Romance and Writing
Feb. 14th, 2011 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSo I was going to drop a whiny little facebook post to the effect of "I've got no valentine and my fictional lovers are having a fight"[1] but then I decided it would be more productive to natter on about some of the issues I run into when plotting semi-fluffy semi-serious semi-historical lesbian romance novels (never mind that so far I've only ever finished first drafts for two of them -- I've got a whole drawer full of fits and starts and research notes).
So my chosen genre -- to the extent that I have one (at which point I insert the usual disclaimer about feeling like a fraud when I write about my "writing process" given that I've only had a half dozen short stories published) -- encompasses both the historic fiction and historicish-fantasy genres, but always centers in some way around a female same-sex romance. Because, at the heart, what I want to write are all the books I never got to read when I was younger because nobody published that sort of thing at the time. (Not that those are the only books I wanted to read back then -- but they're the ones I wanted and couldn't get.) But I have zero interest in writing "coming out" stories in the sense of stories where a major theme is the protagonists recognizing and coming to terms with the fact that their relationship is not "normal" (or at least not typical) for their society.
In the case of the pure fantasy settings -- even the medieval fantasies clearly spun off of real-world settings -- I have the option of simply saying, "Same-sex romance is no big deal in this culture; deal with it." My real love, however, is real-world historic fiction, albeit of the sort that allows the same sorts of liberties with the historically "typical" that opposite-sex historic romance takes. And in that context, you have to set the modern reader up with a plausible context in which your characters are not spending half their time going, "Ack! What are these feelings I'm having? This cannot be!" But rather they can just go, "Hmm, that's interesting!" and get on to dealing with the other plot-hurdles I throw in their path.
You might think this would necessarily result in completely unhistorical storylines (that's "unhistorical" even in the context of historic romance parameters -- which are rather forgiving when you get down to it). But when you start looking beyond the modern conceptions of same-sex relationships and start looking in history for Judith Bennett's lesbian-like categories, you start finding a lot of models for plausible historical romance protagonists. Although the fictional characters developed from these models may not be in any sense "typical", since when do actual, ordinary, realistic historic people end up as protagonists in historic romance novels?
Having eliminated "O woe! Our romance is Unnatural and therefore we must resist it for approximately 75% of our time on the page!" as a plot-hurdle, we're left with the problem that the historic romance genre thrives on keeping the protagonists apart. And we've just removed a major and obvious method of doing so. Where do we turn now? When you come to think of it, there are only a few categories of Keeping Lovers Apart that are necessarily restricted to opposite-sex couples. Even the tried and true motif of "there are social/economic/class reasons why we cannot marry!" works just as well if you substitute "live happily together" for "marry". (In fact, if the sole question is what sort of difficulties we can put in the way of our protagonists living happily together, you actually have a much larger inventory of roadblocks for a female couple than for an opposite-sex couple, since the issues of economic and legal independence may come up, depending on the particular historic setting.)
So in my various historic romances -- both drafted and only plotted -- what have I come up with? Well, there's always the good old-fashioned "my people are at war with your people". I use that one in my Romano-British romance (tentatively titled "The Rebellious Heart") which boils down to "I love you my darling Roman officer's daughter, but first I must go off to join Boudicca's rebellion and slaughter your people!" There's a touch of it in an as-yet untitled story set on the Welsh border around the 12th century, but that one is a bit more along the lines of "My darling English invader, I will console your loneliness while your husband is off on crusade ... oops, he's back!" While one doesn't want to overdo it, I use a "passing" motif in one 15th c. story, where the roadblock boils down to "we love each other, but do I dare to reveal my secret to you in hopes that you'll still love me as a woman?" Now there's one you can't do in a conventional opposite-sex romance!
My current project (Daughter of Mystery), while not strictly historical (since there's a bit of magic and alternate history thrown in), relies on good old fashioned class barriers. In the first part of the story, Barbara is functionally an indentured servant to Margerit, serving as her bodyguard. They have both developed secret and hopeless passions for each other but are quite nobly refraining from acting on them; Barbara, because it's her job to keep Margerit away from scandal, not to drag her into it, and Margerit because she's hyper-conscious of the power imbalance and doesn't want a lover who might only be acting on orders. The tables get turned later on because -- as we've known from the start -- Barbara is actually of significantly higher birth, and when she comes into her own then Margerit turns insecure about their difference in status while Barbara is the one worried about wielding undue influence.
