Tag: romance
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Let’s Just Blame the Plot on Someone’s Sex Drive
The Problems with Leaving Romance up to “Overwhelming Attraction” You know what I hate? I hate when romantic comedies or romance novels set up a perfectly good antagonistic relationship between two main characters (you know, where they take an instant dislike to each other, like in the beginning of Pride and Prejudice), and then easily…
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Why Some Girls Like Mr. Darcy
Maybe this post should actually be called ‘why I like Mr. Darcy,’ but I flatter myself these reasons might be shared by other females. Mr. Darcy gets a lot of flak from guys. He’s just some woman’s imagination of the perfect guy, no real guy acts like that, women in general should just grow up…
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Harder to Write Romance Than Criticize It
“If you think it’s so awful, why don’t you try to do it yourself?” That’s the sort of thing you get thrown at you if you criticize something. No one’s said it specifically to me, even after going on and on about ‘The Trouble With Modern Romance,’ ‘Healthy Romance Makes Bad Novels,’ and ‘The Missing…
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No Thanks, to the Guy Reciting Poetry Under My Balcony
Or, Romantic Reality vs. Fiction If some of the things that happen in romance novels happened to me in real life, I’d probably run the other way. It might make sense in the tightly structured, well-plotted world of the novel, but in the messy real world, not so much. After all, real life doesn’t have…
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Top Ten of 2011: Ugly People, E-Publishing, and Limericks
OR, Why People Read Stories and Stuff It’s Quotable Wednesday today, and since it’s coming up on a year since I started blogging regularly, what better way to celebrate than to quote myself? So here is a list of the Top Ten Most Viewed posts of 2011, brought to you by Stories and Stuff. First…
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The Top Literary Couples as Bad Examples
Healthy Romance Makes Bad Novels, Part II Last week, I argued that healthy, functioning romances (which we’d probably all enjoy in real life) have trouble generating the kind of conflict that drives romance novels. Logically, the next step would be for me to look at some famous literary romances and see if they were healthy…
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Healthy Romance Makes Bad Novels
What’s a Novelist to Do? I come up against this problem all the time when I try to write a romance about two healthy, well-adjusted people – what on earth should come between them and prevent happily ever after? This is related to ‘The Trouble with Modern Romance.’ In the good old days, the couple…
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The Trouble With Modern Romance
The trouble with modern romance novels is that our culture sees no reason for two people who are in love not to be together. This significantly cuts down on the potential for conflict in the novel. In comparison, Jane Austen had it easy. I’m going to use Jane Austen as an example for a second,…
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Woman-Haters and the Challenge of Unconquerable Males
An Unrepentant Old Bachelor? Never! A romantic subplot is a necessity for almost every book/film/play whatever, but every once in a while you come across a character that just doesn’t get one. You can’t figure out it when he (I’m going to look at male characters for this post) has a magnetizing personality and women…
Hmm... 