truepenny | Should Cinderella Kiss the Prince?

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, May 7, 2009; thanks to the Wayback Machine for helping me rescue it]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about romance¹, and from two different directions.

In exhibit A, you have an author who had to rip conventional romance plots out of her two most recent books, The Mirador and Corambis, like yanking Virginia creeper off a tree trunk. In exhibit B, you have a reader who is currently reading a fantasy series by [name of well-known sff author redacted] and is finding the predictability of the romance sub-plots, in all their conventional heteronormative glory … well, predictable. And therefore not very interesting. And at the same time, in both exhibits A and B, you have an author/reader who likes love stories and even likes category romance–at least in the form of Georgette Heyer. And so I’m trying to figure out where the line is between compelling–or at least entertaining–and that not-quite-eyeroll I give the book when the characters yoke up in exactly the pair I expected.

The first thing to do is to separate category romance (including paranormal romance and “urban fantasy”²) out from novels-with-love-stories-in-them, because the point of category romance is, to a certain extent, its predictability. You don’t read a romance because you really want to wonder whether the heroine will find her True Love or not. You read a romance in the comforting certainty that she will, and thus you can watch the twists and turns of the plot, the misunderstandings and separations and rival suitors and all, with a scaled down version of the vicarious thrill of a roller coaster. It’s exciting, but it’s also ultimately safe. And I’m not knocking this–I’ve reread my Heyers so many times I’ve just about worn the print off the page. If you’re reading or writing category romance, that’s what you’re there for and there’s no sense criticizing a duck for not being a ferret. If that’s where you are, then the question is whether it’s a good duck or not, not whether it’s got fur and viviparous offspring.

But the thing about conventional, category romance is that, when it’s imported out of its genre–where it’s part of the form, like it’s part of the form of a sonnet that it has 14 lines–is that it shuts down character development. That’s what happened to me in The Mirador and Corambis. I put my characters in a conventional romance, and they began to behave according to the conventions of the category romance rather than according to their personalities and situations. Now, I fully admit that I did this to myself: I decided arbitrarily that character X and Y should be In Love, so it’s no surprise that X and Y began to behave arbitrarily. But it was astonishingly hard and painful for me to see what I’d done and to see that it was wrong. My writing partner, Elizabeth Bear, just about had to commit long-distance GBH to get me to let go. I’m deeply grateful now, but it’s a little like . . . okay, you’ve gone to a party and gotten completely hammered and you really really really want to take off all your clothes and dance on the table in nothing but a lampshade-hat and maybe shout rude things about the important people at the party (professors or editors or managers–take your pick depending on your profession). You have a friend who won’t let you, and you curse at them and maybe try to hit them and maybe try to stomp off in a huff, only they’ve got your car keys, and then you get distracted by having another drink and end up passed out cold on the stairs. And when you wake up the next morning, you remember wanting to dance on the table and you remember how your friend wouldn’t let you, and you realize you owe them your first-born child and probably a kidney . . . that’s what it’s like.

And I’ve come, in consequence to a realization: love is hard. It’s hard to do in real life, but it’s also hard to write about. And it’s even harder to write about if you don’t fall back on romance conventions. Because we all know how to write romance conventions and we all know how to read them. It’s safe, whereas writing about what love really is–that’s hard and scary, like asking an armadillo to expose its underbelly to a coyote. But here’s the thing. We do all know romance conventions, which means readers are able to predict them. And if we aren’t reading a book where the predictability is part of the win conditions, that predictability is going to undercut the rest of the story. Because real people aren’t predictable–or, rather, they’re predictable according to their own characters, not according to an arbitrary set of externally imposed rules–and if characters who are three-dimensional in every other respect become flat and conventional when faced with love, it points out how flimsy and artificial the conventions of romance are, and it makes a thin place in the structure of the novel, a place where you feel like you can put your hand through and grab the strings. And that thin place, of course, is exactly the thing a novelist doesn’t want.

So I’ve answered my own question: it depends on whether the predictability of the romance is constructed (or construed) as a bug or a feature of a given novel. Because it can be either. It depends on what the novel is trying to do, and on whether that predictable romance is commensurate with the other parts of the narrative.

If you’re writing a romance, yes, Cinderella kisses the prince. If you’re writing a novel about a girl who’s been abused and degraded and exploited by her stepmother and stepsisters for years while her father does nothing to help her, and whose fairy godmother seems to feel that the only thing worth intervening for is a ball . . . well, maybe she should and maybe she shouldn’t. It kind of depends on the prince.

—

¹In the modern sense of limerence and erotic interest, rather than the early modern sense of a prose narrative that is similar to a novel but really something quite different.

²I’m plagiarizing a footnote from myself:

I put “urban fantasy” in quotes because–as we discovered on a panel about it at Odyssey Con–whatever that genre is, “urban fantasy” is a misnomer. Urban fantasy is fantasy about cities–which the panel also discovered is a flourishing sub-genre including authors like China Miéville, Ellen Kushner, Fritz Leiber, and Terry Pratchett–but “urban fantasy,” while very distinctly a genre, really needs a different name. (Oddly enough, both genres are clearly influenced–if not outright founded–by Charles de Lint and Emma Bull). I write urban fantasy; I do not write “urban fantasy” and couldn’t if I tried.³

³This is not a slam against “urban fantasy.” It is very much Not My Thing, but dude. Neither is hard SF. The fact that, obviously, I want to reappropriate the term “urban fantasy” for something else isn’t because I think the books being called “urban fantasy” somehow don’t “deserve” the label, but because, as a genre theory geek, I am frustrated by the fact that the term is being used to label a genre it doesn’t describe, while a genre that it does describe, and which I think is really cool, doesn’t have a label at all–or much recognition as a genre. From the genre-theory-geek perspective “urban fantasy” is actually really interesting, because what makes it a genre is the mélange of genres it offers–fantasy, romance, mystery, action-adventure, maybe a little horror–but while the urban environment, or at least the postmodern cosmopolitan sensibility, is necessary to the genre, it’s not really what books in this genre are about.