Tag Archives: genre fiction

Romance, Research, and Writing a Summer Novel

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ICYMI, I have spent the summer writing a Regency friends-to-lovers romance novel, called A Duke for Lady Ellen, which follows the adventures of poet Lady Ellen Brightly in her pursuit of an eligible husband in London. The story is set in 1816, after the wars on the Continent, so Society is celebrating the London Season in full force.  Lady Ellen, who initially isn’t too keen on getting married because of her tendency toward clumsiness which alienates potential suitors, meets up with the Duke of Danbury at a ball and interest blooms.  I don’t want to spoil the plot, but another suitor, the middle-aged Earl of Hambidge, comes on the scene and Ellen finds herself equally attracted to him. Hijinks ensue.

I’ve read a lot of Regency novels.  What I like about them is that they are total fantasies—women of privileged (alas, white) backgrounds whose sole life purpose is to secure a husband.  Money for them is rarely a concern, and they have loving parents and good breeding, and are basically set up to succeed. And if they are not of a privileged background, they usually have such a nobility of spirit, they can’t help but capture the eye of some obscenely wealthy titled rake (Cinderella stories of a sort).  So you can see the appeal as a reader—these novels completely take you out of your hum drum quotidian milieu.

Lots of harsh realities are glossed over in these novels, if they are mentioned at all.  If you’re a Marxist, you realize that these ladies searching for husbands are commodities themselves AND they get their privilege on the backs of tenant farmers whose rents support the titled gentry and on the backs of a servant class who make in one year probably less than the cost of a few of the heroine’s ball gowns. Less savory elements of London society (small “s”) exist, but for the most part, these women do not interact with people who are struggling to survive through crime or prostitution or begging. If poverty is mentioned at all, it tends to be in terms of the charity work that these Society women do to alleviate the problem.

Granted, the gentlemen that the women marry tend to be hedonistic rakes who only reform their wicked ways because they fall in love with the heroine. And sometimes, the men come from poor backgrounds and have “bootstrapped” their lives by becoming titans of industry. So they are rich and therefore “deserving “of the heroines’ love. But more often than not, the men are rich and titled from the get-go, and they are immediately captivated by the Lady at the heart of these stories.

Rarely—at least in all the novels I’ve read—is race even addressed. This might be my fault because I have not researched POC writing Regency novels like I should, so that’s on me, but when it is discussed, the issue of “race” is always framed in terms of a white person who will risk being ostracized from Society in order to be with their love.  I just read Cara Maxwell’s Jilted in January (part of The Rake Review series, #1), in which the hero, Edward Johns, is Chinese on his mother’s side, but he’s rich as Croesus, and that buys him (some) respectability, even if he’s considered the most “unmarriageable” man in England.  He does not want to marry Persephone Cuthbert—not because he doesn’t love and desire her—but because he’s afraid she will tumble down Society’s ladder for marrying him.  For her part, she seems fine with the fall—she maybe trips down one rung max, and when they marry, winds up living in perfect happiness the Limehouse district at the docks, also known for being a China Town. So race isn’t a barrier to happiness (as it shouldn’t be), even if it feels unrealistic for the age.

In Emma V. Leech’s To Break the Rules (part of the Girls Who Dare series, #4), the main character Senorita Lucia de Ferria is called “exotic” but her exoticism inflames the men of the ton. No blonde-haired, blue-eyed English rose, she nevertheless is passing as European, but it turns out she is actually Aashini, an Indian, trying to hide the reality of her background. The book gives her a very poor, traditional-seeming grandmother who may or may not be psychic, a woman who embraces Viscount Cavendish for her granddaughter. He loves Aashini and when she “comes out” as Indian at a big Society ‘do, he couldn’t be prouder. She also has nine other young women friends in the series who don’t seem to care about her race at all—which is loving and inclusive of them. But again, unrealistic.

