Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

The Craft of Writing

Today is my first release day! Now get your mind out of the gutter… My first novella, Maison Domine, goes on sale today (check out my website for an excerpt). Now that I’m no longer an author virgin, I figured it was time to pop another metaphorical cherry and join the lovely list of authors that contribute to the Samhain blog. Hang on, and here we go…

Give me a research paper, and I’ll tell you how to write it. Ditto for literary criticism essays and analytical lab reports. They’re academic. They’re formulaic. There’s a right way and a wrong way to compose such works. And while there is some leeway, it is expected that an essay for a literature class, for example, will have an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion, with each paragraph composed of a topic sentence or transition sentence, body sentences, and a concluding sentence. Easy.

Academic writing is meant to inform. As such, having a formulaic methodology for composing the work makes it easier for the reader to get to the argument you’re making — or not making, as in the case of weaker analytical essays. In fact, it has become so formulaic that writing a college-level paper is almost akin to playing mad-libs. Just fill in the author, the work being studied, and the school of literary criticism being applied. Add a peppering of quotes and you’re practically done.
But I write romance, which is about as far from scholarly composition as you can get. And that is just my point.

This particular writer is getting a bit peeved at there being a “right” way and a “wrong” way to create romance. Or erotica for that matter. Before you get up in arms about “good” romance and “bad” romance, let me clarify. Aside from proper spelling, word choice (your instead of you’re, for example), grammar, syntax, and punctuation — with judiciously broken rules for the occasional sentence fragment or run-on in dialogue — I dislike the idea of there being a formula for writing romance.

I, personally, recognize that what I write is not literature. It is not meant to instruct on the meaning of life, or explore deeper cosmic human experiences. It is entertainment, escapist literature at its finest. It is something you want to read where the story is just there and it does not take a B.A. in literature to understand.

To me, the point of escapist lit is to please the reader. It is not to convey a well-supported thesis, or to display scientifically rigorous evidence that a new, efficient enantioselective catalyst has been created. Because the reader dictates whether the work is “good” or not, and each reader is searching for something different in her romance, how can there possibly be one “twue way” of creating it?
Rules like “no sex before the third chapter,” “don’t use adverbs,” “don’t use dialogue tags more elaborate than ‘said’,” or “don’t use ‘said’ as a dialogue tag” really mystify me. Yes, these may be good guidelines, but to treat them as dogmatic rules for writing… well I just have to laugh.

Do you have a “rule” you love to break? Or do you think such guidelines improve the genre?

Best,
Skylar Kade
www.skylarkade.com
Twitter: @skylarkade