Philosophic ramblings

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Help one person

I’m always embarrassed when people praise me for doing something useful, or for helping out when I happen to notice a need. To me, this is the base setting; the pass grade. I learnt at my mother’s knee, by watching what she did, that

  • if you belong to a group you take a role to support the group, whether it is baking cakes for a stall, setting out the cups for morning tea, chairing a meeting, or putting out the monthly newsletter
  • people should be kind.

That’s it, really. My whole philosophy. Take responsibility and be kind to those whose lives intersect with yours. If everyone did that, what kind of a world would we live in?

I manage it, mostly. I know others who manage it heroically, and my hat is off to them. They get a B grade or maybe even an A plus.

Today at Mass, Fr Binu told a story that resonated with me.

A man saw a child begging on a street corner. He was clearly cold and hungry — dressed in rags and mere skin and bone.

“Oh God,” the man said, “Won’t you please help this child. Look at him. He is shivering in the cold, and he looks more than half starved.”

“I see him,” said God. “He hasn’t had anything to eat since yesterday morning. He has no family, and he is afraid to go to sleep at night because the other children steal everything he has. Even if he can stay awake, the bigger children beat him up and take it anyway.”

“That is dreadful, God. Something must be done to help him.”

“I agree,” God said. “He needs warm clothing and food. More than that, he needs a home and someone to love him for himself. Without those things he will die.”

The man felt dreadful, knowing that the boy was at such risk. “Then you must act quickly, God, before it is too late.”

“I have already acted,” God replied.

The man was very relieved. “Thank you so much, God. I knew I could count on you. What have you done?”

God said, “I have made you.”

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Feminism and the romance genre

 

“I don’t see how you can say romances are feminist,”” said the gentleman, waving a red flag in front of me on a day my opinions were bullish. His wife, who writes historical fiction, was not so adamant, but also not convinced by my argument that ‘feminist’ is a fair label to apply to any publishing sector in which:

  • the participants (readers, writers, authors, editors, agents) are overwhelmingly women
  • the plots are driven by the needs and actions of a main character who is a woman.

Further discussion disclosed that the man’s main objection is that romances play into a false belief that a permanent romantic attachment — a happy ever after — is the only goal for a woman, and that a story in which a woman finds happiness in her career or her craft is more feminist.

HEA is on the label!

I think the argument has a couple of flaws.

First, such a book would not be shelved as a romance. In the end, genre is a sorting device. A romance is a book in which the main plot arc deals with a taking a romance to the expectation of a happy ending. A mystery is a book in which the main plot arc deals with solving a mystery. A Western is a book with cowboys. And so on.

Second, and more important, I see a hint of the great divide between male and female sensibilities that has brought us to this #metoo point in our cultural history. As human beings, we are social creatures, needing intimacy for our health and wellbeing. Give a baby all the necessities of food, drink, warmth, and shelter, but never cuddle it or give it undivided attention, and it will fail to thrive. It may die, but if it lives it will be with permanent emotional scars.

Intimacy is a human, not a female, need

As adults, we seek intimacy in our relationships with friends, partners, and family members. And we are miserably unhappy if we can’t have it. A romance deals with one kind of intimacy; that with a sexual partner. For me to believe in the happy-ever-after, the couple also must reach some level of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual intimacy — but without the physical it isn’t a romance.

Romances, and some literary novels, are the only stories in which the search for intimacy is central to the plot. How sad that something so central to the lives of all human beings is relegated to books dismissed with appellations such as ‘chick lit’, ‘bodice rippers’, ‘mommy porn’.

So my fundamental objection to my friend’s position is not to his view of romance books (which, by the way, had not been informed by reading any), but by his definition of feminism.

 A feminist is not a woman trying to be like a man

In essence, he saw a feminist as a woman who did the things men are interested in doing, and a feminist book as one that was about women succeeding at things traditionally done by men.

I like those books, too. I’m all for women doing what interests them; yes, and men, too. If you’re the best crochet artist in Eketahuna, I don’t care about your gender. You go for it!

But I categorically deny that a woman has to be like a man in order to be interesting or worth reading about. And I also deny that a genre that deals in intimacy, and in hopeful endings, is — for that reason — anti-feminist. The desire for a lasting intimacy is basic to our humanity.

