Monthly Archives: October 2011

my new favourite thing

some tv shows I watch, and I appreciate the absolute mastery of them: Mad Men and The Sopranos come to mind. Others I watch and they entertain the hell out of me: True Blood, Vampire Diaries, Spartacus, the first two seasons of Gossip Girl.

Then there are the shows I fall in love with. The ones that make me think, This, THIS is my favourite tv show ever when I watch them. Last year there was Friday Night Lights (okay, I’ve just checked, and actually it was only a couple of months ago. But see, these are tv shows you miss like they’re people who aren’t in your life anymore) and now, weirdly, out of nowhere, there’s How I Met Your Mother.

I feel like this should not be my new favourite tv show. I grew up with Friends, and while I still think it’s a funny show, and while I remember watching breathlessly as Ross told Rachel how he felt under the planetarium stars, it wasn’t like this. It was, after all, a sitcom.

So the first achievement of How I Met Your Mother is that it’s a sitcom – and a funny one at that – with complex characters and a whole lotta heart.

And Barney. It also has Barney Stinson.

Some other things it has are impeccable structure (particularly when it comes to open vs closed scenes – but more on that later), tense romantic plots and the kind of characters who become important to you.

I’ve caught up with current episodes, which means I can no longer spend hours a day in their company. And I miss them, damn it!

There’s a lot to learn from this show: many, many dos and one enormous don’t. Let the investigations begin.

 

my marriage thesis

A dear friend I met during my writing course was married this weekend, under a steely, stormy sky. She asked me to say some things about marriage during the ceremony, because she and I have talked extensively about what it takes. And I’ve thought about it a lot, being a romance writer and everything.

This is what I came up with:

  • One of the most wonderful parts of marriage is the comfort and familiarity of it. But as marriage is so often a contradiction, the opposite is also true: marriage can’t flourish without allowing room to be always new and surprising. Because people are always new and surprising. Or, as I once heard it put: Remember – you aren’t marrying yourself.
  • When you’re married, I have found that love can transform from being a fuzzy feeling, to being implacable – a bedrock you can build a life on, that asks for transformation and trust and acceptance, when those things seem impossible.
  • Which is probably why I’ve found that the single most important practice in marriage is kindness.
  • The most confronting part of marriage for myself – and most people, I imagine – is the fact that you’re promising something you don’t know you can fulfil on. But if you were to vow, “I will be with you until it doesn’t work any more,” that wouldn’t be a promise – it would be a statement of fact.
  • When you commit to something beyond what you know you can do, “I will be with you always”, you are calling yourself to be great. You are creating something entirely new, where all the inconsistencies and complexities of marriage become possible.
  • There’s a line from the move Valentine’s Day: “Love is the last shocking act left on the planet.” I agree. Today you two are taking on something shocking – something worth striving for, and worth being great for.

the mistorical mystery

I recently lost a good couple of hours trawling through the Dear Author post in which they introduced the tag “mistorical”. It refers to historical novels that get historical facts wrong.

Fierce debate ensued.

Is historical accuracy necessary for the enjoyment of a novel? Is it even possible? Is “mistorical” derogatory in tone (mis = mishap, mistake, misogyny)? Does the onus for historical knowledge rest with the reader or the writer?

There is, of course, no right answer, so really the debate could go on forever. It makes for pretty interesting reading.

I wrote a post ages ago about my approach to language in my historical fiction. My main point was that the mood or intention invoked by the language is more important to me than its accuracy.

But reading the Dear Author post and the ensuing furore, I asked myself for possibly the first time: Why do I write historical fiction? Why not set my stories in the modern day?

I’m not in the camp of the history lovers. I find the details of other times interesting (like, did you know that men often cried in public in Regency England to express their sensitivity? They even did it in Parliament.) but the idea of “researching” fills me with dread. Every detail I uncover requires another couple of years of study. I mean, really, you need to explore the whole of history, and then the whole of history is just a bunch of people’s opinions on stuff that may or may not have happened, right?

On the other hand, I like to check things on Wikipedia at the very least, like who was actually the Prime Minister at that time, and what veges were in season at the time of year that my heroine’s gardening.

So the history in and of itself is not, I think, the reason I write historical fiction.

One attraction is the obvious social restrictions. I think we’re actually no less socially restricted now than people were “back then”, but because it’s just life to us the unspoken, early-learned rules are almost impossible to distinguish. (This also makes up a large part of my previous post about writing “historical” language. The rules wouldn’t have taken up a huge amount of brain space for people back then either. It would have just been life.) But back to the point: Obvious social restrictions create more obvious external obstacles to a man and woman being free – or even having the opportunity – to fall in love.

