I got my start as a writer back in the long-ago, writing Regency Romances. These were relatively short novels that charted the progress of two characters toward each other, ending in a happy ending and (presumably) a wedding, set against the backdrop of the English Regency. I wrote five romances and then stopped. Not because I didn’t love the setting and the era, but because nudging two people toward each other, with no possibility of a surprise (given the expectations of the form, if you buy a romance, you expect that happily ever after) stopped entertaining me. And I write to entertain myself, first and foremost.*
But that wasn’t the only reason I stopped. At that time the expectations of the romance genre were, um, broadening, and I found I wasn’t very interested in the way things were going. This was the dawn of the Big! Sweeping! Highly Sexualized! romance, with lots of sex scenes using lots of (to me, risible) descriptions of sex which I found as arousing as plumbing manuals.
I am pro sex, personally, and in fiction. But many of the books I looked at at the time were, um, sex-scene delivery systems wrapped up in a thin coating of historical setting. Most of the books had protagonists who were of the middle and upper classes, who were swept off by pirates or brooding Earls or some such, and not-quite-forced into having mind-blowing sex, swept away on a tide of passion that overcame all their prior training about what a woman of good family did or didn’t do and… And there were (in my admittedly smallish sample, because most of the books I looked at were not to my taste) never any consequences. Not the obvious ones–pregnancy and STDs**–but the very crucial societal consequences to a woman of good family. This drove me nuts, and is part of the reason I started writing my Sarah Tolerance books.
I mention this because I’ve been reading a lot of “romantasy” of late, for Reasons. And I have, therefore, staggered through a lot of plumbing. Er, sex scenes. And some of those books come off as sex scene delivery systems wrapped in a thin coating of fantasy tropes. Not my thing. For the people who love this stuff, it is exactly what they want, and I’m happy for that. Everyone should have access to the fiction they want to read. And I think the authors of these books are just as happy as their readers–I don’t believe it’s possible to write this kind of fiction unless you subscribe to it wholeheartedly.
But I would like to suggest to those writers (who are probably not seeing this) that sometimes less truly is more. A little less specificity as to what goes where allows the reader to insert their own idea of what is romantic/erotic. Lead me to the bedroom door, as it were, and my imagination can tailor a scene that contains everything I find satisfying. Giving too much specific detail (particularly when the details are in language that makes me snicker) makes that impossible. I once had a writing student, a nice guy who wanted to write Harlequin romances, and (as I put it at the time) filled his books with more thighs and breasts than a poultry counter… but lacked incense. Sometimes the thighs and breasts get in the way of the emotional core of the scene, which is what I’m there for.
We know how the plumbing works. Tell me less.
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*I’m sorry if that sounds selfish, but honestly, if I’m not having a good time why would a reader?
** And dear God, why everyone in Europe didn’t have syphilis at this time I do not know, so how any of these characters could have dodged that bullet…especially with pirates and brooding Earls, neither of whom were famous for restraint…