The guarantee of a happy ending! I expect the characters to go thru hell (either internally, externally, or both), but I gotta see them triumph over the odds by the end. There’s too much tragedy in real life, I don’t need it in my fiction, too. As much as they’re about love, I think all good romances are also about heroism—the idea of laying your heart, body and soul on the line for what you believe in. To me, that’s what makes romance one of the greatest genres to both write and read.
It depends on your definition of Romance. I could say “Tarzan of the Apes,” which I read when I was 11, and which could be argued to be a romance—even though Tarzan and Jane don’t get their HEA till the sequel (but they DO get it and their grand love continues thru all 30+ books of the series—and, yes, I’ve read them all). Strictly speaking, however, in today’s Romance Genre, the first ones I read were the original Harlequin sweet romances (started reading them when I was 14 or 15), along with Barbara Cartland, and the old style gothics (by authors such as Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, etc.), and the old (basically comedy-of-manners style) regencies. From there I progressed to the longer, racier historicals. The first of those I read was the now famous (in romance circles, anyway) “The Flame & the Flower” by Kathleen Woodiwiss. And don’t anybody laugh. Many of the above mentioned types of books are considered silly by modern standards, but they all laid the groundwork for the romance genre as we know it today. They’re our roots, our literary history. I always recommend to aspiring romance writers that they read at least a few of those early books. You can learn a lot about the “spirit” of the genre from them. To effectively see where you’re going, you have to have some idea of where you’ve been.
It was pretty ridiculous, actually—a combination of luck, pluck, and this maddening tendency I have to bite off more than I can comfortably chew (gets me in all kinds of trouble). I was lucky in that my mother and older brother were already established writers when I was beginning. Back in the late 1970s, they were doing a variety of novels for a book contractor who was acquiring manuscripts for a paperback publisher (Manor Books) in New York.
I was 23 at the time and, aside from some newspaper articles, had never had a thing published before. In fact, I’d never written any fiction longer than a short story before. But I really wanted to write novels. So I swallowed my nerves, called said book contractor and somehow convinced him I was worth a try. I offered him my services as a romance writer. No good. He didn’t need any romances. He asked if I could do science fiction, instead. Not realizing what I was letting myself in for, I assured him that “science fiction” was practically my middle name (well, I had read a lot of it, after all). Now this is where the trouble started, because the guy called my bluff. He told me that he just happened to need a 50,000 word space-opera—the catch being that he needed it in two weeks. Two weeks??? I was absolutely, positively, dead-sure certain that there was NO way I could pull that off. But, for some insane reason, I said yes, anyway. Then I planted myself in front of a typewriter and virtually took root. Two weeks later, like a winded relay-runner passing the baton, I handed him a 50K word manuscript. Whew. He accepted it and it was released by Manor that same year. All of which proves that miracles DO happen... if you’re willing to meet them halfway.
Both, I think. My mother was a professional writer, which must have had an impact on me wanting to be one. I honestly can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to write. I was keeping a journal and making up stories and poems before I even knew the alphabet. I just dictated everything to her. But it was more than a child’s desire to “copy what Mommy’s doing,” because at that age I didn’t have a clear idea of what exactly Mommy was doing when she sat there pounding away on the typewriter keys. I think I just inherited the “writing-gene” from her. And she was good enough to help nurture it as I grew.
I remember thinking when I was asked this that it was such a beautifully straightforward question. I so wished I had a straight answer for it. But I didn’t. I read once that Tolkien said he didn’t invent Middle Earth; he discovered it. That’s sort of what happened to me with I DO. I really didn’t have any clear cut ideas when I started the book. I just had this wild urge to do a traditional gothic--it hit me all of a sudden one night, like a lightning strike. I’d never done one before, but I’d heard that Dorchester was looking for gothics, and I thought if I could pull it off I’d have a good chance of selling to them. I set it in a castle because that’s about as gothic as you can get; but I stretched the envelope a bit (okay, a lot) by putting the castle in West Texas. One of the reasons for that was simply a labor concern. I wanted to cut down my research time. And, since I live in West Texas, I figured it would make descriptions easier. If I needed to know what the climate or terrain was like, I had only to look out the window. Besides that--and this is the curious part--I had a real life example for the thing. Several years ago, my husband and I were driving to Abilene, when suddenly I spied this castle looming up out of the prairie (and, no, I hadn’t been drinking, *smile*). It was only the facade of a castle, actually, but it DID grab my attention. I heard later it was the abandoned project of some millionaire--although what he’d been planning on doing with it, I don’t know. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it obviously hung there in my subconscious and surfaced again when I decided to write a gothic. That happens to me a lot. I’ve been called a walking encyclopedia of useless information. My mind is a storehouse of eccentric trivia that pops out into fiction when I least expect it. Even an oddity like the disintegration device featured in I DO was based on genuine historical reports of John Keeley’s experiments. (He was a 19th century Philadelphia inventor--which also explains where the character of Dr. Earnshaw came from.) I’ve learned not to do much plotting in advance because I’m never sure what’s going to arise as a story progresses. I DO, in particular, definitely had a mind of its own. Since the book was SUPPOSED to be a gothic, I set out writing it entirely from the heroine’s (Dorcas Jeffries) perspective, because that’s how a traditional gothic-romance is done. Spending that much time in Miss Jeffries’ convoluted and active brain, however, put a whole new slant on things. Early on I realized I had a comic heroine on my hands, and she flat out refused to be anything else.
The book took about five months to write (four to get it all down on paper and then another one to edit, tweak and polish). By the time I’d finished I was exhausted and in the throes of a most ironic dilema. This "gothic" that I’d started purely for its marketability had metamorphised into something very different. If anything, it was a parody of a gothic. And I had no idea if something like that would sell--it seemed unlikely, in fact. I wondered if I’d "shot myself in the foot," so to speak. But that’s how the story had turned out, so that’s how I had to submit it. My original choice, Dorchester, was the first and only publisher I approached. They gave me a quick decision, and--miracle of miracles--they liked it just the way it was. The only thing they wanted to change was the title. I had called the book EYES OF THE CAT, because I was still obsessing over the gothic angle. But my editor said it was too funny for a gothic and retitled it I DO.... There must be a moral in all that somewhere, but darned if I can figure it out.
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February, 2007
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