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)
From:(no subject)
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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)
From: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)
From:(no subject)
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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
From:Part 2 (continued)
From: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.