Confessions of a Romance Writer: I hate the fake identity trope

I don’t want to speak for future Lily here, but the Lily of today can pretty definitively say at least one romance trope exists that she will not use: the false identity.

I can’t stand stories where the major conflict revolves around someone pretending to be someone or something they are not. On the one hand: yes, good job other writers for showing how destructive and counterproductive that behavior is. On the other hand: it is a scenario that makes me extremely uncomfortable, so I don’t find those stories entertaining, and since I don’t suffer from any need to hide my personality or try to be what someone else wants me to be, I don’t need the lessons they contain.

I cannot imagine writing a story that revolved around that.

Let me clarify: if a pretense is used by a character as a quick means to an end, and comes back to bite them, but is then moved past and an actual conflict follows it, I can let them go as both a reader and a writer. Even I have been known to just nod and smile rather than expound upon my actual thoughts in order to avoid a fight, only to get accused of hypocrisy when I disagree later because the person I didn’t disagree with took my silence for assent–social pretense IS part of human nature. What I am talking about as intolerable is when the only conflict in a story is the collision of pretense and reality.

This revelation came to me recently via my Amazon recommendations. I do try to look at those, partly as research (what kind of title and cover catch my eye and make me look at the premise) and partly because, hey, I am as much a romance reader as I am a romance writer, and maybe some of those “also bought” recommendations will be from people with similar tastes and turn me on to a new writer I will love. So I flipped through them and looked at probably five or six of the books. And in at least three cases, the main premise was hero/heroine pretends to be someone else and gets caught up in a romance/marriage with their true love, which is then threatened by the truth about their identity/station/past. In every single case I got that shudder of distaste up my back and flipped right on past.

That was the only premise, at least of the ones I encountered that day, that I rejected out of hand. I just found it notable that I was reacting so strongly to one story element.

What’s funny is that I’ve actually written this premise–What You Will–but I think the difference is in timeline. WYW takes place over the course of one evening. Even though a deception is the main conflict, it is resolved quickly. One of my favorite plays is The Misakes of a Night, or, She Stoops to Conquer, which also takes place over the course of one night. And now that I think on it, I can find at least a few examples of books I like that use this plot (Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss, An Arranged Marriage and An Unwilling Bride both by Jo Beverley). But in all cases the hero/heroine was something better than what they were pretending to be, so maybe the problem I have is just with deceptions to make you appear better than you are. If you can be worse and still make someone love you, hey, you know that’s legit. But when you’re hiding something that diminishes you, then it really might be a dealbreaker, and that is…immoral.

I don’t think immoral is too strong a word, not for how I feel about it. I believe quite passionately in the idea of only surrounding yourself with people who like and accept you for who you are. I have been repudiated by enough people over the years to know that I am better off just being myself and knowing those who choose me really choose me, not some fiction of who I am, and giving everyone else fair warning and no judgment for passing on me. Aside, though, from the ease of relationships (if not life) lived by that rule, is the actual moral context. One of the most nuanced definitions I have ever heard of what rape is comes from The Honest Courtesan blog, essentially that rape is taking sex by force or deception when it would not have been given otherwise. So a man who doesn’t pay a prostitute his promised fee or a man who says “I’ll marry you after” but doesn’t is as much a rapist as someone who jumps a woman in a park–even if the act is not violent, the violation of her consent is. By that contextualization, a man who pretends to be virtuous and respectable but is in fact a degenerate rake (one of the book premises I rejected) is on some pretty perilous moral ground if he convinces a lady to fall in love with him and marry him without revealing his past. This isn’t to say that people can’t change, but…you should acknowledge where you have been. If the conflict had been a battle to get him accepted back into society now that he’s reformed, it would have been okay–since the conflict was, she wants to leave him when she learns the truth, it wasn’t.

I am really not sure why this one particular type of conflict is so problematic for me, except that it represents for me one of those intolerably “foreign” points of view and decision-making processes that happen when my little INTJ brain is asked to understand someone…else. Probably and ESFP or something. And “intolerable” is, I believe, the correct word. I literally cannot tolerate being in the mind of someone like that.