It seems to me that Western culture has steadily narrowed the options for men who seek such intimacy, teaching them to be afraid of emotions and to focus on the physical. Having sex with multiple women has, in many cultures, been a symbol of a man’s power, which the poor dears seem to confuse with their virility.

Hence the joke. What do you call a woman who behaves like a man? Answer: a slut.

We are failing our boys

In our culture, such behaviour is sold to our young males as desirable — in fictional and real life representations, both main stream and pornographic. They have no idea they’ve been sold a pig in a poke. No wonder so many of them live in quiet despair — or die young.

As for the impact on young women, and what romances have to do with it, I’ll leave that for another post.

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Research, reviews, and erratum

“Don’t read your reviews” is advice I’ve never been able to follow. I love reading my reviews. Most of them are warming. Even when someone doesn’t like the book, they’ll often say why, which either helps me to improve, or lets me know this wasn’t the book for them (vulgar behaviour, one recent reviewer said, when my heroine succumbed to temptation in the person of her hero; on another story, someone marked the book down because there was no on-page sex — you can’t please all of the people all of the time).

I’m really struggling with the very sensible prohibition against opening a conversation with a reviewer whose review is simply unfair, and based on false ideas about which she proclaims with great authority. Hence, this post, which will allow me to vent without (I hope) making a prat of myself.

I’ve written before about what to do with a bad review. And I’ve written about why book reviews matter.

I haven’t written about what to do when a reviewer claims you’ve not done your research. Mostly, the errors in their reviews are pretty obvious, and I’ve winced, picked myself up off the floor, and moved on. Yes, the Roman Baths at Bath had been discovered by 1805. New baths were built on top of the Roman baths in the 12th century, and the original ruins were discovered in 1790, during excavations for the Great Pump Room. And, yes, craftspeople (both men and women) wore  overalls in the early 19th century, for a given meaning of the term (I’m told there were three garments with that name, but I’ve only found two).

It feels different, somehow, when someone makes a claim other people can’t easily check, and justifies a two-star rating on that basis, even though she acknowledged the strength of the writing and the main characters. Somehow, the compliments and rating combined give greater emphasis to her certainty that I had made up the system of advowsons and benefices that existed at the time of the story, and was not reformed until the second half of the nineteenth century.

Yes, reviewer, my rector villain did collect the tithes, and they were his to do with as he willed. No supervision, except that perhaps the person or organisation who had gifted the advowson might use the threat of its removal to change behaviour.  In my story, said landowner had been absent and careless for years, until death brought a new landowner.

I make mistakes, and I appreciate the kindness of the reader community when they send me a message to say ‘I think you meant volunteers, and not militia’. I try hard to avoid errors. I research everything that occurs to me, and take nothing for granted. It’s the stuff that is so much a part of our life that we can’t imagine being without it that trips us up when we look at the past.

So what can I do? I’m thinking about adding Author Notes at the end of a story, listing the pieces of research I’ve done and some of the sources I’ve used. What do you think? Will it help?

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Can we learn from the past?

My current WIP is set during 1816, the year when summer didn’t come to the United Kingdom, bringing failed harvests, disease, starvation, and other ills. After the long economic pressures of war, times were tough, and unskilled labourers of the time must have despaired at their chances of keeping their families housed and fed, or even alive.

But things were about to improve, at least according to a lot of modern economists. They see widening real income inequality from the 14th century, peaking in the 18th century and beginning to improve from around 1814. For the wealthy, things improved as income from real estate rose and the cost of luxury goods dropped. The poor found it harder and harder to meet the rising cost of housing, especially as the prices of staple goods trended upwards and upwards.

For my book The Reign of Silence, I researched revolutionary movements in England during the early part of the 19th century. For a long time, those in power took the threat of bloody revolution very seriously, especially once the French provided a vivid example of the results of allowing a population to experience untrammeled greed long enough to get sick of it.

In the 19th century, and through to the First World War, the balance shifted as labour shortages forced wages up and real estate prices trended down. The trend reversed between the wars, with the incomes of the wealthy once more pulling away from the incomes of the rich. In the period I remember as my childhood, after the Second World War, income inequality was low, but since then it has reached 18th century levels once again.

Think about these figures (latest ones from the Oxfam report recently published):

  • 1700 England-Wales households:
    • Top 1% share 39.3% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 1740 England-Wales households:
    • Top 1% share 43.6% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 1774 US households:
    • Top 1% share 40% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 1929 US households:
    • Top 1% share 44.2% of the nation’s before-tax income
  • 2017 global figures
    • Top 1% share 82% of income generated during the year.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and 10,000 kilometres of ocean between New Zealand and increasingly desperate people might not be enough.