Another book that (tangentially) deals with race is Elisa Braden’s Anything but a Gentleman (from the Rescued from Ruin series, #7).  This time the character of color, Shaw, is not the main character, but he is the assistant and manager of the hero’s club and is wealthy because of his position.  He is also a very dark South Asian and he’s very in love with the sister of the heroine.  The sister, Phoebe, is pregnant by Lord Glassington, who only comes to heal at the very end when he is tricked into re-proposing marriage to Phoebe.  But by then Shaw, who has nursed Phoebe back to health after an illness, declares himself to Phoebe, promises to love her child as his own, and tells Glassington to get lost and pay up the gambling debts he’s incurred.  Braden takes care to have Shaw explain how Phoebe’s marrying him will hurt her future prospects in Society and is very clear that he’s aware of the difference in their status.  But, as always, true love overcomes everything, even differences in race.  But of the three books I’ve mentioned, Braden seems the most aware of the transgressive nature of the interracial relationship within Regency S/society—yet, the transgression remains between minor characters.  The main characters are white and white hegemony is upheld.

Considering the bias that the white British had towards Indians, it seems like pure fantasy to imagine even minor characters of different cultural backgrounds getting together.  But this is romance, and love always triumphs, even if it’s unrealistic…Of course, I realize harping on a romance novel’s unreality is like saying water is wet—there’s nothing realistic about romance novels, so introducing diversity in these ways should be celebrated even if the color lines in Regency England were much more impermeable than they are now.  But then I’m speaking from a white point of view, and I don’t have a scholarly background in 19th century literature, so take my opinions with a pound of salt.

But back to discussing A Duke for Lady Ellen!

Writing a Regency romance was not hard, per se, probably because I’ve absorbed many of the tropes, expressions, and plotting elements just from the sheer number of Regencies I’ve read. I know my book does break some of those plotting elements—for instance, the big sex scene comes almost at the end of the book (Chapter 25), although there is a little pawing at each between main characters earlier on (Chapter 10).  And even in the point of view:  mine is third person limited, so we never get inside of the hero’s head because it’s told from Ellen’s POV.  At best, she supposes certain things about other characters and their motives, but she doesn’t know.  And using third person limited POV is probably a rookie mistake, and one I wouldn’t repeat. All of the Regencies I’ve read are third person omniscient, which allows readers to see other things than what the heroine directly experiences.

Writing a Regency should have been harder for me because of the research such work requires.  I did do some research, mostly about conveyances, money, the mail, and the peerage. But to write something well, especially in an era for which I don’t have a background, research should be front and center.  And for me on this novel, it was not.

Let me give you the biggest, most egregious example where research could have helped. I didn’t know it, but choosing 1816 in which to set A Duke for Lady Ellen was a Bad Idea—quite a problematic time for England (and the rest of the world). I only found out half-way through the writing that 1816 was considered “The Year Without a Summer” (and then, only because of an offhand comment that Chris made alerting me to the fact). Apparently, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia sent particulates in the air and decreased the world’s temperature by a degree or two, making crops fail and causing famines across England and world-wide.

So I had to retrofit my story with nods to the weather and crop conditions to bring a little more realism to the book. Not that anyone in my book seems to suffer for the most part about The Year Without a Summer… just another one of those glossed-over harsh realities I mentioned, I guess. (If I had done research earlier, then I could have incorporated the details more organically and “realistically” instead of ham-fisting them a bit.) But really, I should have done at least a cursory look into 1816, other than arbitrarily choosing a year just because the Napoleonic wars were over and I didn’t want to deal with military history. Next time, amirite?

Still, all things considered, I’m happy with the novel.  I’m sure, writing it as quickly as I did (in the span of several weeks), there are mistakes.  And I changed my mind about who the hero really was kind of half-way through because I fell in love with him, and dropped characters in and out of the story as needed for plot, but over all, I like it.  I’m proud of it. And I know that some people have read it:  at least two of my friends have, and Mom and Chris plan to read it too. I would love a wider audience than just folks I know, of course.  But I’ll take who I can get.

Read a little (or a lot!) and let me know what you think of it!  It’s free!

 

Seriously, JC, They Make Pills for This

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My novel went on a “first date” yesterday.  Metaphorically speaking.

