"Dirty Words: The Writing Process of 'Smutshop'." The University of Texas at Austin, Master of Fine Arts.
["I worked at Siren-BookStop, Inc. for three years, cleaning up
manuscripts and penning gay werewolf erotica [...] It was the best and
worst job I’ve ever had — the best because I got paid to write and spend
my workday making dirty jokes, and the worst because real sex isn’t
porn sex, and real women aren’t romance heroines, and love and
relationships are messy and complicated and when you spend all day
boxing it into the confines of a highly formulaic genre, you’re bound to
start getting some messed-up ideas about how your love life ought to
be"]
Hm...maybe romance heroines don't seem like real women because they're absent any experience that would prevent the audience from standing in her shoes, e.g. heartbreak, kids, etc. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a fantasy, which is the line romance is forever toeing. I don't think authors necessarily absorb romance cliches into their own thinking though.
" they're absent any experience that would prevent the audience from standing in her shoes, e.g. heartbreak, kids, etc."
There are quite a lot of divorced and widowed heroines, some with children and/or whose child(ren) have died. I don't think the "fantasy" of romance is that there's no suffering in life. As Pamela Regis has argued, one of the key elements of a romance novel is a "moment of ritual death" and the RWA definition of romance fiction states that "In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love".
I think one of the core messages of romance is that love (primarily romantic love, but also of family and friends) can help people overcome a lot of suffering. Whether/to what extent it does that in a realistic/relatable way is another issue.
Hm...maybe romance heroines don't seem like real women because they're absent any experience that would prevent the audience from standing in her shoes, e.g. heartbreak, kids, etc. Otherwise, it wouldn't be a fantasy, which is the line romance is forever toeing. I don't think authors necessarily absorb romance cliches into their own thinking though.
ReplyDelete" they're absent any experience that would prevent the audience from standing in her shoes, e.g. heartbreak, kids, etc."
ReplyDeleteThere are quite a lot of divorced and widowed heroines, some with children and/or whose child(ren) have died. I don't think the "fantasy" of romance is that there's no suffering in life. As Pamela Regis has argued, one of the key elements of a romance novel is a "moment of ritual death" and the RWA definition of romance fiction states that "In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love".
I think one of the core messages of romance is that love (primarily romantic love, but also of family and friends) can help people overcome a lot of suffering. Whether/to what extent it does that in a realistic/relatable way is another issue.