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Riding the crocodile

The bazillion book market is a puzzlement. Authors fret about how to be noticed in the huge flood of new releases every week (more than 370,000 in the past 30 days on Amazon alone). Readers complain that many books they pick up are not worth reading, and I’ve heard many say they’re trying no new authors because of disappointments.

Meanwhile, those who guard the paths by which we authors reach our readers are working for themselves, and not for us. I don’t blame them for that. It is the nature of business to wish to make money, and it is the nature of mega-business — such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — to wish to remove any competition that prevents them from making more money. They are, as a series of New Zealand advertisements said about foreign-owned banks, rather large crocodiles doing what crocodiles do. Admirable creatures in their own way, precisely designed for their purpose. But uncomfortable and dangerous to keep in the house.

I need to ride those particular crocodiles in order to reach the readers who prefer those platforms, but I’m trying to avoid being swallowed, crunched, and spat out. (Which means I’m not joining KU or anything that requires exclusivity.)

On the plans for this year is a shop on my site, where you can buy my books directly. I am toying with some kind of a sponsorship model — a sort of a subscription, where people make one modest payment a year and then get sent anything I write, plus some kind of other recognition that they are sponsors of the author known as Jude Knight. Maybe a t-shirt? And a club card? Special sponsor events?

I’m also looking at making changes to the newsletter to make it more appealing. People are just so busy!

What else? The most effective way I’ve found to reach more readers is reader word of mouth, and that is very much in your hands. I’m open to ideas. How can I do more to help you help me?

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The Jude Knight Manifesto

The classic bodice ripper cover shows the woman’s ambivalence about the situation she has landed in. Interestingly, some claim that these covers, whose artists were the same comic artists who had been creating superhero magazines, were actually designed to appeal to male booksellers.

At the day job this week, we had a workshop on personal branding, and did a number of exercises to find the authentic self we wanted to project when dealing with clients.

I had no trouble defining my essence: the core values and passions that define me. I’ve spent the past four years thinking about them as I created the brand for Jude Knight. They don’t change between Jude Knight the storyteller and Judy Knighton the plain English business consultant, because they are the real me.

I’m a storyteller with an abiding compassion for people and a deep desire to contribute to the wellbeing of individuals and communities.

This post results from mulling over the workshop and also several blogs and articles I’ve read this week.

Sherry Thomas, in an interview, talked about romance writing in the current political environment. She has received some flak for her views from people who seem to think she is planning to turn her novels into a political rant, but I didn’t take it that way.

To me, it seems inevitable that one’s values and attitudes will influence the themes we write about, the characters we glorify, and what we consider to be happy endings. Yes, and whether wealth and power are shown as corrupting or as virtuous, which is a very strong political statement indeed.

My values are informed by my life experiences and my Catholic faith, and I try to live by them in all I say and do. My books will always reward a passion for justice and community, and ultimately punish greed and selfishness. (Which life doesn’t always do, at least the bit of it we see, so I should, because in the world I create, I can.)

Laurie Penny, in the Unforgiving Minute, has produced one of the best #metoo articles I’ve read (and I’ve read lots). She challenges men to stop making the current post-Weinstein world about them and their desire to get laid.

In a world where men take their view of good sex from Hugh Hefner and women suffer the consequences, I firmly believe that writing bodice rippers is a degenerate act. I’m defining the term as a book set in the past, with a young, virginal heroine and a more powerful (because older, richer, or simply more brutal) hero who forces her to have non-consensual sex until they fall in love and live happily ever after. Rapist-turned-true-hero, and no-doesn’t-mean-no. For a man to write such a book is an act of violence. For a woman to do so is treachery.

My books will reward relationships founded on mutual respect. If that’s not where my couple start out, it is where they will end up. The most rakish of my heroes will need to face the emptiness in their souls where intimacy should be, and so will the heroine I have in mind for a series I’m involved with in 2019.

I strongly believe that the romance genre is feminist, in the sense that it is a genre in which women are subjects, not objects; in which women’s concerns and women’s actions are centre stage;  in which women’s sexual pleasure is based on female, not male experience.

