Validate Me
Jul 18th, 2006 by Sandra
There was a blog entry by Brenda Coulter over on Romancing the Blog the other day about academics reviewing and discussing romance fiction, and how the “unwritten assumption appears to be that the best romance novels contain ‘important’ themes; [sic] most often about gender roles.” Honestly, that is what academics do, but what interested me most was how RWA and romance writers in general seem to crave, in effect, “the right kind of academic attention.”
And that led me to thinking about the romance genre’s need for validation. What gives?
Okay, I know I have problems with needing academic validation because I come from a literary background (graduated from UH, which is widely regarded to have the best graduate creative writing program in the U.S. after the Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and spent the first two years of my romance writing trying to justify — mostly to myself — why I was writing romantic suspense. The term “selling out” was often used by friends who knew my background. Soon, thereafter, came “trashy novels,” “sex books,” my favorite, “bodice ripper,” and other terms that generally say nothing about the genre and everything about the prejudices and ignorance of the speaker.
So I eventually got over feeling — dare I say it? — ashamed that I was writing romance. (In my weaker moments, I still tell people that I’m writing “action-adventure for women,” and not just because that accurately represents my sub-genre but it also allows me to skillfully avoid the term romance.)
It became clear to me that my feeling ashamed was my problem, not anyone else’s. I was walking into conversations feeling “less than” others; they weren’t passing judgment on me. And even when people teased me about writing “sex books,” I began to see that they were criticizing a target that didn’t exist. (I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a 4-page love scene in a 300-page book qualifies it for that particular category.)
So is the romance genre as a whole walking around feeling “less than”? We certainly behave like it. We remind ourselves that we’re a $1 billion business. We discuss the fact that our sales often subsidize the publishing of literary novels. We hire consultants to help improve our image. We offer grants to academics to discuss our work without irony.
It seems to me that we offer a specific product to a specific audience. The people who read academic papers likely won’t read my novels. My reader is someone else — you know, the one who just got home from work and put her three kids to bed and is waiting for her husband to get off his shift so they can eat a late dinner together. The one who appreciates the escape of a well-told story and enjoys trading books with her friends.
I don’t need validation when I feel that the work I do has a purpose that suffices for me. No, I’m not Hemingway (nor would I ever try to be). I don’t have pretensions to the Pulitzer Prize or want to prove myself in the publish-or-perish battleground of academia.
I only need validation when I’m comparing my work to others’ — and am afraid I just might come up short.
3 Responses to “Validate Me”
You inspsire me in so many ways - I love your books, I envy your work ethic and I admire your approach to life. This blog entry was very empowering! Thank you!
I hate to be a spoiler here, but I’d like to present a different perspective. I’m a published writer, author of “Old School Romance,” a history of older romantic fiction. Having spent over seven years in reading romantic books from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, I’ve seen the huge, huge, difference between the old days and now. These were books that were literally demanded to be taken seriously. And having read the memoirs of one of the old writers, Faith Baldwin, I can promise you, she took herself very seriously indeed. (And in fact, wasn’t afraid to criticize Hemingway!) If us “romancers” walk around feeling “less than,” the fault lays not in others, but ourselves. I mean no desrepect to anyone, but in the romance industry as a whole there is this defensiveness towards criticism that is possibly one reason we have this self-made “inferiority” complex. There are some writers and trends that deserve criticism. We shouldn’t be afraid of criticism–in fact we should embrace it, relish it! At least it means we’ve got someone’s attention, right? And I sincerely feel if we shouldn’t just be totally for one specific audience, or we risk fossilization. (Which is what happened to the Nurse novels and Gothics.) Write for that specific audience, sure, but not be afraid to take chances, because that chance may bring a different audience into the fold. If it weren’t for criticism, we would never have gotten beyond the 1970s version of romance. We may not like to admit it, but criticism is what pushed us to change. And seeking acadedemic recognition is worthwhile too. It gives fledging writers something to strive for, to emulate. I’d like to see the day a romance writer strives to win the Pulitzer. All books are commercial–there’s nothing wrong with that. But we should never let the fact that we’re genre writers limit our vision, or our capacity for greatness. (And I do truly believe we all have that in us.)
Welcome, Conrad.
I think what we’re talking about now is the commercialization of romance fiction. Maybe back in the early 1900’s there existed a drive to take romance fiction seriously (and we have to remember that the very earliest “romance novels” were written by men), but I think that particular field has been yielded over to writers like Sue Monk Kidd and Mary Jessica Stein (and even they lean toward schlock on occasion).
My university-trained mind sees a vast difference between something as well-written as Stein’s Coyote Dream and, say, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto. No matter how “unromance-like” Stein’s novel is, it’s still a romance. I’m not sure that it shows me anything new about the world or about relationships. That’s not the modern romance writer’s job. The job now is to provide an entertaining beach read that doesn’t insult the reader’s intelligence, and that’s about it.
Once romance became a “product,” it automatically dropped out of the “serious fiction” category. Occasionally we do get the serious romance novel (Peggy Webb’s Pulitzer nominated Driving Me Crazy comes immediately to mind), but the vast majority of work out there isn’t.
So I see seeking academic recognition to be going at things the wrong way around. We want academia to take us seriously, but we’re not producing work that encourages us to do so. (Romance authors, flame me at will for that remark, but I’m not taking it back.)
When we generate material that itself shouts to be taken seriously, then bring on the academics.