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From the Fog City Divas Blog Archives "Candice on the Joys of the Simple Old-Fashioned Love Story"
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Several of us Divas brainstorm together, and I often come away from these sessions thinking my own stories are too simplistic. Just your basic boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl romance. Nothing complicated. But as I sit down to write, I find I am not interested in external complications. I just want to tell a story of two people who somehow manage to forge a path toward love. Simple relationship stories. The kind Mary Balogh (one of my idols) excels at. Since my simple little books aren't exactly flying off the shelves, there is the tempation to reinvent myself, to introduce paranormal elements or suspense or mystery. Or even (gasp!) to write contemporaries. But I don't want to do any of that. I just want to do what I do, and try to do it the best I can.
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I was encouraged today to get a fan letter for In the Thrill of the Night that included the following line: "No violence, no mystery, no suspense needed. Nothing slathered on top of the romance, because the romance itself is a page-turner." Wow. That says in a nutshell exactly what I'm trying to do with my simple love stories. I swear from now on that's going to be my mantra: make the romance itself a page-turner. What a concept!
And that's really the key, I suppose. Relationship stories don't have to be simple. The best ones are very complex. LaVyrle Spencer almost always had whole casts of secondary characters whose lives were impacted in various ways by the relationship between the hero and heroine, creating seemingly insurmountable obstacles to a happy ending. Family Blessings, for example, where the heroine's daughter had a crush on the hero before she realized he was sleeping with her mother, and the heroine's family who objected to the age difference. Judith Ivory interweaves layer upon layer of complexity through the characters and backstories of the hero and heroine, tying them closer and closer until they can't live without each other. In Sleeping Beauty, for example, where both past events and future prospects at first pull the hero and heroine apart, but ultimately bind them for life. Mary Balogh strips away layers of emotional baggage to get to the core of her protagonists' characters before they can truly understand and love each other. In The Notorious Rake, for example, where both the reader and the heroine have to peel away the hero's character like the skin of an onion to get beyond the public Bad Boy persona to the wounded soul beneath and finally to the Honorable Man at the core. Each of these authors delivers a very basic love story, but the depth of characterization, along with occasionally exquisite prose, sucks me in every time and definitely keeps me turning the pages. I guess what it all boils down to is that I'm more interested in character than plot. In my own books, whatever plot there is (and there is very little!) is always driven by the characters. Their personalities and goals and backstories bump up against each other to produce (I hope) conflict that drives the story. Those are the sorts of stories I like to read, and I plan to keep writing them, too. And so, for the near future at least, no suspense plots, no vampires, no ghosts, no mystery, no murders from me. Just simple, old-fashioned love stories.
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candicehern.com |
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So I thought it would be fun to talk about page-turning romances. No suspense plots. No paranormal elements. No mysteries. Just straight romance. As I said, Mary Balogh does it for me everytime with relatively basic character-driven stories full of emotion. She keeps the pages turning for me, as I always want to see how these two people will ultimately build a relationship together. Loretta Chase keeps me turning pages, too. Lord of Scoundrels remains in my All Time Top Ten Favorites list. She does throw in a few more elements so that her stories are slightly more complex, plot-wise, than those of Mary Balogh. As in Mr. Impossible, for example. But they are still primarily relationship stories, with the hero and heroine center stage the whole time. Most of LaVyrle Spencer's books fall into the simple romance category for me, too, though the stories are far from simple. She uses the relationship between the hero and heroine to create layers and layers of complexity within their lives, without introducing complicated external plot devices. Judith Ivory, too. Simple love stories infused with layers of complex characterization. Page turners, all.