Not all romances are feminist. I’ve dnfed* some shocking pieces of adolescent male fantasy masquerading as romance erotica, and I’ve read many stories with heroes who are controlling despots with heroines who like that in a man.

My stories won’t always have strong heroines. They won’t always have heroes who, at the beginning of the story, honour the identity of their love interest and partner with them. But that’s always going to be my goal: a true abiding love based on mutual understanding and respect.

If I am to be true to myself, I can do no other.

(More on the covers that gave a genre a bad name here and here.)

*dnf = do not finish

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All You Need Is Love

Today, I want to talk about love, sex, and writing romances.

I’ve been trying, in my own romances, to lead my hero and heroine in the direction of consummate love, which I’ll talk more about soon, but I’ve also been reading a few romances recently in which the couple seem to have little between them except lust, or when the success of the relationship depends on one of the pair subsuming their will to the other. That bothers me. It bothers me a lot.

Then, during the week, I was in a Facebook writers workshop event where the topic was clean romance, which meant (of course) that we talked about sex. And someone astounded me by asking how you could stop the story from being boring if there wasn’t any. (Any sex, I mean.)

And the third factor triggering this post was the conversations I’ve been in since the #metoo campaign went viral across the Internet. I’m not going to repeat any of them here, but let the following four worrying threads of argument suffice.

  1. Men do this sort of thing. You shouldn’t take it seriously.
  2. What was she wearing? Doing? Why was she there?
  3. Yes it’s bad, but not as bad as (pick the victim group of your choice).
  4. Only monsters do such things.

In other words, excuse the abusers, blame the victims, set one group of victims against another, and reject responsibility for making a change. And if we want change, then everyone of us is responsible for changing ourselves first, and then for challenging those around us.

The need for intimacy

Which brings me back to writing romances.

We’re occasionally told that sex is a basic human need. It is certainly a basic biological need, or we wouldn’t be here. But we can choose what to do with our appetites in a way that has not been observed in animals. Animals in the grip of the mating urge cannot resist it but must be physically confined. We can go and have a cold shower and a cup of tea. We are capable of crimes of lust, but also of celibacy. Animals who pair bond, as humans tend to do, are unable to pair elsewhere. We are capable of betrayal (but also of faithfulness).

So sex is a physical urge for an individual and a biological imperative for the species. But our driving need as humans is not sex, but intimacy, of which physical intimacy is just one of five aspects, and sex just a small element of that aspect. The other aspects are emotional intimacy, mental intimacy, experiential intimacy, and spiritual intimacy.

Babies denied intimacy will die. Children denied intimacy grow up wounded. Adults denied intimacy spiral into despair.

Those who think sex with strangers will fill their emptiness are doomed to disappointment. They mistake sexual intimacy for physical intimacy, and leap from there to assuming emotional intimacy. They are climbing a ladder, but it is leaning against the wrong wall.

I will never write a romance that has the couple in bed at first meeting, and from then they know they have found The One, and all the obstacles are external. Certainly, love can grow in such an unlikely seed bed. But I strongly believe that having sex before true intimacy in other aspects is more likely to be a barrier to developing a real love than to promote it. If my lovers start off in that way, their biggest obstacles to true intimacy will be internal.

The five aspects of intimacy

And I will write romances that look at couples who, in their journey towards intimacy, are progressing in all five aspects.

So what do I mean by that?

In a real romance, the hero and heroine support one another.

They are, of course, because this is a romance, physically intimate. This doesn’t necessarily mean they have sex all the time, or on the page. They express their feelings for one another by touching, hugging, holding hands, or whatever other physical expressions are appropriate to their culture. They are each aware of the other’s body, and they understand how to give pleasure each to the other. They know the shape of one another’s hands and ears. They are at ease in one another’s arms. They each know how the other will react to particular touches, and they know the taste and smell of one another.

They are emotionally intimate. They have shared their darkest and dearest secrets, their most terrible and precious memories. They are honest about their feelings, their desires, the instincts and experiences that drive them. They have bared themselves, each to the other, and have found acceptance.

They are mentally intimate. They share their thoughts and ideas. They can discuss anything with one another, not always agreeing, but always respecting and listening, and working together to agree at least an armistice on issues that might otherwise divide them.

They have experiential intimacy, which means they spend time together doing things together. They build memories. They are friends who enjoy being with one another.

