When I first started to tell my friends and family that I was writing romance novels, they were a bit surprised. I was always one of those literary readers – bordering on literary snob, I suppose – who spent the college years lugging around my volumes of Keats and Shelley. I took classes called “The American Literary Experience,” and “American Literature in the 20th Century” and talked late at night in the college coffeehouses with my friends about Saul Bellow and Willa Cather. We never even spoke the names of genre writers, let alone took them seriously. Many English majors did take a class called “The Popular Novel,” in which we read two books in five genres (romance, western, sci-fi, mystery and horror), but the object of that class was to explore the “formulas” of those genres, not to extol their virtues. We rolled our eyes at the clichéd phrases and acted like we had to read them at gunpoint. We were impressed that the writers made so much money, but we didn’t think they were writing “real books.”
When I moved into the real world, then, I continued reading literary, going through my Margaret Atwood phase with a good friend from work and desperately searching for a book club so I could discuss Toni Morrison and Milan Kundera. I started writing my own “great American novel” – a literary novel, of course – focused on manipulating language to tell a story in a different way.
But then a funny thing happened:
I kept thinking about that pop novel class. …
And I kept thinking about the romance novels. …
And I kept thinking about writing one. Continue reading
