There is not much you need to know about this blog, but I will start out with the pertinent facts. Primarily I intend to use this blog as a way to organize my thoughts as I go through the process of writing my first Romance novel. I have had a love affair (cringing but punning nonetheless) with the genre since I was a young teenager. Most young ladies go through a Romance stage, usually when they have a lot of feelings and urges and are looking for some guidance on how this whole coupling up thing is supposed to work. Sadly, it is only when we reach adulthood (and sometimes not always then) that we realize that Romance is as much a fantasy as Science Fiction or Fantasy itself.
I realized early that reality was missing from the perfect unions in the novels I read. I really think it was when the tall, handsome, humanoid alien brought his human bride to rule his own personal solar system that I realized “hey, clearly the rising divorce rate in America has nothing to do with following the rules of Romance novels;” because that humanoid alien book was written by a hugely popular, best selling author and she was trying to make me believe that romance can work between humans and aliens. This particular set up did not work for me. Despite loving both Sci-Fi and Romance, something about the wildly divergent genres clashing gave me pause in my faith in Romance (novels). While I was pausing, I started to work out the generic rules for Romance, and in the process realized that one day I would absolutely contribute my own work to the incredibly expansive genre.
That is the first thing you need to know. The other two pieces of information are purely incidental to the greater project here of working through my own writing process. Those two things are that I was dumped after writing the first twenty five percent of my novel, and have not written any more since that day two months ago. I have continued to talk to this guy for much of the past two months like a dummy, which led me to stupidly write him a letter from Mr. Darcy.
You know, that letter he hoped Elizabeth had destroyed because it “might justly make [her] hate [him]?”* It is a letter that is all angry and expository and full of self-righteousness. I totally wrote one of those. Now, as all good literary classifiers know, P&P isn’t a Romance Novel but it exposes the stifling nature of Regency life through fantasy, and most girls perform an act of P&P at least once in their lives. Therefore, I think the novel can totally be used to gain access to two of my primary objectives in my own project. Those objectives being that I want to navigate the rules of a genre that has been my comfort and entertainment for fifteen years in order to contribute my own work, and I want to somehow reconcile Romance with reality.
The actual letter in Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy taught me two things about how I am going to write my novel. The first being that my exposition needs to be presented in a way that does not only advance the plot, but also key in to the psychology behind how people interact in order to give insight in to the character’s feelings without describing their physicality. The second lesson I learned is that generically, for the male characters the lesson in how to feel, or understand their own feelings often comes only after they have done (or written) something they regret.
My letter from Mr. Darcy taught me that even when I am hurt I should be nicer if I am putting it in writing because that stuff gets brought back up when talking about feelings and sitting on the couch with one’s ex-boyfriend while the rain pours outside the windows. Yuck.
*Austen. Pride and Prejudice. The Complete Works of Jane Austen. Penguin, 1983. 433. That’s right, I totally cited my work. Yeah college.
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