What I mean is, it is in the process of being “courted” by a potential future editor, which is to say, my Brilliant Fiction Writer Friend™ (whom I’ve mentioned before in this blog), who, despite not being a fan of YA, has graciously, and generously, and kind of insanely agreed to read my NaNoWriMo novel Hecate Applebough because he believes in me as a serious writer (even a serious writer of fluff), and sight unseen is willing to work with me to revise it and maybe make it into something good (or good-ish).

I must admit I am in the absolute worst dither of insecurities about my writing ever.  Like I’m back in my first creative writing class when I’m 20 years old, and so shy about what I’ve written that I really fear—not just that what I wrote is crappy (because that is surely a given)—but that I will have a) inflicted my mental crappiness/ drivel on another person; b) wasted someone’s already limited amount of leisure reading by forcing them to read something appalling (and deeply flawed on all levels); c) imposed on someone’s friendship, even when they offered, even when they are doing their best to wear me down to make me agree to continuing this part of the writing process (and I am deathly afraid of imposing on people, like pathologically so); and d) allowed someone to discover proof  that I’m not nearly as hilarious and awesome as I think I am.  (Perhaps that last fear on the list sounds trivial or frivolous, but I assure you, it’s a deeply-seated fear.)

It’s really a weird place to be in—like I believe in my ability as a poet.  I might be having a shitty time convincing contest editors that my volume of poems is fantastic, the next best thing, blah blah, and they need to publish it already, goddammit, but I don’t doubt in any fiber of my being that I’m a poet.  When I think “JC,” I think “poet.”  These ideas fit in my head together, like synonyms.  And sure, it makes sense—you think about all this time that I’ve worked on writing poetry, that I earned that Ph.D. in poetry—I mean, if I didn’t see myself as a poet after the time I’ve invested in it, that would be a huge (and annoying) problem. (And would make having to pay back student loans even more of an insult.)

Except, I don’t want to be just a poet.  I have more words in my head than that.  I’m not saying I believe BFWF that I’m a “novelist” either (just by virtue of having written 1.99 “novels”), but limiting myself to one version of “who I am as a writer” doesn’t fit me any more either.  Of course, in terms of writing fiction—well, I still feel like I’m still 20 years old, with zero experience—but there’s an expansiveness that’s been coming the last few years, a real desire to try something new, and to tell stories that take more than a page.

That narrative bent in my writing and my voice is there—and let’s be honest, the poetry world does not appreciate narrative as a form.  So, I need to use forms that narrative work in… which is why I wrote Hecate Applebough, which is why I also write these memoir-y vignettes that seem to find homes in little journals too.  Hmm.

But getting back to the possibility of having a real reader/ editor:  I was asked if I want to be worn down.  That’s a hard question to answer.  Like, realistically, who wouldn’t want a person you admire who is brilliant and has critical and practical expertise and proclaims a genuine wish to help you succeed to be the one who reads your book and helps you edit and revise it—the two hardest parts of writing?  You’d have to be an idiot to turn that down—particularly when there is so little return in it for them.

(But to be fair, my idiocy is well-documented.)

As I’m thinking about this and talking myself in-and-out of this amazing opportunity that has shown up in my life like a late Christmas gift, I realize my fear isn’t anything like worry that I’m a “fraud” as writer.  I don’t question I’m a writer, per se.  Because there’s so much that goes into writing beyond the actual writing of whatever the piece is, you have to believe that you’re a writer deep down in your heart because if you don’t believe it, then what is the point of doing this really lonely, difficult  (and often barely rewarding) work?  Once a piece of writing is released into the world (and that’s after the writer has spent her time polishing her poem or story until it gleams) you can’t control the people who read it.  If your submission (or your “novel”) shows up on a day that the editors/ grad students working on a journal are on the rag, or hungover, or pissed off at their bosses, or they hate anything that smacks of genre or narrative poetry or they just read a great bird poem right before they picked your bird poem up from the pile and so can’t imagine any bird poem after the one they just read as measuring up (or whatever), your writing, no matter how good it is, won’t go beyond the first pass.  It might not even go beyond the first lines. (I say this as a person who has participated on the grad student side of the journal publication process.)

