There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The pleasure of writing fiction is that you are always spotting some new approach, an alternative way of telling a story and manipulating characters; the novel is such a wonderfully flexible form.
I didn't know anything about romance novels until a friend suggested that I try writing one. After I read a few, I realized that my favorite part of fiction had always been the relationship aspect.
To me, novels are a trip of discovery, and you discover things that you don't know and you assume that many of your readers don't know, and you try to bring them to life on the page.
A lot of times with novels, you can get a really deep, engaging story, but there's not a lot happening, frankly. Those books tend to be super-literary and dense, and they require a lot of commitment, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want fast-moving action and gore and plot and excitement, you can get shorted on that.
I think of my books now as suspense novels, usually with a love story incorporated. They're absolutely a lot harder to write than romances. They take more plotting and real character development.
If I'm a genre writer, I'm at the edge. In the end, they do work like genre fiction. You have a hero, there's a love interest, there's always a chase, there's fighting of some kind. You don't have to do that in a novel. But you do in a genre novel.
A good novel is something that challenges perception, that allows you to see the world anew through a different point of view - something that genre fiction doesn't do, although it sells more because it doesn't disturb people's innate sense of what a novel should be about. Often, people want characters to be nice, for example.
Romance novels are my favorite books to read. I write young adult romances, and am so happy to be promoting this wonderful genre.
If I'm going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.
I've had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn't a romance - with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader's expectations going into the story, and that's very hard to predict person to person.
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