In none of these stories is the same-sex aspect of the relationship treated as "normal" and unremarkable, but in none of them is it the primary source of conflict and angst driving the romantic tension. Given the wealth of options available, it's hardly needed for that purpose.
[1] But they get to have great make-up sex in the next chapter ... albeit off-stage. This is romance, not erotica, after all
So my chosen genre -- to the extent that I have one (at which point I insert the usual disclaimer about feeling like a fraud when I write about my "writing process" given that I've only had a half dozen short stories published) -- encompasses both the historic fiction and historicish-fantasy genres, but always centers in some way around a female same-sex romance. Because, at the heart, what I want to write are all the books I never got to read when I was younger because nobody published that sort of thing at the time. (Not that those are the only books I wanted to read back then -- but they're the ones I wanted and couldn't get.) But I have zero interest in writing "coming out" stories in the sense of stories where a major theme is the protagonists recognizing and coming to terms with the fact that their relationship is not "normal" (or at least not typical) for their society.
In the case of the pure fantasy settings -- even the medieval fantasies clearly spun off of real-world settings -- I have the option of simply saying, "Same-sex romance is no big deal in this culture; deal with it." My real love, however, is real-world historic fiction, albeit of the sort that allows the same sorts of liberties with the historically "typical" that opposite-sex historic romance takes. And in that context, you have to set the modern reader up with a plausible context in which your characters are not spending half their time going, "Ack! What are these feelings I'm having? This cannot be!" But rather they can just go, "Hmm, that's interesting!" and get on to dealing with the other plot-hurdles I throw in their path.
You might think this would necessarily result in completely unhistorical storylines (that's "unhistorical" even in the context of historic romance parameters -- which are rather forgiving when you get down to it). But when you start looking beyond the modern conceptions of same-sex relationships and start looking in history for Judith Bennett's lesbian-like categories, you start finding a lot of models for plausible historical romance protagonists. Although the fictional characters developed from these models may not be in any sense "typical", since when do actual, ordinary, realistic historic people end up as protagonists in historic romance novels?
Having eliminated "O woe! Our romance is Unnatural and therefore we must resist it for approximately 75% of our time on the page!" as a plot-hurdle, we're left with the problem that the historic romance genre thrives on keeping the protagonists apart. And we've just removed a major and obvious method of doing so. Where do we turn now? When you come to think of it, there are only a few categories of Keeping Lovers Apart that are necessarily restricted to opposite-sex couples. Even the tried and true motif of "there are social/economic/class reasons why we cannot marry!" works just as well if you substitute "live happily together" for "marry". (In fact, if the sole question is what sort of difficulties we can put in the way of our protagonists living happily together, you actually have a much larger inventory of roadblocks for a female couple than for an opposite-sex couple, since the issues of economic and legal independence may come up, depending on the particular historic setting.)
So in my various historic romances -- both drafted and only plotted -- what have I come up with? Well, there's always the good old-fashioned "my people are at war with your people". I use that one in my Romano-British romance (tentatively titled "The Rebellious Heart") which boils down to "I love you my darling Roman officer's daughter, but first I must go off to join Boudicca's rebellion and slaughter your people!" There's a touch of it in an as-yet untitled story set on the Welsh border around the 12th century, but that one is a bit more along the lines of "My darling English invader, I will console your loneliness while your husband is off on crusade ... oops, he's back!" While one doesn't want to overdo it, I use a "passing" motif in one 15th c. story, where the roadblock boils down to "we love each other, but do I dare to reveal my secret to you in hopes that you'll still love me as a woman?" Now there's one you can't do in a conventional opposite-sex romance!
My current project (Daughter of Mystery), while not strictly historical (since there's a bit of magic and alternate history thrown in), relies on good old fashioned class barriers. In the first part of the story, Barbara is functionally an indentured servant to Margerit, serving as her bodyguard. They have both developed secret and hopeless passions for each other but are quite nobly refraining from acting on them; Barbara, because it's her job to keep Margerit away from scandal, not to drag her into it, and Margerit because she's hyper-conscious of the power imbalance and doesn't want a lover who might only be acting on orders. The tables get turned later on because -- as we've known from the start -- Barbara is actually of significantly higher birth, and when she comes into her own then Margerit turns insecure about their difference in status while Barbara is the one worried about wielding undue influence.
