Dark Matters: cultivating creative cruelty in romance fiction
by Damon Suede
Romance writers are sadists at heart.
They have to be, because romance needs genuine suffering to produce
the transformations and emotion that make for memorable reading.
Sure…romance authors need to love their characters, but even more
essential is the capacity for extended imaginary sadism that’s
pushes beyond the box. If we can admit that bad stuff happens to
good people, then really hideous misfortunes happen to great
people...and romance characters need to (by all accounts) seem
doomed from the get-go.
Depression, disaster, and disillusionment
are the secret throbbing heart of romantic fantasy. As Hitchcock
once pointed out, “The stronger the evil, the stronger the film.”
While it may seem obvious to apply that rule to the crime genre or
action-adventure, darkness is the mainspring of all stories: fear,
anger, brutality, and deceit. Think I’m bonkers? Look to the
personal suffering that drives your people and the bigger shadows
cloaking their world. In a real sense, the thing that makes romance
compelling is not the happiness of its ending but the gloom that
make that ending possible and satisfying.
Every love story has a painful core that
makes its pleasure possible.
Haven’t we made the McRomance mistake at
some point? One of the most common traps for young romance writers
is to invent two dazzling protagonists, concoct a saucy meet-cute
and then let them have exactly what they want as they march in
lockstep to their predetermined life as cheerful automatons…which is
about as entertaining as watching oatmeal simmer. Without highs and
lows, grist and grit, nothing can happen...no one can changes… Hell,
without friction even SEX doesn’t feel good.
The thing is, for a romance to feel
satisfying, protagonists need to change and develop, and in fiction
(as in life) real growth is never a cakewalk. Who’s gonna take your
hero’s epiphany seriously if it doesn’t come with a cost and a real
impetus? Certainly no reader who has ever faced adversity, that is
to say, anyone who has ever drawn breath. To get your characters out
of their status quo you have to hit them where they live and hit
hard. Destroy their old
selves so that their new selves can emerge, together. The
satisfaction in romance fiction is not that the ending is happy, but
that it overcomes overwhelming odds by unlikely people.
To put it another way: love stories are
unleashed not by license, but limitations.
Take a look at your work-in-progress. All
catastrophes are not created equal and every story deserves its own
distinct shading. It’s up to you to determine the lower limit you’re
willing to broach: whether it’s cutting glances from trusted friends
or madwomen in attics. The dark patches don’t have to be violent or
event depressing, but they need to provide
chiaroscuro for your
fictional folks. Evil produces context and sets up the limits of the
world you’re building. The personal voids within each character
draws on the powerful forces shadowing the book and vice versa. What
is the worst thing that could possibly happen to your characters and
how soon can you make it happen? I’m only half-joking.
In the weakest romance fiction, perfect
couples amble through a few mild complications before snicking into
place like a greased lock. In essence these books telegraph their
endings from page one, not because they end happily but because they
start happily and stay
that way for long stretches. A jog through the daisies, as some
folks would have it…contentment but not joy. Most books that fail
for me blow it by wrapping all
their characters in cotton wool and completely skipping the kind of
“Dark night of the Soul” that might transform the protagonists and
their world.
Love
hurts.
Think back over romance novels you’ve
loved or the genre-defining books that drive our industry. The most
unforgettable stories and characters spring from crushing
opposition. What we remember about romance novels is the darkness
that drives them. Three hundred pages of folks being happy together
makes for a hefty sleeping pill, but three hundred pages of a couple
finding a way to be happy in the face of impossible odds makes our
hearts soar. In darkness, we are all alone.
So don’t just make love, make
anguish for your
characters. As you structure a story, don’t satisfy your hero’s
desires, thwart them. Make
sure your solutions create new problems. Nurture your characters
doubts and despair. Make them
earn the happy ending they want, even better…make them
deserve it. Delay and
disappointment charge situations and validate character growth.
Misery accompanies love. It’s no accident that many of the stories
we think of as timeless romances in Western Literature are fiercely
tragic: Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Cupid and Psyche… the
pain in them drags us back again and again, hoping that
this time we’ll find a way
out of the dark.
Only if you let your characters get lost
will we get lost in them. And that, more than anything else, is what
romance can and should do for its protagonists and its readers: lead
us through the labyrinth, skirt the monstrous despair roaming its
halls, and find our way into daylight.
Originally published as a "lecture" for Romance University.
If you wish to republish this article, just drop me a line.