You know about the bestselling book, Fifty Shades of Grey. No need to dissect it here. Decide for
yourself if it’s erotica, or pornography, or just a really really sexy love
story. The fact is it started off as Twilight
fan fiction, and fan fiction has rather elastic standards in storytelling. Twilight itself (the first book in
particular) is an old school Harlequin-style romance, just with vampires. Give
Edward the vampire an Italian accent and a title, and he’d fit right into the
pantheon of dominating Harlequin heroes. In my opinion these two bestsellers
have their roots firmly in romance, however far they may have strayed.
One book doesn’t do it for me. I don’t know about you, but I
have read more than fifty romances. I
have read thousands. Some have been sexy, and some have not, but I never, ever have
read a romance looking for a cheap thrill. Never. Few people do read romances
for such reasons, because romances are too emotionally complicated for mere
thrills. When you read as many as five books in one day, you’re addicted. But
what is the addiction? Not to sex. No, the addictive quality of romances is their
deep exploration of people’s emotions when trying to complete connection with
their soul mate. Or to use a simpler term, it’s courtship. Romance is
courtship, and the entire purpose of courtship is discovery. Do I like this
person? How does this person treat me in public and in private? Can I see
myself with this person for the next fifty
years?
There’s that fifty
word again. An unfathomable number, really, yet if we are lucky, we might live
long enough to celebrate fifty years
together with someone. If we find the right person. A romance novel is an
exploration of what makes someone the right person for a particular someone
else. We as readers get to tag along and experience it all for ourselves through
the heroine.
Emotions play a role in other kinds of novels, but in a
romance, the emotions are the story. I can show you fifty different kinds of romance story arcs but it’s all the same
underneath, the development of the heroine’s love for someone, the conflicts
that complicate it, and finally, a resolution with a happy ending. Some people
may read romances for whatever sexual thrills they can find in them, but those can
be few and far between. Despite the sexual openness of many romances today,
many other romances are being written featuring sexually reticent characters and
circumspect behavior. Readers simply looking for a cheap thrill have a long
wait to find one in a romance. They’re much more likely to encounter an emotion
first. Characters have to be introduced and relationships between the
characters developed, and complications must then ensue. Who would hang around
for a couple hundred pages just to experience the heroine finally getting a
kiss out of a hero in an Amish romance? Does the heroine with faerie powers
have time for a lot of sexual hijinks while she’s saving the world from demons?
Are the fans of evangelical Christian romances, the ultimate in chaste
storylines these days, addicted to the nonexistent sex in them? Oh, please.