What about y’all? Are there any plot types or character types or other romance tropes you just can’t stand to read? And not just that you’re tired of, but that you feel this visceral, (meta?)physical rejection of?

Confessions of a Romance Writer: I Don’t Find Seduction Sexy

Let us begin by defining the word at hand. I consider “seduction” a pejorative term, because I read it as being talked into doing something that is against one’s moral code.  In essence my take on seduction is this:  just because you physically want to have the sex with him, if you morally do not want to, and he talks you into something you could (or do) later regret, the seduction cannot be a positive thing.

That is probably more absolute than it should be for me, but there it is. Seduction is not a positive thing.  And it bothers me when romance novels are focused on the seduction of the female as if it is. 

Jillian and Madeline Hunter  are two authors who come to mind as offending me on this point–basically the only discussion made about being the object of a seduction is “can he do the sex well? Then sit back and enjoy” rather than deciding if he can be trusted or if is he worth throwing away her future for.  I feel like the books where the heroine and/or her friends look only at the existential enjoyment take too much for granted that “this is a romance, and there will be a happily ever after, and of course we the readers know he can be trusted, so we can ignore all the very salient fears and what-ifs in favor of the sexiness.” That attitude grates against the constraints of the story if it’s historical romance, because a huge consideration for non-modern stories is the consequences of seduction; removing them kind of removes the point, or the weight, or the drama, of the story.

On the flip side, Anne Stuart is really good about showing the ugliness of seduction. Many of her novels focus on the negative consequences (and not pregnancy most of the time, because plot babies are really not the worst of the problems).

I think what bothers me more than anything is simply that seduction takes away the woman’s moral agency.  Romance as a genre has moved with the sexual mores of our culture into greater sexual freedom for women, and less misogyny and violence, but yet there still seems to be a stubborn streak of abjuring female responsibilty when it comes to sex.  Many romance novels still have themes of sex being forced on the woman. 

I guess seduction has become the new rape?

In old school romance the forcing was straight up rapey rape (even if he did do foreplay before penetration, sometimes), whereas now it seems to be more seduction against her will and/or better judgment….but it turns out she loves it, so it’s okay.  Which sentiment is almost as problematic for me as the actual rapeyness of old romances.

What’s hilarious is that I think the closest thing I have to a fetish with erotica (certainly as far as what I write in that genre is concerned) is dominance and submission, specifically male dom/female sub, but I think the difference is the permission angle.  A sub is sexually aroused by having their agency taken away.  A woman (or a man) who is sophisticated enough to grasp that about herself and makes the conscious decision to engage in that kind of sexual play with someone they trust is different from a woman who refuses to take responsibility for her sexuality and falls back on the excuse (even if it is only ever  used with herself) of “he seduced me until I was too swept up in it to think better of the idea.”  That is weak, and it is insulting to women as thinking individuals and equal partners in relationships, and it perpetuates the status quo of female as something to be conquered or won rather than an individual coming to the same action with the same level of choice and responsibility. 

God, I sound like a feminist theorist now, and, y’all, trust me when I say that is the furthest thing from what I am.  But in terms of romance writing, even current writing, I see the trope of ”woman who refuses to make a choice about her sexuality has that autonomy taken away by a man who forces her into sexual behavior” far too often for where I feel like modern sexuality is, or at least where it should be.  The force may not be violent—it might be force of will or the force of passion, so let me be clear that I am NOT calling seduction rape; I am not one of those people who says that anything less than 100% consent is rape—but it is still a woman being denied a say in her own sexual experience because she refuses to take that responsibility for herself.

I think that’s what bothers me the most about it, not the behavior of the men, which (in the non-rapey variety) is basically whatever the women allow them to behave like, but the behavior of the women.  Are we still so uptight that women can’t say “I want to have the sex with him” and make a moral calibration of whether acting on the desire is acceptable (or not) and then following through accordingly?  If a woman decides she doesn’t wish to have sex with a man in a romance novel, why does she so rarely stick to that decision? 