And they are spiritually intimate. What that means depends on the couple. If they share a religion, they might worship and pray together. Non-believers might make time as a couple to open themselves to the awe-inspiring, because spirituality is not just for the religious.

(Some people put financial initimacy in as an extra aspect. I think it is just one more issue, about which the couple need to be honest. Like many issues, it has mental and emotional implications, so comes into both of those aspects.)

So that’s my challenge as a writer. How do I write a realistic journey that allows my characters to challenge one another, trip and fall, and pick themselves up and learn?

Respect is key

I write men and women who respect one another, and who suffer consequences when they don’t. A character who seeks to get his intimacy needs met at the expense of another is doomed to fail in my stories, and will either learn from the experience before he gets his happy ending, or will become a villain and get his just desserts.

I love fiction. Real life villains are harder to dispose of, and impossible to reform. (They may reform themselves, but that’s a different kettle of fish entirely than being saved by the love of a good woman, which is a terrible and dangerous myth.)

Consummate love is the ultimate goal

Let’s get real. I’m talking a lifelong journey. By the end of my story, all I can promise is that the hero and heroine will have made sufficient progress on all five types of intimacy for you to feel confident of their destination. Happy Ever After means the reader’s sense that even if life goes to hell in a handcart, they’ll be okay as long as they’re together.

The real achievement is consummate love, that special kind of love described in Robert Sternberg’s Triangle.

So take no substitutes. As a writer, give me characters who build one another up and create a love to last a lifetime. As a reader, measure the books you read against Sternberg’s triangle and ask yourself if this book boyfriend is worthy of the special person that you are.

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In which I deride labels and explain why.

Today, I’m inviting you to join a celebration. I’ve talked frequently about the Speakeasy Scribe box set to which I’ve contributed a story. Tomorrow, the authors and others from the Speakeasy Scribes are going to be hanging out on Facebook to chat about their books, their lives, and their ideas. They’re neat people, and we’ll have fun. I hope you can join us.

If you don’t want my philosophical meanderings, and just want to read about the wonderful book and its journey through time with the denizens of the Final Draft Tavern, then go to my second post for Sunday, here.

If you’d like to know why the label of the party bothers me, read on.

The party is called ‘Leftist Literature and Libations’, which is a clever piece of alliteration. But the term leftist gets up my left nostril, and I want to explain why.

I have a deep distaste for language that divides people along a single dimension. When we call a person left or right, liberal or conservative—or even (in some contexts) black or white, male or female—we speak as if we can predict the full complexity of a human being from a single label. We are, all of us, more than the few attitudes and opinions that we share with others in any one of the multiple overlapping groups into which we could be directed according to such labels.

If I accepted any label, it would be centrist, but even that would be misleading. Many of my ideas and views count as radical. Others would be pigeonholed as deeply conservative. So centrist is not a description but a default; an average of all the positions I might take on all the many issues that face us.

I am, however, more or less centrist on a scale a two dimensional scale of my own invention: a four cell scattergraph matrix that I think more nearly represents the differences between us. For lack of a better name, Let’s call it the Fear matrix.

 

The matrix has two axes.

The vertical axis is Our attitude to resources, and it runs from Scarcity through Sufficiency to Plentitude. An attitude of scarcity is one that says ‘there is not enough, there will never be enough, and if you have it, I won’t.

The horizontal axis is the Spectrum of confidence. It runs from Despair through Cautious hope to Reckless optimism. An attitude of despair expects the worst.

I suggest calling it the fear matrix, because people (left-leaning or right-leaning) in the bottom left quadrant are reacting out of fear (of loss, of death, of the Unknown) when they withdraw into a mental or actual bunker, guns facing towards those not in their inner circle.

The inner circles concept is the third dimension of the scatter graph. Rather than placing yourself on matrix as a dot, place the circle of the people you would trust and protect without question, and make the circle the size of that group.

We naturally define the world into ‘Them’ and ‘Us’. Everyone does it. Some of us fight it, some of us embrace it, some of us are utterly unaware of it. But the ‘Us’ concept differs, and since we define ‘Them’ in relation to ‘Not Us’, the consequences are huge.

For some poor souls, ‘Us’ is a single person. They may have disciples, or family members, or servants, but those people are adjuncts to the ‘Us’ that is, in fact, the single individual at the centre. A failing adjunct can expect to be amputated without compunction.