There’s so much luck involved in a person’s work entering the wider world by being published. And forget about the accolades.  You have to believe you’re a writer—because the odds are so stacked against you that your work will ever resonate with anyone and find a home in their journal or on their upcoming publications list.

So it’s not a matter of lacking faith in myself as a writer (in the generic sense) that is the stumbling block with my sharing Hecate Applebough—the fear emerges from the realization of just how drafty the first draft is—and sharing a piece of my writing with someone that is 98% imperfect terrifies the fuck out of me.

Because when I share my poems with people, they only see them after—typically—the poem has gone through 8-10 drafts already.  Like my writing group?  I show them poems that are, to my mind, already mostly good.  Poems after I meet with them may go through another 5-10 drafts, but when the writing group sees them initially, they don’t see the first draft.  They see something I’m not ashamed to show.

First drafts are unfit to be seen by anyone.  And Hecate Applebough is a first draft.  I mean, it’s prettier than a first draft, in that I’ve line-edited it, I’ve changed some words here and there, or added a few scenes to smooth over some plot holes.  But the aggregate is still first drafty.  (It’s so drafty, it needs to wear a coat.)  And sharing imperfection with someone, even someone as committed to helping me as BFWF is (someone who expects imperfection, moreover, so I’m not going to shock them), even someone who is my friend, is just one of my worst anxieties.  It just seems so wrong—so contrary to my process.  So naked.

And I guess I either need to get over myself and stop being so crippled by self-doubt and all this blather and take the opportunity because when the Universe wraps it in a bow, how stupid do you have to be to say no?  Or I just need to STFU about this book and move on to the next thing and be satisfied with sabotaging myself (again) and learn to enjoy obscurity and blown chances.

(Ugh.  When I put it like that, suddenly I think I must be pretty foolish to have spent 1400 words to realize I planned to say “Yes” all along.)

P.S.  I know BFWF will have read this post (being one of my Five Faithful Readers). And BFWF will think “I knew it.”  But I’m pretty sure, recognizing the kind of headcase I am, that I will change my mind at least 58 more times.  Possibly more. So certainty tonight may shift back over into uncertainty many more times before I actually hand a copy of the book over.  Fair warning.

P.S. #2  BFWF should in no way feel compelled to comment or to cheer me on. (This post is not a plea for more convincing.)  Sometimes I blog just to take the edge off my neuroses.

Oh, Fiction, How You Torment & Tantalize Me…

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I’ve been doing this little online fiction class—it’s only for three weeks, and it is just about over.  The group is small—seven writers and a leader/ moderator and his friend/ assistant.  I don’t know much about the person leading the workshop (I know he has an MFA and a TT job and he’s published a great deal). But all of the things he’s shared about writing and about the individual stories that the group have submitted seem pretty on target to me, and (once I finally understood the interface—it took me several days) I’ve been enjoying it… but more from a teacherly perspective, than a writerly one.

Were I a fiction writer by vocation, I would probably find the prompts and writing discussions more applicable to my own writing process—I want to try them out, of course, I just haven’t… yet.  I’ve said before that I’m interested in writing fiction—I just really can’t seem to do it.  But perhaps like anything, it just takes practice.  And, a few of his prompts could very well apply to creative nonfiction, and I know that I’ll definitely try his “life through artifacts” prompt.

Anyway, as I said, the class interests me from a teacherly perspective.  I like to see good teachers in action.  He draws from a lot of different backgrounds in fiction, and, since the theme of the class is about genre bending/ blending, and being experimental (two things I’m especially poor at), he has a vast knowledge of texts that he uses as examples to illustrate his suggestions about individual pieces and in his discussion about writing in general.  Since I’m not that educated about fiction (from a writing it kind of standpoint), his commentary is especially useful and interesting.

While he seems to have a particular affinity for SFF (as do the rest of the students in the workshop), he doesn’t look down his nose at other genres of fiction, and I admire that, because many academics in general dismiss genre fiction as being aliterary at best and no damn good at worst.  This tension seems to pervade the aesthetics of many writing programs; I’ve seen a few genre-writing MFA programs advertised in Poets & Writers, but that’s in no way typical.  (I never took a fiction writing class at Nebraska, but my sense of the fiction writers they had on faculty back then was that they were literary fiction writers exclusively.)