Honestly, the way women behave in these books—if it is an at all accurate portrayal of real life female behavior—makes me think no wonder men have had the conquer/seduce idea for so long, since all the women seem to be right on board with the actual sexy times, they just didn’t want to have to admit it to themselves.  So if we have generations of women saying, “No, I don’t want that,” but secretly wanting it and secretly wanting the man to do it to them without their explicit permission…is it any wonder why we ended up with the fucked up view that a man should try to have sex with every woman he’s interested in, because she might want it and not want to say it?  And then how many girls felt date-raped or pressured to have sex when they really didn’t want to because they were too insecure or timid to say no or to say no in forceful enough terms that he listened?  See, unlike the feminists, I don’t think that all men are rapists who would take advantage of a woman given half an hour and half a chance. I think most men are pretty decent guys, and I bet plenty of them would be shocked to hear that women they thought were willing bed partners—thought this because the women kissed back, didn’t protest groping or undressing, didn’t say no at any point or give any indication that they did not want to be doing it—felt like they were not allowed to say no and cried about it later.

And the  romance novels that perpetuate this kind of female indecision, this inability to reconcile physical desire with moral imperatives or perhaps just their own self-image as a “good girl” or whatever, make me sick.  There have been authors with books I enjoyed who have other books I simply will not read because part of the description is her getting swept up in his sexuality and feeling helpless before it. 

I have zero issues with novels that present female confusion about their sexuality, because I think it’s realistic for women, especially young women, to have questions and uncertainties. I have no issues with novels that depict seduction, as long as the seduction is contextualized as being a negative, or at least something the heroine must learn from.

What I can’t stand and could live the rest of my life happily without ever reading again, is a book that presents seduction as something to be enjoyed because the heroine can’t be bothered to live by the moral standards she sets for herself (in this case, denial of pleasure) or embrace a morality that allows her to do what she wants. I have one comment for the women who like that kind of story and behave that way in real life: Grow up.

Confessions of a Romance Hero: I Don’t Know the Difference Between a Cape and a Cloak

…or really any of your other sartorial decisions.

I know when you look nice. I know when I like a color on you and when it clashes with your hair.  I notice when you wear a bold shade or something glittery that catches my eye in a crowd. I know when your bosom is framed in a frustratingly tempting way, and I notice if you’re showing ankles.

Another gem from Longmire Does Romance Novels….

But I do not notice in a glance if your dress is a la francais or a la polonaise. I don’t think of your little spencer jacket as being jaunty–probably I don’t notice it at all, except to note that you are all buttoned up.  I don’t catalogue your evening cloak as being flannel or wool, and I’m really not even sure if what you’re wearing is a cloak or a cape. It has a front closure and hand-holes so it’s a cloak? Got it. I…can’t promise I will remember that tomorrow.

You should wear green more often. It looks nice on you.

Your servant,

The Dashing Lord Griffyndor

__________________________________________

Got that, romance writers? Can we please agree to stop cataloging outfits unless it is done by the heroine, of the heroine, and for the heroine?

Nothing annoys me more when I’m reading a section from the male point of view than when her outfit is described in detail, in precise and correct fashion terms. It’s one thing for him to notice the generalities–she’s in a green dress with lace at the elbows and the material is shiny so it must be silk…but he’s not going to think about whether it’s taffeta silk or satin weave silk, or that it has three rows of ruffles at the bottom and not five, or that it’s Brussels lace not domestic, or any of a dozen other things that a woman would notice because she would have been involved in making every one of those decision on her own dress.

If the hero is thinking about those things, the heroine has bigger problems than the villain of the story.

I am sure this is one of those conventions of historical romance that at some point became like the fourth wall in theatre, part of the suspension of disbelief we go into the story willing to give. After all, we read historicals in part for the fabulous costume drama angle of the genre, so we want to know what the heroine is wearing at all times. We rarely see her full-length from her own perspective, and since romance doesn’t offer points of view other than heroine and hero, that leaves him to tell us about her fabulous dresses. I just find it unrealistic when he spends a paragraph describing what she has on for their walk in the park.

