writer's block / the pros and cons of Romance Novels

Romance novels are a rather major genre. Nearly any bookstore, or any store that happens to sell books, will have a romance section. These are books where the main plot arc is the romance. There are frequently other plots, too -- murder mystery, action heist, fantasy quest -- any sort of plot that would appear in any other book, just made into the backdrop of the romance rather than having any romance be a side note to the plot, as happens in those genres.

That is actually annoyance #1 for me, especially within science fiction / fantasy. 

Good science fiction / fantasy involves requires world building. It requires an author think through what powers or abilities are there and what the consequences to those are, how the world and society are affected. Examples of ideals are Tolkien for fantasy and Asimov for science fiction. Tolkien created a world with history and societies and geography and the whole works, and it all fits together. Fabulous. Asimov looked at our world, added robots, and made it real. Artificial Intelligence academics still look at his Three Laws of Robotics. It makes sense.

Romance novels, on the other hand, don't put that much effort into creating their backdrop, since it's not the important part, and wind up with these peculiar societies that are useful plot devices on the top layer and completely and utterly messed up on all the layers under that. There are, alas, way too many examples of this. One example is Nora Roberts who wrote a whole "In Death" series that's set in the future. There's all sorts of computer gizmos that can do all sorts of things but the heroine is still banging the side of her desk top computer when the speech portion goes on the fritz, and the hero is still hacking complex systems by typing really fast on a keyboard.

Problem #2 is more general to the Romance genre than just the fantasy romance, and it is the characters.

I read my first romance novel a few weeks into my first year of college. It was about the same time as we were getting all sorts of orientation materials. One bit of orientation was on social skills for living away from home and with a bunch of other young adults, and included a list of warning signs for date rape. Curiously enough, it was also a check list for all the major character points for the hero in the majority of romance novels. The characters and their relationships are almost always awful! I want to smack them upside the head. Because no real attention is paid to the actual plot, there are rarely reasonable explanations for how the characters get into the problems they are in, which pretty much means they do something extremely stupid or fail to do something common sense demands, and lo and behold instant plot. Then they lie to themselves and each other and there's jealousy and possessiveness and all sorts of things that, really, nobody wants. But it's all very sexy in the book.

And when they're not being stupid/creepy/slime-y, they're being too perfect/rich/beautiful. It's a genre pretty much devoted to Mary Sues. Which are really oddly addictive. Alas, you may have also noticed that I feel well-read enough in the genre to make generalities. There's a reason why so many people write Mary Sues and it's a lot like why people eat cotton candy.

(There's even a sub-genre for lonely women who are unappreciated in our time being sent back in time to a more romantic era so that they can be loved and dominated by handsome brutish and possibly even vaguely historic heroes. These stories push my limits and I avoid them like the plague.)

However, these problems actually all lead to pro #1.   (I'm counting the addictive quality as something of a wash, both pro and con.)

These books are so very bad, their characters are so bad, and their plots are so bad, that they make really the perfect writing prompt. Do you have writer's block? Read a romance novel. Unless you somehow manage to luck out and find a fabulous one (I'm assuming such a one exists though I never found it), then you are instead going to find something that desperately calls out to be fixed. So all you need to do is fix it.

What would it take to make the premise work? What would the world actually look like? 

What would it take to make the plot hold together? What would fill in the plot holes?

What would it take to make the characters make sense? Be sympathetic? Would the main characters even wind up with each other? 

Of course, by the end of this, you don't even have a fanfic because you've probably made so many changes that it's an original work. But that is my response to writer's block. Read something good to be fulfilled in mind and spirit but read something bad to be inspired to write.

Methos in a Romance Novel...

Having gotten my romance novel rant out of the way, I do of course have a couple of ideas for fanfic.

Because really, most romance novels have heroes who are insanely good at everything. Immortals, on the other hand, have a reason to be insanely good at everything, because those who aren't tend to die at the hands of those who are. Stick Duncan MacLeod into a romance novel and he fits right in (as seen in "Dramatic License" when Carolyn Marsh writes him in one.) Methos, on the other hand, has all of the abilities, but none of the character points than the standard romance novel hero has. So I want him to mostly show up the more standard hero, in a fairly classic nerd-beats-jock type of thing.

That is fairly vague, however. So to be more specific, Stephanie Laurens has a series of regency romances that follow the Cynster family. The Duke is the hero of the first book, then his brother, then his cousins, all down the line. And each main character and each of the main character's love interests is not only beautiful but also particularly capable in one thing or another. One is fabulous with investments (his love interest is going bankrupt), one is fabulous with horses (his love interest has a horse farm), one is fabulous with detective work (his love interest has a mystery). And of course the female always has some problem that the guy has to fix.

Despite my mockery, I did enjoy these stories.

My enjoyment, however, does not negate the mockery.

In the stories, there are two women in particular that I find interesting. One is the strong-willed loving dowager duchess Helena Cynster, the mother of the first hero. The second is the incisive and blunt Lady Therese Osbaldestone who wacks people with her cane and tells them to get over themselves and get on with wooing the love interest. Both of them are unattached women who are clearly placed in the role of grandmother and way too old to have suitors. They can maybe have a genteel flirt with some older gentlemen but nothing serious.

Methos, for all that he looks whatever age he looks, is old enough that any mortal and most immortals he dates is going to be him robbing the cradle.

So I would like for him to be making his unremarkable way through London society and fall in love with one of these women. And then have to woo her with all the disadvantages of appearing significantly too young, too poor, too socially inexperienced, and simply not as capable as all the other men in their lives. And then proving that he is in fact, better in all ways. He can certainly defeat them all in swords, on horseback, in conversation, in experience, and possibly in wealth as well although the last is not necessary for my enjoyment.

This story would be pure indulgence, much like the original romance novels were, but just so much fun.