In none of these stories is the same-sex aspect of the relationship treated as "normal" and unremarkable, but in none of them is it the primary source of conflict and angst driving the romantic tension. Given the wealth of options available, it's hardly needed for that purpose.
[1] But they get to have great make-up sex in the next chapter ... albeit off-stage. This is romance, not erotica, after all
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no subject
Date: 2011-02-15 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-15 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-15 09:56 pm (UTC)Anyway growing up in my rather bohemian California heaven, I would frankly love to a read a book where we are past the whole idea of having to explain how/why the ladies hooked up and get right to... well... you know... people just being people and living their lives :)
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 08:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-15 09:03 pm (UTC)Really? A woman passing as a man stows away on a ship, which is populated by a couple dozen lonely men, who have gotten used to occupying themselves on the high seas with one another. She falls for one of them, who seems to return her affection but trips her gaydar; will he still like her if he knows she's female?
Only slightly less plausible than the gender-reversed version, I think.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-15 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 07:44 am (UTC)I'm both amused by the tongue-in-cheek way in which you talk about your romantic roadblocks and the conventions of the romance genre and intrigued by the little tidbits you've thrown out as examples.
In cultures where men had multiple wives, would/could the women have had relationships with each other, either completely clandestine or as a sort of "open secret" among the wives?
Also, I love to read/listen to people's musings about their writing.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 08:44 pm (UTC)I will note that, on a market level, there is a causal connection between these two statements. One of the reasons why it's hard to run across good lesbian romances -- at least once you get away from contemporary settings (emphasis on the "good") is that when you look at the consumption habits of non-gay/lesbian readers, women are far more likely to be interested in reading male-male romances and men tend to be interested only in female-female pornography (not romance).
Looking over the "recommended reading of the year" from the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards committee, you see about 75% female writers and about 80% male characters. This is specifically in the speculative fiction genre, not the romance genre, so the results don't quite carry over. But in SF, even lesbian authors are statistically more likely to write male-male relationships (especially for protagonists) than female-female ones.
And, I will freely admit, an awful lot of the non-contemporary lesbian romance novels I've read are simply badly written. And a certain amount of this is affected by market forces: without a strong and remunerative market there's less of a context for nurturing and developing good writers, and conversely the good writers rapidly discover that there isn't a lot of money in non-contemporary lesbian romance and often shift to topics and projects that will pay the rent more consistently.
In cultures where men had multiple wives, would/could the women have had relationships with each other, either completely clandestine or as a sort of "open secret" among the wives?
It's one historic context in which a lesbian romance could be set -- I confess it's not one that interests me to write about. As I discuss in the next response, there is a strong element of writer/reader identification in how the stories and characters are shaped. I want to write and read about characters that I enjoy identifying with, and for me that means female characters who are in control of their own lives and bodies (at least by the end of the story!) even if that narrows down the list of possible historic contexts somewhat.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 03:28 am (UTC)Very true. I've started reading m/m romances, some good, most sort of meh, and have found that a lot more women who've never even heard of slash or fandom like such books than I'd realized. Very interesting.
Speaking of f/f romances, I assume you've read Sarah Waters? I adored Fingersmith even though Tipping the Velvet is also very good -
no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-17 11:34 am (UTC)What's really a surprise to me is the number of lesbians who write either slash or m/m or both. I still haven't figured that out....
no subject
Date: 2011-02-16 12:58 pm (UTC)It's funny, as a dedicated hetero-sexual historical romance reader, I tend to think my favorite stories are the ones with heroines that I want to self-identify with and heroes that I want credit for taming. Those are the best page turners.
Reading your post, what occured to me was that in same sex romances you get two chances to write a character that the reader identifies with (and/or wants to tame). If you ever feel like it, I'd love to read your thoughts on how diversity of your heroines' traits impacts your characterization and your readers empathy with the heroines. Do you feel you have the chance to write two distinct characters to get wide appeal or do you still feel constrained to writing an "every woman" character and an "every women wants" character so as to interest the greatest chunk of audience?
Part 1, 'cause evidently there's a length limit on comments
Date: 2011-02-16 09:31 pm (UTC)Character-identification is definitely a strong force in how I develop my characters and shape the stories. But the specific nature differs from project to project. In retrospect, I think there's a direct correlation between how much I identify with a character and whether they get written as a viewpoint character. (It isn't absolute, but it's a strong correlation.)