Men don’t pay that much attention to the details of fashion–they look at whether it looks good on you, if it’s appropriate (for the outing and time of year and decade you’re living in), and if it looks like it was expensive. Impressionist painting style swaths of general form/color but no real attention to the details. 

Certainly my husband can’t remember my clothing. I am not sure he could describe his favorite of my dresses other than to say “that 50′s dress.” Maybe he would get that it’s black and white polka dots. But he’s not going to talk about cap sleeves and under-bust gathering and bias-cut swish on the high-waisted A-line skirt. I bet he hasn’t even noticed that the collar and belt are a different fabric with the same pattern, or that all of it is a crepe gauze over a black slip. He knows he likes it on me, though, and that’s all I need him to notice.

That’s all I need my romance heroes to notice. In fact I’d rather have a paragraph of him watching her dress move and wishing he could be somewhere taking it off than a paragraph giving me the details of her wardrobe.

Jane Austen had it right: “Woman is fine for herself alone.”

Confessions of a Romance Writer: I Don’t Like Supra-Quotidian Stories

In direct violation of the edict in Lucky Number Slevin that “Two people should only fall in love if there is a good story behind it, seeing as you have to tell it so many times,” I actually find romance novels that take place over the course of some grand adventure to be problematic.  Especially if the grand adventure is something completely outside the bounds of normal life, that real life could not possibly encompass even as a special event (such as suddenly discovering the world is full of magical beings or having to go rescue your sister from drug smugglers in South America–that kind of outside of life, not a “trip of a lifetime” expedition that you planned and saved for for three years). 

 The issue I have with romances that take place under extraordinary circumstances is…what happens to the relationship when it hits the mundane wall of reality? If every interaction between hero and heroine took place when they were full of adrenaline and high emotion, how does the dynamic between them work when the only excitement is what kind of tea to brew that morning?

I think this dynamic actually becomes more clear when characters who had some big adventure together in their book show up as minor characters in someone else’s book. They always just seem so boring, settled into their normal lives, even if they spend the entire span of the adventure longing for their normal lives.

As well, I think more often than not falling in love on an adventure relies more on coincidence than falling in love via the course of everyday life. What are the odds that you meet your soul mate on that crazy adventure that takes you out of your normal sphere versus the sum of all the places you spend the rest of your life?  I guess it depends on this: are you the sort of person whose soul mate is likely to be found in the same place you spend your life?  So in that sense, if your romance novel heroine is a Princess Leia type who is bored by princes, it might make sense to have her fall in love with the Han Solo-ish rogue escorting her on her adventure. If she is escorted by a man of her own class and background…why didn’t they fall in love normally? There has to be a reason they wouldn’t have fallen in love, otherwise them sharing the adventure and falling in love during it is just one big coincidence.  And storytelling that relies on coincidences is weak storytelling.

As a reader, picking books for myself (versus, say, having a friend put something in my hands and say “read this”), I tend to be drawn to stories that seem realistic.  Events and circumstances that could happen without serious suspension of disbelief, that do not raise doubts about whether the characters really find each other exciting or if they just find the situation exciting. As a writer, I am not inspired to write grand adventures and interludes that take place in a time out of life.

I know romance readers tend to split on this issue. Some readers love the wild stories, because they want not just a fantasy romance but an escape from the doldrums of reality. And if I sat here and pondered long enough, I could come up with examples of romances I absolutely love which take place against a backdrop of adventure. I certainly am not writing this to condemn that half of the genre! It just hit me the other day, talking about romance with a friend at the local bookstore, and how we have maybe a 2% overlap in books and authors we have both read, that I have a definite and decided preference for romances that are…more plausible than not.

Confessions of a Romance Hero: I’m Not Giving up My Booze or My Smokes

Maybe this should be

Confession of a Romance Author: I Am Not the Kind of Woman Who Would Ask You To

This rant is going to be a bit rantier than my usual confessions posts, in that it has less to do with me being a writer of romance and more me being a reader of romance.  Also it’s about the war on drugs, inside the romance genre, my feelings on which are more of an opinion and less of an objective reality than the observations I often make.