For others, ‘Us’ is a small group, defined by shared ideals or beliefs or interests, or by family connections, or by some other criteria that makes sense to a person with our family of origin, experiences, and personal circumstances.

I have often thought that a person can be judged more or less civilised according to the width and breadth of their ‘Us’ circle.

What we do with ‘Not Us’ depends entirely on where we sit on the Fear matrix.

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The dangerous pen

David Skinner’s ‘Terry Pratchett Tribute Graffiti’, installed at Code Street, near Brick Lane, London

I write, at least in part, as a way to explore ideas and feelings that are bothering me. Once, being bothered, unhappy, sick or grieved would send me into books written by other people. Today, in a world riven by strife and fear, at whom and abroad, I am just as likely to transmute those feelings into a world I create myself.

When I write, I see things more clearly. I can also rewrite reality to give me a better result, which can be easing to the soul. I do like happy endings.

Which is all by way of introducing a book I’ve been reading. I have been a fan of Sir Terry Pratchett’s since Strata, one of his first books. I have just been reading Raising Postal, his second to last Discworld novel.

On one level, it is the story of the coming of the railway to Discworld. On another, it continues Pratchett’s burning indictment of the stupidity of prejudice based on racism, sexism, or any other ism. And it eviscerates the mindset behind terrorism that results from such prejudice.

Here’s a typical footnote:

Scouting for trolls, dwarfs and humans was brought in shortly after the Koom Valley Accord had been signed, on the suggestion of Lord Vetinari, to allow the young of the three dominant species to meet and hopefully get along together. Naturally the young of all species, when thrown together, instead of turning against one another would join forces against the real enemy, that is to say their parents, teachers and miscellaneous authority which was so old-fashioned. And up to a point, and amazingly, it had worked and that was Ankh-Morpork, wasn’t it? Mostly, nobody cared what shape you were, although they might be very interested in how much money you had.

And here are the terrorists, recruiting:

‘Nobody has to be hurt,’ they said, and it may have been too that people would murmur, ‘After all, it’s in his own interests,’ and there were other little giveaways such as ‘It’s time for fresh blood,’ and such things as ‘We must preserve our most hallowed ordinances,’ and if you were susceptible to atmospheres, you could see that dwarfs, perfectly sensible dwarfs, dwarfs who would consider themselves dwarfs of repute and fair dealing, were nevertheless slowly betraying allegiances they had formerly undertaken with great solemnity, because the hive was buzzing and they didn’t want to be the ones that got stung. The watchwords were ‘restoring order’ and ‘going back to the basics of true dwarfishness’.

To kill innocents in the name of politics is very warped. To kill innocents in the name of God is, in my view, both warped and risky, as Pratchett points out in this brief passage:

… and in the gloom the locomotive spat live steam, instantly filling the air with a pink fog . . . The dwarf waited, unable to move, and a sombre voice said, PLEASE DO NOT PANIC. YOU ARE MERELY DEAD. The vandal stared at the skeletal figure, managed to get himself in order and said to Death, ‘Oh . . . I don’t regret it, you know. I was doing the work of Tak, who will now welcome me into paradise with open arms!’ For a person who didn’t have a larynx Death made a good try at clearing his throat. WELL, YOU CAN HOPE, BUT CONSIDERING WHAT YOU INTENDED, IF I WERE YOU I WOULD START HOPING HARDER RIGHT NOW AND, PERHAPS, VERY QUICKLY INDEED. Death continued, in tones as dry as granite, TAK MIGHT INDEED BE GENTLE. STRIVE AS YOU HAVE NEVER STRIVEN. YES, TAK MIGHT BE GENTLE, OR . . . The vandal listened to the sound of silence, the sound like a bell with, alas, no clapper, but finally the dreadful silence ended in . . . NOT. [Tak being the deity of the dwarves]

Pratchett’s great genius was in making us laugh while making us think. Rest in peace, Sir Terry.

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Ruminations on world-building, after an orgy of reading

As I may have mentioned, I’ve been a bit slowed recently by a shoulder injury and a repeating winter cold. The shoulder is finally responding to treatment, but being limited in the number of hours I can type has been a real nuisance. The demands of the day job have to take priority so the bills get paid, with the novellas for anthologies coming next. So I’m way behind on The Realm of Silence, and will need to really buckle down if release is not to be postponed until next year.