One commenter on the Dear Author post made the point that marrying for love – the central premise of a romance novel – is already an anachronistic concept in a historical period like the Regency, so why sweat the small stuff? This is another appealing characteristic of the historical setting: Love is more obviously a courageous and subversive act than it is in the modern day. (I think it still is today, but as most of us strive to marry for love it’s sometimes harder to see.)

It’s easier to put a hero or heroine in a difficult circumstance, because so many other people had power over their lives. There was no option for women to go and set themselves up in a different city – or hey, a different country – if they didn’t like the way they were being treated by someone else. And most of them relied 100% on someone else for food, shelter and clothing. Men had the cultural pressure of maintaining bloodlines, titles and estates, and providing for their women. I’ve been thinking a lot about my contemporary teen heroines and it’s tough to put the same kind of financial and emotional restrictions on them.

And lastly I think there’s the complete fairytale of it. There’s a duke to marry, and an unspoiled English countryside to enjoy, and carriages to ride in, and servants to bring you hot chocolate in bed, and buckets and buckets of money.

A suggestion that came out of the Dear Author post was that a sub-genre be created along the lines of Historical Fantasy (or, my favourite suggestion, Bodice Punk). The book’s world would be based upon the real historical world, but without adhering to precise details, dates or people.

If I had to choose, I’d say I write Bodice Punk. My books are definitely set in the dream of a world gone by, rather than in that world itself.

everyone likes old ladies

Despite my almost-thirties reading-taste crisis I borrowed a couple of Mary Balogh books at the library last week. It’s been a while since I last attempted a romance novel (okay, it’s been about 2 weeks – but that’s an age in book-years), so I thought I might be ready to enjoy one.

I didn’t. And here’s why:

The heroine of Simply Magic is beautiful but destitute. The beautiful part doesn’t bother me too much – a woman doesn’t have to be plain-until-you-know-her to deserve true love. But I had an epiphany about the destitute part.

Being destitute is not a character flaw – it’s a circumstance. This is huge for me. For such a long time, as I developed my heroine, I threw worse and worse circumstances at her – made her have to endure more and more. But in light of this I realise: It doesn’t matter how many circumstances I throw at her – unless she develops some highly interesting character traits, in reaction. Traits that hinder her in other ways, preferably.

We all know now that a romance can’t be based on two people being really hot (my writing teacher Toni Jordan likes to quote someone (McKee, I think?) as saying, ‘At the end of Pretty Woman Richard Gere could have said to Julia Roberts, I love you because we’re in a movie together.’) so now all romantic heroes and heroines have to have flaws. Flaws are all-important.

But writers are so anxious to keep their characters likeable that their flaws tend to be things like how poor they are (see above epiphany), how they’ve been treated by others, or – yes – how kind they are to old ladies.

See when I really stopped reading the book was when the heroine gladly – because that’s just the kind of gal she is – went to read to a poor old woman who was losing her eyesight. The hero had just been talking to the poor old woman earlier, because one must talk to poor old women, and the heroine of the previous novel (you can always tell a previous heroine because she exists in a kind of Happily Ever After stasis and has good-natured “arguments” with her husband, just to show that they’re happy but human) had intended to be kind to the poor old woman, but someone or other was holding her up.

I should say here that I have nothing against poor old women. Except when they’re nothing more than a plot device. If the heroine had shown some of Emma‘s qualities – some reluctance to spend an afternoon with a rambling acquaintance because she is expected to “do good” – I would feel so much more sympathy for her overcoming herself and doing it anyway. Or finding some actual good in a situation that grated on her.

Cat and I were recently discussing this and I think she nailed it when she said that these shiny-smooth characters lacks depth because they know themselves too well. There is no variation from their internal world to the external.

We weren’t talking the kind of self-misunderstanding where a heroine thinks things like, “My reaction to him just doesn’t make any sense! I hate him!” That kind of wilful misunderstanding is a bit boring. We were talking the kind of variations that come of never fully knowing yourself – thoughts and reactions to situations that arise before you have time to rationalise or consider.

This ambiguity of human nature is what makes Meredith Duran a great romance writer. Her characters have the ability to feel embarrassed by themselves, and to know themselves as vain, and to acknowledge how onerous it would be to read to a poor old woman, but find it within themselves to do it anyway.