Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

“Wallpaper" historicals are, essentially, costume dramas. Yes, the characters dress up in clothes that more-or-less resemble clothing of the period. Yes, characters sip warm lemonade and dance at Almack’s. But the reader can’t really believe for one minute that these people could have actually existed in 1813 (or whenever), nor did the world of the book ever exist. In essence, the readers just can’t believe in the book.

Jane Austen’s books, being entirely rooted in the mores, customs, and foibles of the time, would not be “wallpapers” if written now.

I think the wallpaper effect happens most often because many writers use other romance books as their primary research tool, with a secondary reliance upon books like What Jane Austen Ate… They’ve read tons of historical romance and love the genre, and so they think they really know the time period. Unfortunately, if I restrict my reading to those kinds of sources, the experiences of my characters will rarely deviate from what I’ve already read because that’s as big a world as I could understand. Hence a derivative story with no historical substance and characters that might be my next door neighbors in fancy clothes.

(...)

When people dismiss complaints about “wallpaper historicals” by putting up a “history lesson” as the alternative, I get a little...tetchy. It’s an attack out of left field with nothing at all to do with the issue at hand. Don’t care about accuracy in books? Fine. But don’t imply that anyone who cares about accuracy likes to be lectured or that Judith Ivory and Loretta Chase write “history lessons”.

*insert Candy fistpumping in the air with joy*

That’s not to say that I haven’t read and enjoyed wallpaper historicals. The queen of the wallpaper historical is, in my opinion, Mary Jo Putney. (Authors like Julie Garwood and Johanna Lindsey don’t count, in my opinion, because they didn’t write historical novels so much as novels set in some sort of wacky alternate reality. And we won’t even speak of authors like Connie Mason and Cassie Edwards because...we just won’t.) Putney gets many of her historical details right, but many of her characters behave, speak and think in modern ways.

But despite the exasperation I’ve felt over her characters, I still have a few of her books on my keeper shelves, because damn, that woman knows how to write a compelling love story. The wallpaper historical element, while it may interfere with my enjoyment, isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker for me.

On the flip side, nothing beats a historical that gets the feel right. part of the reason why I enjoy Loretta Chase as much as I do is because she gets the voice dead-on--or, perhaps more importantly, what I perceive as dead-on. I hear a very dry, witty British voice every time I pick up one of her books, and it’s not something I’ve seen any other American romance author accomplish. I enjoy her love stories, but it’s her voice that gives her books that extra zing, and what keeps me coming back for more.

So, where you do you stand in all this? Do you give a shit? Don’t give a shit? Think those of us who care about accuracy are nitpicking prigs? Think those who don’t care about accuracy are troglodytes with compromised palates? Something in between? Let ‘er rip in the comments.

Sarah

Author vs. reader arguments are hard to read because it brings up all this latent stuff that exists when we discuss reviewing, bad reviews, Amazon, and royalty portions, because writing, although a solitary creative endeavor, is something of a service industry, but in service to whom?

That is a big question right there.

Is the writer in service to herself and her muse? Is she writing because she has a drive and a story and a goal to be published? Is she unable to prevent herself from writing, as some have described their experience? I’ve had that experience writing prose, where it was either “write this essay out of your brain or go nuts debating the topic in the confined space of your brain.”

Or is the writer in service to her publisher, the person who pays for her work and edits and markets it?

Or is the writer in service to her readership? Are the people who read her writing the clients of her labor? I feel often as a reader that when I pay full price for a book that sucked an ass that somebody let me down. But is the writer accountable for quality in her product?

Candy

What? You’re trying to get me to think right before lunch? Don’t think I’m not on to you and your tricks, missy!

The three options you provide aren’t mutually exclusive, though some aspects of each are in tension with each other. How each author resolves these tensions probably differs quite drastically.

I think that most authors do it because it’s a labor of love. I know exactly what you mean about the pressure to write--I can feel a physical sensation that builds up in my head and my chest when something is niggling at me, and it goes away only after I’ve set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, which doesn’t sound nearly as romantic). Makes me wonder about how pre-literate cultures deal with these sorts of pressures, or if they feel them in quite the same way people who can read and write do--I imagine that a lot of pre-literate cultures are too busy surviving and working to have the sort of leisure.

However, I don’t doubt some authors do it mostly for the money. The only service they care about is their wallet--and their egos. Perhaps they didn’t start out this way, but initial successes allowed them to work the system.

I’m not sure the writer is in service to the publisher, necessarily--the relationship here is a lot more tangled than that, I think. I’ll need to ponder on this a bit more, and get back to you later.