I suppose writing programs still want to turn out John Steinbecks and Margaret Atwoods (though she’s a bit of a fence sitter) rather than Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings and Kerry Greenwoods… The argument always comes back to high art vs. popular culture, particularly in the hallowed grounds of the Ivory Tower, doesn’t it?  (I also suspect, though I can’t be sure, that academics have a deep-seated fear of debasing themselves to write for money.  Like writing popular fiction is the dark side or something.  I have no such fear.  If I had the talent to do it, you better believe I’d be turning out romance novels or mysteries or Game of Thrones clones or horror stories, or hell, even porn.  I’m not proud.  I’m just not talented that way–I have no attention span to write anything longer than six pages, tops.)

As a reader and lover of genre fiction (although my interest tends to run toward mysteries… and Christmas romance novels, when it’s Christmastime), I’m glad the  workshop leader doesn’t have an arbitrary bias against genre fiction.  Anyway, all this is by way of saying, I ordered three books from Amazon on his suggestion—two were by Kelly Link, a writer I didn’t know about at all, but whom I’m liking. (I’m reading stories from her Magic for Beginners in between more chapters of Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novels and in between stories from Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (which was a suggestion from BFWF**).  It’s important to have good material to aspire too… or to be motivated by.

Imitation being the highest form of flattery, I try putting absurdity like Bender’s or Link’s into my stories, but generally it just comes out wrong. Or pretentious.  Or just like I’m trying too hard to be too cool and winding up being that doofus in the corner.  So then I try writing a conventional story, which I gravitate towards naturally anyhow.  (I know, I know, they tell you to write the thing you’re frightened off… but mainly I’m frightened of writing things that suck, so that advice doesn’t work too well for me.) I worked on a story the other day—it was based on an upcoming theme from Duotrope’s upcoming theme list—a Christmas-ish story, to be submitted by Sept. 25th.  (So, not a lot of time to dick around with it.)  I don’t know if I will finish it, though.  It’s lacking something… maybe, more words.  It’s supposed to be flash though—ideally, the journal wants 700 words.  I’ve written 1000, and it’s not finished.

A real experience prompted the story, and so as I’ve written it, it lies somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. (Liminal spaces suck, by the way.) The problem is, it doesn’t work as fiction OR nonfiction.  I like the idea of it—it focuses on an interaction with a neighbor I had one time when I made a snowman in the front yard.  I could make it totally creative nonfiction, but then it will be considerably longer—and it already lacks that CNF aesthetic—that real attention to beautiful language that CNF is known for, that expectation of a transformative moment that we rely on in creative nonfiction to drive the story forward.  And yet, it is there, a flash of a moment where the woman building the snowman relents, at least a little bit, in her annoyance at her neighbor’s intervention.  So the draft has that going for it.

Still, the journal wants fiction.  If I make it shorter, and more fiction-y, I don’t know that its point will be clear.  Honestly, I’m not sure anyone would care either way.  If I made it more fiction-oriented, I wonder what I could do to “fix” the story?  I can’t make it about a snowman that comes to life because I believe we ALL have heard that one before.  What I’m really interested in is the relationship between the two neighbors.  But I just don’t know if it’s compelling enough.  Maybe the story just needs to be a little anecdote I share with friends—maybe it’s really not meant to be shared in a large sense (with a public audience, I mean).

But maybe I’ve just persuaded myself that I could try harder and make this story work.  It doesn’t hurt to try and a hundred other motivational platitudes, blah, blah, blah.  I can see what happens if I try.  At the very least, it will be practice, and all writing practice is good, even the failures.  I know it will wind up longer, so I guess I’ll go the CNF route and forget about sending it to that particular journal.  That’s ok.

But I’ve digressed…  Back to the writing workshop:  I have a story to read and respond to for the online group.  I printed it out and left it on the table and now it has cat vomit on it.  But the first page seems pretty good, despite the stain, so I think I’ll go read the rest now.  And then maybe another Kelly Link story.

**Brilliant Fiction Writer Friend™