I’ve been reading instead of writing

On the other hand, being laid up has allowed me to voraciously reread entire series of novels by the authors who sucked me into the historical romance genre. Georgette Heyer, of course. Elizabeth Hoyt. Eloisa James. Grace Burrowes. Mary Jo Putney. Carla Kelly. Stephanie Laurens. Mary Balogh. Anne Gracie. Anna Campbell. (Others, too. That’s just off the top of my head.)

I’ve been rereading an entire series at a gulp, then another by quite a different author, just as I did five years ago when my eldest daughter loaned me the book Simply Perfect and I fell in love with the genre. (Though some of the series I’ve read in the past three months weren’t written at that time.)

This time, though, was different. This time, I was reading from the perspective of my own years of world and character building in historical romance writing.

And I know what I love!

All the authors I love provide the same things, to a greater or lesser extent. Engaging plots where I care about what happens. Well-rounded characters who seem like real people for the times, and who have something about them that makes me wish them success. Realistic and detailed background features that are true (as far as I can tell) to the history of the time and place.

Reading them the way I have, a whole series in sequence, is leading me to reexamine my own writing to see how well I’m performing in those areas.

I like my plots to surprise me

Plots? I can get a bit carried away, I think. I love a detailed and complex plot with lots of Byzantine twists and turns, with copious clues that are easy to miss and only obvious as the story draws to a close and all the bits are tied together with a bow. Expect me to keep doing this. Even in my short stories, where plots are simple, I try not to do the obvious.

I reckon good people come in lots of flavours

Characters? What I try to do is make each hero and each heroine into different people. It works the other way. Stephanie Laurens writes a brilliant Norman aristocrat: tall, stern, protective, outwardly impervious but inwardly vulnerable to the one woman on whom he sets his autocratic heart. We meet him in story after story, and have all the fun of watching her bold, unconventional, challenging heroine bring him to his knees.

Mary Jo Putney, on the other hand, peoples her books with individuals of many different stamps. Decent men and women, but formed by different influences (both nature and nurture). In the Fallen Angel series, she has one of these heroes describe himself and his friends.

“What are your friends like?” He smiled a little. “Imagine a great long wall blocking the path as far as one can see in both directions. If Nicholas came to it, he would shrug and decide he didn’t really need to go that way. Rafe would locate whoever was in charge of the wall and talk his way past it, and Lucien would find some stealthy way to go under or around without being seen.” “What about you?” His smile turned rueful. “Like a mad spring ram, I would bash my head into the wall until it fell down.”

Exactly. Four very different men, and she gave each of them a heroine alike in loyalty and love, and unlike in everything else.

So for me, that means more of the same. Each hero, each heroine, each villain, as unique as I can make them. I also want to watch that my secondary characters don’t fall into the Dickens mould. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘enter, one cheerful landlady’ or ‘manservant for comic relief’, but I’ve got into the habit of knowing a little bit about everyone who crowds into my books, and even if surface characteristics are all I have time for on the page, something of their personality and history needs to sit beneath it.

And I need to like them in order to fully enjoy the book

And even if my readers don’t always like them and their behaviour, I need to. Many people find Aldridge unsympathetic, particularly in A Baron for Becky. And so they should. He behaved badly there and again, mostly, in Revealed in Mist (though not nearly as badly as Richport will in coming novels). Still, I know what motivates them and I hope you will forgive them by the time they reach their happily ever after.

I also have a couple of thoroughly unlikeable females to redeem. So watch this space.

Research is my catnip

Then there’s background: that weird amalgam of language usage and facts judiciously chosen to create a realistic environment for a story that could have happened only there, only then. I have read and enjoyed stories set against cardboard cutouts of historical backgrounds, when I’ve been in the mood. But they don’t sustain me. I’ve read stories with modern-thinking people in historical novels, and they irritate me exceedingly, unless they are time travel books and the people really are modern, or unless the writer gives a reason why this character is so out of step with their entire cultural milieu.

So research continues to be essential, and I agonise over detail. That doesn’t mean it is always correct—I make mistakes, usually something that seems so obviously true that I don’t check it. I’m always grateful for corrections. Indeed, reading to know what not to write is almost more important than reading for details that appear in the story. Not all research appears in the book, which is why I’ve got into the habit of posting research posts, so I can fool myself I did all that extraneous reading for a purpose.

Now your turn

So that’s what I’m trying to do. How well I emulate the writers I admire, and how much my own unique voice provides you with a different product, is for you to decide.