I posted this comment over on Dear Author's mega column about mislabeling romance...
I was going to save this for a RTB column but here goes...Why is this so hard to understand?
Romance vs. Love Story:
Romance: To qualify as a romance right before "The End" there needs to be an invisible and THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER, it must have some sort of HEA, whatever type of HEA that works for you is fine. That doesn't mean they're happily married with 3 kids, a dog and a picket fence. It means the main characters have found some sort of happiness together now and in the future.
Love Story: a romantic story that may or may not have a HEA. The book Love Story is a perfect example, true love tragically doomed by death, it's filled with romantic elements, but misses the main one that would make it a ROMANCE--a Happily Ever After ending.
Much further down in the discussion was the following...
I hung out on an sff board for a while and people were regularly dumbfounded that romance required that the hero and heroine end up happily alive and together at the end. They usually felt that this requirement must stifle for the writer...
How the heck does this stifle the author? Nobody is strong arming an author into writing a HEA. The author can write whatever the heck they want, they can end the story with charcters dying all over the place to save man kind or the one they love.
Not stifling, nothing to be dumbfounded over, it's not difficult to understand.
For crying out loud it's not brain surgery...
To qualify as a ROMANCE, to be marketed to ROMANCE readers as a ROMANCE the book needs a Happily Ever After ending.
5 comments:
I was wondering about that over at Karen S's blog. She's posted the same blog post. I always thought that Love Story was a great romance, and that Gone with the Wind was a romance too. (and a few more but I can't think tonight, my brain is fried after trying to upload pages to a website all day, lol.)
I certainly don't think a HEA stifles a writer anymore than any other requirement for a certain genre - science fiction requires some sort of science to qualify, fantasy needs magic, and horror has to scare the socks off you...
LOL!
Sam
Sam, nope, Love Story and Gone With The Wind are great love stories, not romances. Now, if Rhett had come back and swept her up and promised to stay with Scarlett forever, that would have been a romance, but then it might not have been a great novel.
I certainly don't think a HEA stifles a writer anymore than any other requirement for a certain genre...
Exactly.
It seems so simple, doesn't it??
Sometimes I'll read a Love Story and turn it into a romance in my head. You know, my own created epilogue.
Here's a question for you, though. What about a series of books that doesn't actually end well until the last book? If the last book hasn't been written yet would it be a Love Story until the very end, changing the entire series to a romance??
Something to ponder...
How can someone says it stiffles the authors when 90% of the authors already do it? Anyway, I don't think that HEA necessarily means main guy + main girl tho.
Sing it!
If either the H/H die then it's not a romance. Ever.
I remember when people were telling me how romantic Titanic was - Uh, not romantic at all (for me).
Bridges of Madison County? - totally pissed me off - not romantic.
Gone With The Wind - Rhett could do so much better and not a romance.
Why can't we just leave these things in the fiction section? Afterall, there are people who won't go into a romance section with 'a 10'pole or hazmut suit' so why would people who are adamant that their books *aren't* romances want them in the romance section? Hell, Gabaldon gets pissed if you say her books are romances and you can see she's doing A-okay over in the fiction section!
Oh and LKH has never been labelled paranormal romance - ever.
Okay, obviously I'm just as pissed as Jane and I never even read the series ;)
Then again, the whole mis-labeling thing is getting out of hand and I don't care what the publishers say, they are trying to manipulate the buyer. Ugh.
I could go on but I need to go wipe the foam from my mouth ;)
CindyS
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