Romance Writing and The Single Gal

You wouldn’t believe the number of people that think romance novels give women unrealistic expectations of love in the real world… And as I’m a single gal, it also seems to allow people to carry that misconception over a little so that they believe it also means I shouldn’t know how to write one either!!! One person recently, (who shall remain nameless to save their embarrassment and not mine you understand), when informed by a proud friend of mine that I wrote romance novels, whilst looking surprised, asked; ”Does she have much experience of romance then, I thought she was single?” Sheesh.

I guess to the former set of critics I’m the ideal example to back them up. I read these books from my early teens. In fact, I often kid my mother that her idea of sex education was Mills & Boon and pamphlets from the doctors left strewn around the house. I certainly don’t remember a sit down conversation on the subject! But rather than giving me an unrealistic expectation, I think what they did was make me believe it was possible to still find real love out there in a world that seems determined to make the subject more *practical* or worse still, more physically based. Yes, there is a certain practicality to it in the real world – but I think the fact that my characters often have to deal with some of the everyday troubles reflects how I feel on that subject. And the physical part of it is also important in the stories I tell, so that kinda tells a tale on my opinions too, even though I believe that my characters should be able to stay together when that part eventually fades. But what I believe most of all is that reading romance taught me a lot about human nature, about taking a chance when you maybe wouldn’t, about looking below the surface, and about not settling for second best when the real thing might still be out there…Which ain’t bad lessons to learn in your late teens when you think about it…

Does it mean that I spend my days waiting for a Sheikh or a Billionaire to whisk me off my feet and I won’t settle for anything less while I wait? Not so much. But then neither does reading a romance make me believe that no-one ever needs to go to the bathroom – something that never happens in a category romance. If I was that easily led then I’d have serious kidney problems by now…

My being single has nothing to do with too high an expectation brought on by reading romance, and to suggest that women are so easily led is kinda patronising, don’t you think??? It’s like in some way we have to be labelled dumber for reading romance in the first place and therefore would fall into this terrible trap…

Erm… NOPE.

As to whether or not being single means I’m qualified to write one… well… that’s like suggesting that Terry Pratchett shouldn’t be able to write about the Discworld cos he’s never been on a flat planet carried through space by a giant turtle, or Patricia Cornwell shouldn’t be able to write about the workings of a mass murderers mind because she’s never murdered someone herself! Nah – when it comes to writing romance, for me, it’s all about having an imagination, with an understanding of why people might do the things they do, a fair share of life experience to understand what they might feel at any given time - oh - and a good dose of the kind of discipline needed in order to sit down and write from the beginning all the way to the end thrown in…Being single or being married or even currently being head over heels in love has nothing to do with those things, does it?

Having said that, could this single gal have written a romance when they were given to her in her teens? No. Could she have written one before she understood what it was like to have had a broken heart or having picked the wrong guy somewhere along the way? I don’t think so. Is she less likely to find the kind of hero she now writes about because they subliminally set the bar too high for mankind in real life? Actually, when it comes to men like that not existing in my life that was a given before I even started reading or writing them - really – if you saw where I live you’d understand why…it’s a population thing…and a percentage of guys who would fancy me within that population thing… Move me somewhere with a larger population and I guess my percentages would go up… But I digress...

So, do I write better heroes because I haven’t found one of my own in real life? Well no, I know many authors extremely happily married who write gorgeous heroes!!! And do I only write them to fill a void in my life? Hell no.

Simply, I guess I read and write romance because I believe in happily ever after – which maybe means all the fairy stories I read as a child set up those ‘unrealistic expectations’ and are really to blame. Or maybe Disney Movies. Or Chick-Flicks now…But the truth is, I still believe it can happen. I think it’ll be a sad day when the world stops believing in that possibility, don’t you?

But would I give up writing romance for a real life hero as delicious as some of the ones I create on paper? Mmm… That’s a tough call… I think if he loved me he wouldn’t mind if I passed on my belief in happily ever after to a few more women. After all, believing in romance and the possibility of that happily ever after would be what made me hold out for him in the first place…Right?

So do Romance Novels make your expectations higher? What do you think?

And I'm currently running a competition to win a copy of Breathless! with details over on my Blog if you'd like to have a go! Pop over and answer a nice simple question for me and I'll put your name in the draw...

Is Everything Research? - Trish Wylie

Seems to me that since I became a writer, everything has become research for me - in one form or another…

Used to be when I took a weekend away somewhere I did it just to – well – have a weekend away somewhere. But not anymore. Now I’m taking pictures of things around me with a view to using them in a story, I’m looking at places where imaginary characters could live or work, I’m seeing parks where they could have walked, cafes were they might have had coffee… And I’m seeing them there and wondering what they would say or do and what their lives are like.

But then I think I did that before I even became a writer.

Maybe that’s the thing with people who write – we don’t just look at a place and see that place. Or watch two people talk and just leave it at face value. Our imaginations are always on the go and we’re always curious about people; what they’re talking about, their lives, their problems, whether or not they're alone in the world. From time to time we may even eavesdrop to try and found out...

With friends on a night out (too many years ago for me to confess to), we sometimes played a game where we would pick a couple in the crowd and build a whole life for them - we'd give them a profession and a name and a personality and we would talk when they talked – making up conversations for them (quite often with dumb accents and much hilarity) – and do you know what? I think that was writer training too.

So now, every place I visit become a research trip. I might never use a particular place or setting in the end, but if I ever need it I know it’s there , stored deep in my brain. Like when I visited Dublin recently for the book launch of fellow Irish Writer Abby Green’s first book. I mean, I’ve used Dublin as a setting dozens of times – but truth be told I’ve always shied away from finer details and exact place names. All it took was a weekend refresher visit and it occurred to me that I was missing out on a lot by not adding that particular layer in.

So I put on my nice new trainers and took my Christmas Present camera and off I went a wandering. I found a house for my heroine to live in, a park for her to sit in, a busy shopping street near Trinity College where she could have worked. I took random pictures of the streets full of people that she might have seen every day, the local landmarks she would have walked past to get to work – I even took my camera and a pen and paper onto one of the open top bus tours so that I could take notes from the bus drivers hilarious running commentary…

And while I travelled back to my hotel on one of the City’s shiny new Tram’s (which give the place a lovely European City feel) I imagined that I was the heroine – I was breathing the air that she would breathe, seeing the people she would see and simply *being* in the city she would be in. Which made it all the more real to me, and I have to believe that can only be a good thing for my writing, right?

Maybe sometimes we do need to just leave the keyboard behind and walk out in the real world so that we can come back and create a more realistic imaginary world?

But what it does mean is that everything is now research for me….

I wonder if I’m the only one that thinks that way…?

H’s & K’s
Trish

Trish’s next release is a Modern Extra entitled Breathless! out in February:

Just one night would take her breath away!

Rory Flanaghan is every girl's dream: tall, toned and so, so sexy. On leave from his dangerous overseas job, he's helping out at the gym he owns. When writer Cara Sheehan starts one-to-one sessions with Rory, exercise takes on a whole new meaning. He leaves her with a sensual awareness she's never let herself feel before...

Rory can't understand why this beautiful, fiesty woman has a problem with her image, and he knows he can teach Cara what she's capable of... As things get really personal, Rory shows Cara that just one kiss, just one touch...just one night... will leave her breathless!