Staggering Like a Fool Drunk on Love towards the Nu Romantic
There are some odd differences between how works are categorized in the realm of fiction publishing versus the realm of film. In film, if you have a story in a contemporary setting that has “all the elements” so-to-speak (love, action, a little comedy) it will be categorized as a drama. No problem, right? As soon as you amp up the love and the comedy, you have a romantic comedy, which can do well enough at the box office but it is not Art, ladies and gentlemen. Think The English Patient versus When Harry Met Sally.
It’s not like that in the book publishing world. If you’re Nora Ephrom and you write a book (she wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally and writes similar books), it does not get categorized as a romantic comedy. It doesn’t even get categorized as a romance. It gets categorized as literary fiction. Even though the story is about nothing but romance, it is not classified as “a” romance. Right now there are probably thousands of angsty snobbish MFA graduates wringing their hands over fact that the art they create is lumped in with such trash (we’re all snobs about something, relax).
Why are Nora Ephrom’s books not romances?
Because in publishing, a romance has certain strident requirements and if they’re not met the story is not a romance. It won’t be accepted as such and it won’t be published as such. If you’re an indie author you can put your book in any ol’ category you please, but you can expect angry comments and scathing one-star reviews because your story is not a romance. You see, in a romance:
- Two people meet and fall in love, but…
- They can’t be together because of both inner and outer conflicts, so they…
- Spend a lot of effort trying to overcome these barriers so they can finally…
- Live Happily Ever After™
Happily ever after is known as the HEA. It has a red-headed step sister (who’s still pretty hot) known as HFN: Happy for now. If you don’t have a HEA, you don’t have a romance, regardless of what else is in your story.
You can argue this all you like, but I think the most important part of a book is how the ending makes you feel when you finish it. One of the most well-known “romantic” stories is that of Romeo & Juliet. Romeo & Juliet is a tragedy. The main characters die. The English Patient does not have a HEA, but ask anyone if it’s a romantic story and they’ll probably say yes.
What if your characters are sick and twisted and what’s happy for them is abhorrent to most people? There’s an audience for “dark” romance and dark erotic romance and even erotic horror. There are thriller-like elements in these stories blended in with the romantic and erotic elements. But if you categorized them as thrillers on Amazon they likely wouldn’t sell. If you categorized them as romances they might not sell.
What if you wrote a story that had strong romantic elements but technically was a tragedy, similarly to Romeo & Juliet? What if you wrote something like Macbeth but with a lot more love and sex in it? Good luck trying to find the right spot on the virtual or physical bookstore shelf for those ideas.
Just because something is ragingly popular and selling well doesn’t mean people aren’t heart-sick for something new, something they’re not seeing. As a writer you often hear “write the story you want to read, yourself.” The saying is not “write what you want to read as long as fits in rigid arbitrary categories, otherwise you have no hope of ever selling your book.”
Could it be maybe it’s time for something new?
Declaring loudly and repeatedly that something is A Thing does not make it A Thing. That’s like making up your own nickname and then trying to get everyone else to use it. But you still need some kind of banner under which to rally.
In the world of music, you can have dozens of subgenres under a main genre. You have metal and you have nu metal (and many more kinds of metal). I happen to like nu metal, personally, and you may not think that’s relevant, but it is, and here’s why. Nu metal is specifically a variant on heavy metal music that incorporates elements into it from other genres of music, like hip-hop, alt rock and others. If I wasn’t into it, I might not have known that.
So maybe… just maybe… somewhere in between literary fiction and romance and erotica lies the Nu Romantics.
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