the human mind, or the human experience, it's terribly hard to classify in simple terms. That's why, although I'm someone making a living with my writing, who is grateful for the industry that allows me to do so...I do lament the ways the industry has allowed something as rich and varied as romance to become this very rigid, boxed-in classification. 

Let's look, for a minute, at the Romantic Movement, and at Romanticism. 

Romanticism is an "artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement" that began in the late 18th Century in Europe. It was born as a response to the previous period, Classicism, especially Neoclassicism, which sought the mechanical, logical, and rational. Romanticism, by contrast, was all about the organic. About sensation, the individual, and deeply felt emotion. There was a heavy emphasis on nature; on being present in nature; hearing it, seeing it, feeling it. There was an exploration of human feeling; of human suffering and torment. Of love, and hate, and fear. If Classicism asked you to think, Romanticism asked you to feel - and it asked you to feel a wide range of emotions all at once, tangled up in a character's search for meaning. 

I love this quote:

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

You can read the rest of the essay here. 

Romanticism also gave birth to my favorite genre of all time: Gothic literature. From Ann Radcliffe, to Charles Dickens, to Edgar Allan Poe, to the Bronte sisters, to contemporary Southern Gothics like Anne Rice, and even modern horror writers, like Stephen King.  

I've often described Rice's work - her Vampire Chronicles are particular favorites - as "romantic," despite a lack of what a modern reader might consider a proper love story. But I'm using the term in a more classical sense. Lestat is nothing if not the ultimate searcher for the sublime. Her prose focuses on a really lush, rich, emotional reading of place. There is wonder, and beauty, and darkness in everything, from a forest, to a coffin, to a New Orleans apartment. 

Romanticism handed down a tradition of rich description, in which setting serves often as its own character. The scents and textures of a place inform the characters' mental states. Romanticism gives us mood. It gives us that deep inner reflection; it's where stories about characters struggling beneath the weight of emotional burdens originated. A work of romantic fiction doesn't merely tell us how to feel; the prose actually inspires dread, joy, terror, understanding, and love within the reader's mind. 

Now. That's all well and good, but it's 2019 out there, after all. So what does that mean for a modern writer? 

If you're trying to get traditionally published as a romance author, you have to adhere to industry standards. Publishing houses are trying to sell as many books as possible, and their approach is to appeal to the widest number of readers possible with books that are classified for ease of search. And publishing houses tend to follow trends rather than invent them. 

Indie publishing, though, is a more craft beer, garage band, Etsy-type affair that can follow or reject industry standards at its own risk. Indie means I can scream into the void about Romanticism and write my weird Poe/Tolkien/Bronte-inspired books however I want to. 

Personally, I view a romance as any story in which the love story has an important and rewarding impact on the main characters' narrative arc. By that definition, all of my books are romances. But some fall short of that classification based on strict industry standards. And if an audience expects those strict standards...then it generally behooves me not to advertise as romance. Though all my books are heavily flavored with romance. But, go back to the narrative pie chart; my books in which the romantic relationships have less page time than other relationships are automatically labeled as "not romance," or, funnily enough, "not my norm." 

Trust me, I still struggle with this. I hate it. 

What's been interesting to see, though, is that, even within the world of traditionally published books, there's some disagreement about the definiton, and this is largely due to the fluctuating level of sexual content in romance novels. 

To my mind, a book can have plenty of sex, but no romance, and likewise plenty of romance but no sex. Most romances do contain explicit sex, but it's the emotional components that truly define the story. Love is an emotion. If emotion is not examined within the narrative, no matter how much sex it contains, then it's not really a romance. 

Also, just a sidenote: romances with lots of explicit sex are not necessarily erotica; in order to be considered as such, an erotica novel needs to be exploring themes of sexual growth and discovery. 

For an author, it's important to label your books properly for marketing purposes. If I referred to Sons of Rome as a "romance series," readers would doubtless be disappointed, because they were looking for something very different than what I've offered. But that doesn't mean my books don't contain romance. Quite the opposite, actually. All my stories are love stories. Thirty years ago, then might have even been categorized as romances, too. 

There's more I want to say - specifically about fanfiction, its contribution to romance, and the way audiences interact with romance in media - but I think I'll put that off for a follow-up post. Until next time.