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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

Romantic fiction for the unromantic

12/2/2014

8 Comments

 
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As Valentine's Day approaches and the adverts for flowers, chocolates, romantic getaways – and even adopt-a-veg – ping into my inbox, my thoughts drift to romance. Okay, I’m lying. In truth, my thoughts recoil from the frill and froth, the commodification of love. I can’t deny that Valentines can be a lot of fun at a certain stage of life or relationship, but grown-up love is too complex to wrap up once a year with a boxed card with a satin padded heart. Or maybe I’m too much of a cynic?

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In my own writing, the dozen or so short stories about couples I’ve published would constitute an unlikely bunch of red roses. Similary, scanning my bookshelves for novels to mark the big day, nothing jumps out at me as pure romance. Pride and Prejudice earns its place as witty social history (or small-scale politics, or even horror, in its depiction of a world where women had no status independent of the men who held the purse strings); its modern counterpart Bridget Jones was consigned to the Oxfam shop before she could bore me with another instalment of her hopeless diet. I’m not against the boy-meets-girl story, but I want a novel to engage my head as well as my heart. So it’s no to romance as genre, and a big maybe to romance as plot.

Yet, looking closer, those romantic subplots keep drawing me in. Perhaps I’ve got a heart after all. Is there a type of novel that particularly benefits from having romance sewn into the weave?

Romance makes the darkness a little lighter

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I blogged recently on the depiction of terror in four literary novels. In each, the gloom and pessimism is partly ameliorated by the love angle, albeit an extremely small element in Pat Barker’s First World War novel, Regeneration. Yet it might be no coincidence that I found this, featuring the minor character (at this stage of the trilogy) Prior’s relationship with a young woman who works in the munitions factory, the bleakest of the four. In contrast, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son can be legitimately described as a love story, despite the possibly more gruesome world of a semi-fictionalised North Korea it depicts. Romance offers a glimmer of hope within the darkness, enabling us to creep a little closer to what might otherwise be unbearable.

Romance renders a speculative setting more credible

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The doomed romance of The Orphan Master’s Son is reminiscent of the story of Winston and Julia in George Orwell’s 1984. Science fiction often necessitates a fair amount of authorial telling; here it is our interest in and identification with the couple that brings the author’s vision of a dystopian futuristic (at the time of writing) Britain to life. But the reverse is also the case: an ordinary romance is enlivened by the novelty of the setting. The same applies to the two novels I mentioned in my recent post on slipstream fiction. Despite their reliance on a somewhat dodgy premise, these novels pose deep questions about who we are. For those willing to believe in a man travelling unpredictably back and forth through time without his clothes on, The Time Traveler’s Wife explores the continuities and discontinuities of the self over time, and closeness and distance in relationships. If we can suspend disbelief to enter a world in which human beings are cloned and harvested for unspecified body parts, the love triangle in Never Let Me Go provides a perspective on the losses that accompany our own journeys to adulthood and how we confront our own mortality. Our sympathy with characters who experience the highs and lows of relationships overrides our scepticism about the created world in which they live.

What do you think?

Where does romance fit in your reading and writing and are there some types of fiction where it matters more than most?


Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
8 Comments
Norah Colvin link
12/2/2014 04:10:33 am

I think what appeals to me in any story, book or film, is relationships, not necessarily romance, but relationships. It helps clarify and define, I would like to say who 'we' are, but maybe I should say: who I am!

Reply
Annecdotist
12/2/2014 06:08:56 am

You're so right, it's the relationships that make it and romance is just a certain type of relationship. Other strong relationships can be equally engrossing.

Reply
Ali B link
12/2/2014 06:57:33 am

Hi Anne
Like you I find conventional romance a turn-off, but favourite novels nearly always have a love story going on somewhere, including the literary stuff. Possession for instance, or even The Goldfinch which explores all sorts of relationships including unrequited romantic fantasy. You don't have to have a love story, but I would say that a touch of UST never did a book any harm! Ali B

Reply
Annecdotist
13/2/2014 05:53:41 am

Thanks for sharing, Ali. Agree, finding, losing and keeping a mate are big themes in most of our lives so would be strange to set out to exclude them from fiction, but I like other things to be going on too

Reply
Fran link
13/2/2014 03:44:21 am

As a writer of Women's Fiction, I am always aware that people will assume by the genre that romance is the key issue of the story. But like Norah, as it is relationships that appeal to me that is what I tend to write about. And that could be between a mother and daughter or friends. Romance for me has got to be treated with care and most importantly the writer's style and how they deal with the subject. Having said that I love for my husband to bring me flowers, Valentine's Day or not.

Reply
Annecdotist
13/2/2014 06:01:18 am

Thanks for coming to my blog, Fran. Yeah, all relationships matter, and I sometimes think the mother-daughter bond, which came up in my mother's day post last year http://annegoodwin.weebly.com/1/post/2013/03/amothers-day-alternative-annethology.html, is the most fraught of them all.
And presents, including flowers, are nice at any time of the year – I just balk at the commercialism of a single day.

Reply
Linda link
18/2/2014 03:57:46 am

I once tried to write a Mills & Boon romance but had to give up because I just couldn't take it seriously! There is an element of love in most of my stories but not the hearts and flowers variety.

Reply
Annecdotist
20/2/2014 05:21:11 am

Thanks, Linda. I don't think I've ever read a Mills and Boon but I understand they're are trickier than you might think to write. These comments are segueing nicely into the post on heroines I've got planned for international women's day

Reply



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