I'd say about half the time both members of the romantic couple get viewpoint time. Part of this is that I have a stylistic preference for showing strong emotional and psychological experiences externally rather than internally, so alternating viewpoints gives me the change do show both of their reactions from someone else's point of view.
I'd have to do a serious analysis, but I'd definitely say that if a primary character doesn't get to be a viewpoint character, it's likely that I identify with her less. But sometimes it's simply that the story seems to call for a single point of view. For example, another of my half-written stories (that didn't get mentioned above) -- the one for which the cocktail-party synopsis is "Viking girl kidnaps Welsh princess!" -- the viewpoint character ("Welsh princess") is less in control of the action of the story and therefore makes a better observer/commenter on things, but also the gradual unveiling of the back-story of the second protagonist ("Viking girl") is a major part of the plot and it would be less natural to control that gradual unveiling if we were inside her head, rather than showing the backstory as our viewpoint character learns about it. But there's also an element that the Norse character falls more into the "needs to be tamed" role of the classic story arc, which works better as object than subject.
I try to make all my characters distinctive and individual, with a mix of positive traits and flaws, but I don't particularly aim to have their characteristics be strongly contrasting and complementary. (For one thing, it would get boring if I were basically writing the same couple over and over in different settings.) Overall, there's a slight tendency for one character to break gender norms more in terms of presentation and behavior, but I try to avoid ending up with every pairing boiling down to an obvious butch-femme contrast. So overall, while I don't identify with all my primary characters, I do use the doubled-opportunity for identification on a regular basis.
And not just doubled -- to some extent, I'm writing woman-centered stories in general, not just romantic-pair stories. There may be primary female characters available for identification purposes who aren't part of the main romance (or who have romantic entanglements but don't happen to be paired up at the end). For example, in my medievaloid alternate-world fantasy "Iultig's Dreams" (completed first draft, needs massive revision) there are three female main characters, all with very different backgrounds, personalities, and problems to solve. They are involved at different points in the story in two different romantic pairings (well, "pairings" at least -- it's complicated) but not as an adversarial "romantic triangle". Two are viewpoint characters; the third isn't, mostly because she undergoes less internal transformation over the course of the story. But she could easily be the character that some readers identify most strongly with.
Part 2 (continued)
Date: 2011-02-16 09:32 pm (UTC)Quite frankly, when I write, I'm not thinking at all about "interesting the greatest chunk of audience". I do keep some hypothetical market considerations in mind. For example, given that the existing market for "pure" lesbian historic romance is fairly dire, I do tend to actively look for cross-genre elements to include (e.g., mystery, fantasy). And both for marketing reasons and personal enjoyment I like to develop complicated enough plots that the romance thread itself is only one strand of the braid. But in the end, I'm writing the stories for me -- and hoping that I'm not such a complete freak that that means nobody else will like them.
But fortunately, given that there really is no coherent "non-contemporary lesbian romance genre" I'm not constrained by genre conventions to include clearly labeled subject and object characters, or to make any particular character an "every woman". In essence, I'm trying to write exciting plots involving individual characters and interesting settings ... but where I'm choosing to write that subset of all possible stories with those criteria that also happen to involve lesbian romances. This is in contrast to writing lesbian romances to which I've added exciting plots and interesting settings.
a fistful of linkage
Date: 2011-02-17 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-18 11:07 pm (UTC)On a completely different tangent, when I think of medieval lesbians, I think of a sense of the ordinary. I think of all of the situations in which women were thrown together in communal living situations. People tend to think of nuns right off, but what about ordinary servants? It was common to share quarters so I would imagine it was easy to share a romance. Upper class ladies would have ladies in waiting. Prostitutes and courtesans would have each other. There is so much opportunity, and not a lot of education. I think it is quite plausible that there were some subcultures that turned a blind eye to women seeking each other's company. Some might even say it wasn't sex (as they knew it) so there isn't a reason to feel guilt.
I think you can easily avoid the "But, I am a cheerleader!" I have run across a lot of medieval sermons preaching the dangers of adultery and lust. They almost always mention men and women. (Of course, women are the culprits.) I have never run across a medieval sermon that said two women should not have hot, romantic sex.