And I absolutely think that the author is accountable for putting out a shitty product. It’s not only the author’s fault; the publisher shoulders a good deal of the responsibility, too.

But on the flip side, I’m not sure it’s a good idea to pander too much to the audience, because let’s face it, unlike the two of us (who have FABULOUS tastes in everything), sometimes people love and demand drek. That’s perhaps where the biggest tension lies: the need for the author to create a commercially viable work while retaining her artistic integrity.

Sarah:

Think before lunch! Email before food? Damn right! I am a vicious taskmistress and have a big whip. Or, keyboard.

And I know exactly what you mean about the I Have to Write feeling. It never happens with fiction for me, as my fiction voice is a weak, shy thing that doesn’t know what to do with itself, but for prose, essays, etc, esp. on the online journal, there are things I have to Get Out Now and the only way to do that is keyboard in hand, ass in chair. Occasionally I grab a pen and sketch out ideas on paper, but it’s rare.

The integrity vs. profit thing is a big fish, to be sure. I know one author I spoke to had a major problem with the way RWA allows itself to be pushed around by publishers, and how the romance market, despite appearing to grow, gets ever more narrow. I was shocked when she said it, but after some thought, she’s right. There’s a lot of vampires and paranormal, but that “expansion,” which isn’t really because it’s turning into cookie cutters of the same, arrives at the expense of other genres that are being shut down.

The peculiar thing about the author/publisher relationship is that in some ways they are in service to each other, but in rapidly unbalancing ways. The author submits her work to the publisher for review and editing, and the publisher shapes it for publication, but the publisher wouldn’t have product without the author (or without the Harvard undergrad to put her name and face on the promotional materials at least). And once a writer is under contract for more than one manuscript, it gets very tangled, as you say.

Candy:

Caveats up front: Have not published anything. Very likely never will. Am very much on the outside looking in. And what I say does not apply to all publishers across the board, and a lot of what I’m talking about covers what’s happened (and is still happening) to mass media in America in general, and not just romance novels.

In short, what we have in modern publishing is an oligopoly, and as has always been the case when an effective oligopoly is set up, the people running the show get to dictate terms. There are a huge number of people trying to get published, and only a few publishing houses out there--and if we take into account the big, big publishers that are responsible for over 90% of the books (especially fiction) that’s stocked in bookstores, then we’re talking about a tiny, tiny number of big names. The names that immediately occur to me are Hachette Book Group (which owns Little, Brown and Co. and Warner Publishing), Random House (which runs Ballantine, Bantam, Dell, Doubleday and Knopf), HarperCollins (imprints include Avon, Harper, Harper Perennial, Eos and William Morrow), Penguin Putnam (Berkley, Viking, Penguin, Puffin, New American Library, Signet [actually, does the Signet imprint exist any more?], G.P Putnam, Riverhead Books, Dutton), Simon & Schuster (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, MTV Books, Pocket Books, Downtown Press, Touchstone, Atria), Macmillan (St. Martin’s Press, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Pan, Picador, Tor) and, of course, Harlequin (Harlequin, Silhouette, Mira, Red Dress Ink, Luna). I may be missing a couple of names, but I think these are the big ones.

So these huge multi-national conglomerates run the show, and as several readers have noted, there’s a definite push towards treating authors as raw labor and books as some sort of a mass-produced, interchangeable product. This is something that makes me deeply uncomfortable, my snarky analogies comparing grammar to car engines notwithstanding, because books aren’t fungible, dammit, the way car parts are. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko isn’t the same thing as Savage Thunder by Cassie Edwards. Hell, Savage Thunder by Johanna Lindsey isn’t the same thing as Savage Thunder by Cassie Edwards.

(Side note: What are the freakin’ odds that there would be TWO books with such hideous titles running around. I mean, next thing I know, somebody’s going to tell me there are two different books out there entitled Eager Hot Butt. Oh, wait....)

Anyway, the “books are commodities” sort of attitude seems more prevalent in genre fiction, and seems especially evident in much of romance publishing in America. The publishers seem to abdicate much of their responsibility once their book has been printed. Plagiarism? The author’s fault. Book tanked? Well, shit, the author should’ve marketed the book more effectively. And by the way, amnesiac vampire cowboys are hot hot hot, so please write those, set in Regency England, if at all possible. What, you have a sweeping non-paranormal, non-amnesiac romance set in ancient Egypt? Well, can’t the hero have really, really sharp teeth and occasionally forget his name? And instead of pyramids and sand in 2030 BC, how about you set it in, say, Bath in 1811?