I was reminded of this issue in romance during a re-reading of Liz Carlyle’s One Touch of Scandal, wherein the hero, a man born and raised in India and now living in London, who suffers from insomnia and regularly smokes hashish to calm his mind, tosses his stash down the latrine shaft after one night of sex with the heroine and her magical, insomnia-curing hoo-ha. 

The worst part is this is after the heroine has already judged him (in her mind, at least) for smoking too much. So, you’d rather he not smoke and not sleep ever than get some chemically-assisted rest? Yeah, drug crusader, you’re really looking out for everyone’s health and best interests there. 

Actually, no, the worst part is she judges him for this habit AFTER she has taken advantage of his inebriation to seduce him. So, basically, she’s like “Oh, he smoked so much hash it’s like he roofied himself? Score. I’m going to tap that while I can.” And then she’s all, “Hey, hero, I know you totally weren’t ready to have sex with me, and I just took advantage of you…but you should let this date-rape be a lesson about why you shouldn’t smoke or drink or anything!”

(Okay, to be fair that’s a bit of an exaggeration of her attitude in the context–the part about gleefully date-raping him, I mean–but that really is the lesson I took the author to be giving us about smoking the marijuana in any form.)

The scene (well, really I mean sequence, as there are several scenes involved)  is one in a long and glorious tradition of hero who drinks too much or does drugs giving it up once he finds out how purifying the love of a good woman is.  Let’s be honest, that’s just trading one addiction–or habit, as almost none of the heroes I’m discussing here have actual clinical addictions, just habits the heroine (cough *author* cough) doesn’t like–for another; that is, trading getting his high from drugs or alcohol to getting it from the seratonin and endorphines falling in love and banging the heroine give him. Because we all know that is the healthiest role to play in a relationship:  His Heroin (pun and Twilight reference both intentional).

Honestly, it just annoys me when the heroine gets all judgy about someone’s habits (sometimes hero’s, sometimes just a minor character’s), especially weed smoking.  Like…are half the romance authors out there narcing for the DEA?  The authors rarely write anything as overt as “that’s so bad for you,” but part of the happy ending is that character choosing to stop using and then giving a speech (or a soliloquy) about how much happier and more fulfulled they are now that they’re clean.

Every time I’m just like…why? Why was this an issue, and why was it part of the story? Is part of the requirements for traditionally publishing a romance being stridently anti-drug? Ha, ha, sorry, fail that test. I am stridently anti-drug WAR, but that’s not the same thing, is it? At least with self-publishing, if I ever write a hero who came back from India with some sweet hashish to calm his raging ADD or PTSD or something, he won’t have to give that up to calm down a hysterical editor who believes drug references are only okay if the person doing it sees the error of their ways within 300 pages. Go read some Hunter S. Thompson and then tell me whether my mentally fragile hero who uses it to escape the cacophony in his mind that is slowly driving him mad, for like an hour at a time, is really such a public menace. Sheesh.

It’s just funny, because it hits home to me that a lot of people who write romance probably are pretty traditionally conservative people–and I say this as someone who is an unabashed libertarian, AKA more liberal than liberals or more conservative than conservatives, depending on the issue–and for traditional social conservatives, especially those over 35 or so, drinking to excess and drugs are probably still Very Bad Things.  It’s just funny to me that writing erotic romance is totally okay with that morality as long as there’s No Drugs Or Alcohol Abuse…at least not in the Happily Ever After segment of the story.

Anyway.

I just don’t think it’s realistic to ask heroes to give up all their vices for the heroine. I’m not saying all romance heroes should be users, but I think unless part of his character arc is coming out a true addiction or a spiral of self-destruction, that the subject of him cutting back shouldn’t come up at all.  Do we really think Mr. Darcy gave up drinking because he married Elizabeth? Please.

And she didn’t ask him to.