Being proud

In today's Guardian, there's an article by Danuta Kean, chair of the RNA/Foster Grant Romantic Novelist of the Year award, about being proud of writing romance. In it she says:

It is about time romantic novelists got angry, reclaimed the word's proud tradition and celebrated good writing that makes the pulse race as much as the mind.

And over in Romancing the Blog, Nicole - one of the respondents to the request for feedback and suggestions about RTB - wrote in part: I’d love to hear about the appeal of romance from a writer’s perspective. Why they write what they do as opposed to something else.

I'm not an RTB columnist, but I thought I'd answer that question from my perspective, anyway ;-) I write romance because I believe in it, and because I believe that love and loving relationships are vitally important to us. While I read and enjoy a wide variety of romance, what I write tends to be gritty and, I hope, realistic. That's a conscious choice on my part, based on my own world view. My stories take place in the real world, where apple pie doesn't cure everything (unfortunately!), and there are many shades of grey; where love is not portrayed as simple or easy, but is all the more powerful and empowering because of that. I hope, when I'm eventually published, that readers will find that ultimately affirming and uplifting, and that my stories will resonate with their own experience of relationships.

But I do hope that there aren't as many corpses in my readers' real lives!! :-) I didn't actually intend to write romantic suspense when I first started, but I had an overwhelmingly strong idea for a premise for a story which happened to involve a detective's response to a murder, and things have just snowballed from there.

I'm proud to be writing romance. I've found the whole process of writing an amazing and demanding challenge - weaving the character's emotional responses to each other in the light of the experiences they are undergoing and making that authentic is no easy task. But it also incredibly rewarding, when something works and the words flow :-) And I hope that my readers' pulses will race as much as their minds....