Robyn DeHart | What’s in a love scene?

In its various forms, love scenes are probably one of the most discussed topics at romance writers’ conferences. Love scenes are an integral part of romance writing yet for some writers the thought of writing one can strike the same amount of fear as the dreaded synopsis. I can't tell you there is no reason to be afraid, sex, unlike synopses, can actually have fearful roots. But I can tell you that there was a time when I found writing love scenes to be rather uncomfortable, yet now they tend to be one of my favorite scenes to write.

My journey through them isn't important, and frankly I'm not sure why everything has changed, so I can't offer you a step-by-step guide. I can tell you that the first one I wrote (many years ago now), I just typed as fast as I could to get through it as quickly as possible. When I re-read it, it was riddled with clichés and purple prose and had zero emotion. Needless to say it needed a lot of work.

The first step to writing love scenes (okay, so I lied, apparently I am giving you a step-by-step guide) is to ignore those around you. If you sit down to write a love scene and immediately you worry about your cousin or your mother or your in-laws, then it will paralyze you. As a romance writer, we have a built-in readership, it's not our job to recruit new readers, though pulling people over to the dark side is always fun. But our readership is already used to graphic love scenes, they will not be embarrassed by what you have to offer them, so you shouldn't be embarrassed.

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Marsha Altman | The Plight of the Darcy Brothers

My name is Marsha Altman, and I’ve written The Plight of the Darcy Brothers, a sequel to The Darcys and the Bingleys. If you have not read the first book, you can pick up the second, as what happened in the first book is pretty self-explanatory (after the second book, it becomes more difficult).

I’ve been a romance writer for ... well, okay, this is my second book that could loosely be categorized as romance, though I do say that loosely because there are no men with partially-exposed chests on the cover. It will probably hurt sales but it’s a good way to go in historical fiction. Jane Austen, even though she primarily wrote about romantic issues like marriage and ... getting married ..., wrote a lot about marriage is all I’m saying, and it was romantic, but it wasn’t romance. It was contemporary fiction. She was writing about the world she lived in, and now when we write about the world she lived in, we’re writing historical fiction, or historical romance.
Categories in publishing are confusing and mostly about shelf placement. Let’s move on.

The title may appear perplexing to some people upon closer inspection because, as anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows, Darcy does not have any brothers. The titular brothers are not Darcy and Bingley, as I like to give Bingley a little more credit than to consider him a Darcy by adjacency. In short, Mr. Darcy Senior, deceased five years before Pride and Prejudice opens, left some skeletons in his closet.

How I came to write this book is a story unto itself: I had finished book one. I was bored. I was either between classes in graduate school or I wasn’t given enough to do. A full day had passed. Then I said, “How about I write some more?” Not the most inspiring story, but it’s the truth. Things you do while sitting in front of a computer generally isn’t that inspiring. Maybe for book 3 I’ll make up a story about being attacked by a moray eel and how that inspired me to write Regency fiction.

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Mary Balogh | Love As Opposed To Romance

I always describe myself as a writer of love stories rather than as a romance writer. One of my reasons is an obvious one—romance is not highly thought of in the writing community beyond its own genre, and I firmly believe that my books are serious literature and not to be sneered at as trash. More important, though, I believe that love is far more powerful than romance and that we can sell ourselves short as writers if we are content to write romances at the expense of telling true love stories. A great deal, of course, depends upon how those two words are defined. Here are my definitions.

Romance is that wonderful aura that surrounds a couple as they meet (even if they initially feel hostility to each other) and interact and fall in love and finally commit their lives to each other. It's the growing sense of rightness about the relationship, and the sense of joy we get out of reading about the building attraction they feel for each other on their journey to the happy ending. It's a powerful reason for reading any book, and when it's well done it can pull us in and leave us thoroughly satisfied at the end and sighing for more. It can be pure magic. It is certainly an essential component of a love story, and a great deal of effort must be spent upon creating it. It's not easy, by the way.

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Carolyn Jewel | Confessions of a Historical Romance Junkie

Will you Join Me in my Affliction?

Thanks, Fresh Fiction, for inviting me to blog here today!

It’s no accident Romance is such a popular genre. As a species, Homo Sapiens care deeply about relationships. Our survival depends upon forming them. No one should be surprised, therefore (are you listening ET?) that our stories are so often about relationships. Likewise, the popularity of the various sub-genres can tell us a great deal about what concerns us today, even when, and I would argue, especially when, the stories are not “realistic.” Vampires and shapeshifters don’t exist, after all, and 1815 was so long ago, isn’t it irrelevant by now?

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Shakespeare set a great many of his stories in his historical past, foreign countries or fanciful realms because the displacement of location and time allowed him to comment on present day issues that wouldn’t otherwise have made it past the censors and might even have gotten him in thrown in jail. Modern stories set in the past serve a similar function; they allow commentary about our lives today, whether the result is something along the lines of Thank goodness we have antibiotics! or a reflection, however brief, that perhaps having a day job isn’t so bad. At one time, there were whole classes of people who needed income yet were forbidden many of the means by which one could obtain one. In fact, fifty-one percent of the population falls into this category.

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