Not to say this treatment is the same across the board. Superstar authors like Stephen King could shit out a phone book sideways and someone will still publish it and market the hell out of it (actually, I’d argue that this has happened already--dude, why the fuck was Gerald’s Game ever published, and more importantly, why did I feel like I had to finish reading it?).

More often than not, I get the feeling that the publishers don’t really give a crap one way or another about ensuring that the books they release are as good as they can make it; they mostly want to get product out and on the shelves. And like Robin said somewhere on AAR (I think the post has been deleted by now), there’s little incentive for publishers to change their ways because by the time readers have realized they have some deeply flawed product on their hands, they’ve already paid for it.

Well, here’s my take on it.

Writing is not a service industry, because writing is an art. When I sit down to write, I am not thinking of my readers. I am thinking of the words, the story, the characters, the way it all goes together, the why and where it goes, this golden ball with the golden string unraveling and tangling and confusing me and frustrating me and delighting me.

Guess what readers. It’s not about you at all. It’s not about me either, except that in some unknown way it’s born of me and nurtured and driven by me. The old cliché about books being your children is true. They are -of- you, but you do not control them.

It’s about the writing. It’s about the world and story there, and sometimes you want it so badly to be something else and you try and you try and you cannot make it go that way. And you want to beat your head against the wall and scream. And nothing you do will make it what you dream that it can be. As good as you wanted it to be.

Like children, books.

So then it goes out there, whatever you made of it, and it’s a commodity. People say what they want to say, in whatever way they want to say it, because it’s no skin off their back. And they get really really pissed off if they spent their money and they didn’t like what they got. So now it’s corporate America and readers “voting with their wallets” and shut up if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen, be a professional, suck-up to readers, always be polite, who-do-you-think-you-are, some kind of diva? Some kind of artiste? Be truthful to the depth of your heart in your work, but in your public persona, lie lie lie because otherwise you’re just another wuss who can’t take it. Learn to sell yourself, get a blog, get a website, that’s the future, son, it’s all out there, Wall Street, big money…hey it’s just a buncha damn words, what’s your problem? We can always find another writer, they’re a dime a dozen.

A book is a magic thing. It has a life of its own. Do you doubt it, in the small hours of the night when you sit up in bed reading and reading, living in a world you never made, unable to bear to leave it until the last page closes and it vanishes into thin air?

Do you think it is any different for me when I write it? It is magic, but so fragile. So hard to find and easy to lose.

Now there’s this internet, another magic thing with a life of its own, a million voices roaring whispering screaming over your shoulder into the quiet place where the stories come from. You can either shut it out entirely or try to open one tiny window and hope you aren’t washed away in the flood. It’s foolish to open the window, frankly. You do that when you’re stuck with no magic at hand, and you’re bored and discouraged and fretful but you have to stay at the computer just-in-case. It’s like having a bottle of liquor in the drawer.

I always loved books by certain authors. I loved the words, the way they were put together…"Language is like shot silk; so much depends on the angle at which it is held.” John Fowles wrote that in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and it awed me when I read it, the simple perfection of that image, the sound of it, and the way it fit into the story that he told. I used to love his books so much that I longed to write to him, like you’d write to a lover, as if I knew him and he must know me, and we could have long conversations and understand one another.

Lately I read a biography of him, and he was a silly mess. He was just a man, and did some things I couldn’t respect, but as an author myself I understand much better now that his books were not him. He lived in two lives, his real one, common and a little shoddy and full of all the
aches and missteps and selfishness and worries that we all bear, and in another one, a world that he created with words. They intersected but they are not the same.

One is living, one is like a living dream, both created piece by piece, moment by moment, step by step and keystroke by keystroke, blood sweat and tears and run to the grocery store and by the bank before you walk the dog.

All the storm and fury of the internet and readers and critics and sales figures is nothing. It’s not out there. It’s in here. If I have to protect it from readers, I will protect it, viciously. That may be by thinking you are all a bunch of clueless babbling idiots, no personal offense. No more than you want to hear my personal woes do I want to know what your ten million conflicting opinions are.

I serve a different master. I serve this art, whether you buy it or not. I began to write because I loved to write. That is still the only way.

I as a person deserve no particular respect above the average. But the work that I do, the art itself which has been with us and served us and consoled us and given us wonder and joy and some little modicum of understanding here and there--that art deserves respect. From me, from
readers, from publishers. We should all give it the best that we have.

That’s my take. Your mileage may vary.