Candy and I had yet another back-and-forth rumination about romance, this time about smoking:
Sarah:Question for you: smoking characters in romance novels. Not characters that are hot and described in puerile incendiary terms, or characters who are actually aflame, but characters who engage in tobacco inhalation as an indulgence or a habit.
You rarely see smoking characters nowadays in contemporaries. In historicals you see them indulging in snuff, pinching all manner of whatnot between their cheeks (The dudes, not the ladies. Or the buttcheeks) and cigars, cigarillos, and maybe cigarettes make appearances as vices that are part of the costume. But in a contemporary published in the last ten years, and that’s a loose estimation, you don’t often see a character smoking.
In late 80’s Nora Roberts Silhouettes, which are the only reprints of old series romances that I’ve read, sometimes a heroine will smoke now and again, but nowhere does Roberts describe her heroine with a two-pack-a-day habit. I know I’ve read a western contemporary where the hero was a Marlboro man down to the dangling cigarette, but I cannot for the life of me remember the title. I think the last character I read smoking a cigarette was the villain in Crusie/Mayer’s Don’t Look Down, now that I think on it.
How has smoking become such a non-occurance, when in reality so many people do smoke cigarettes? Social pressure? Can a character smoke in a novel without it being perceived as a flaw? Is it a flaw if a character smokes?
Candy: That’s an excellent question, actually, and something I haven’t noticed.
Corollary: are villains more likely to smoke in romances?
Several different explanations pop up in my head about the lack of smoking among protagonists:
– A lot of people hate the smell. Cigarette breath != sexy. Well, I, personally, don’t mind it too much, but I know lots of people who do.
– The odds of all sorts of diseases increase by so much that if there was a hero or heroine who smoked, I’d think “Oooh, hey, lung cancer in 20 years. Sweeeet.” Which isn’t romantic, and it interferes with the HEA.
– It’d be a lot more acceptable if they portrayed a character struggling with it and triumphing at the end.
– Addictions aren’t particularly sexy or romantic, unless used in the context above.
Sarah:I am curious as to whether one can trace the use of cigarettes in romance fiction among protagonists alongside the increasing negative publicity surrounding smoking. Whereas a heroine who smokes in a 80’s romance might as well be putting on shoes for all the significance her cigarette has, today that same cigarette, as you state, can impact the HEA in the reader’s mind. I wonder if publishers have stances on smoking protagonists, the way some editors mark out any mention of September 11 in some manuscripts.
It may be possible that as smoking protagonists decreased in number, the number of villains who smoke increased. Or at least, smoking was used as a prop to indicate villainy or the like.
I wonder what the Bitchery thinks – are smoking heroines and heroes victims of addiction, or are they individuals making their own choices, just doing their thing and it doesn’t mean that much anyway? Is it a marker of a time period and a different set of social standards that is now gone the way of the shoulder pads and the wide offset leather belt? It wouldn’t be the first time I read too much into a characterization element.
Candy: I do think popular opinion has turned against smoking, to the extent that it’s now seen as almost on par as, say, smoking pot. (I actually know some hippie types who view pot with a lot more charity than tobacco.)
I wonder why all the hard-bitten SEALs and cops never smoke. Those people tend to smoke quite a bit, right?
Sarah: True. It is odd that some characters who in “real life” you see smoking don’t often do so.
NR has a smoking heroine in a relatively recent (within the past 5 years, I think) book that was released as a hard back, so I don’t think she has entirely gone the way of PC’ness. The smoking heroine was Lena, who owned a bar in the French Quarter in New Orleans. Except she didn’t smoke that much—one pack per month.
I’m not jarred or offended by smoking characters, unless I read about someone who smokes in the office at work. Since smoking has been banned in public buildings for as long as I’ve been working, that grabs my attention.
The most recent character I can remember smoking? Phury, from JR Ward’s vampire series. He wasn’t smoking regular tobacco, but I don’t remember exactly what it was—some sort of vampire version of tobacco? vampire pot? Dunno. He’s not a hero yet, though, so it’ll be interesting to see if he still smokes when his turn comes.
Oh, you’re right – Lena does smoke. But yet I haven’t seen a heroine or a hero with a multi-pack-a-day habit. It’s almost a subtle taboo.
Victoria Dahl & I were just discussing this on Tuesday. One of my adult romantic comedies has a heroine who *pretends* to smoke as part of a threatening no-nonsense bitch facade, and I was thinking of cutting it out because it makes her too harsh, even tho she is only *pretending.* Vicki pointed out that a very very very funny recent Lani Diane Rich book has a smoking hero who smokes at the beginning and is still smoking at the end—so whatever the reason my book didn’t sell, maybe the smoking wasn’t it. *shrug*
Come to think of it, two of my YAs (SB Sarah has one of these on her TBR pile) and one of my adult WIPs use smoking as a marker of eeeeeeeevil or foreboding or stress or desperation. I think I’m following the culture in this, after
Cancer
Smoking Man on the X-Files, and Chandler smoking when Ross & Rachel fight on Friends, just as he smoked when his parents fought when he was a teenager.
Funny this should come up. I am reading a NR book from the 80’s and was surprised when the hero lit up. So surprised that I looked to see what the pub date was. Once I saw 80’s date I could see why it would have been a natural thing for him to do. It bothers me though. The smoking scene was my first introduction to the character and now, in my mind, he has this nasty habit. Emotional problems, narrow mindedness, arrogance, these don’t phase me and make a hero more real, more human. Smoking, that just makes him icky.*
*Not that I won’t read the rest of the book and just pretend the smoking thing didn’t happen.
Ceilidh
Duchess of Cocqueringue
I don’t see it much in recent books, but in older ones, and in non-romances smoking comes up a lot. It only irritates me when it’s described in loving detail as the next best thing to sex. Or when, in sf/f or paranormals, someone who’s never encountered tobacco before is immediately enthralled by the pleasures of smoking—I was of the impression that one has to get used to it before it’s pleasurable, but since I’ve never smoked, I suppose I could be wrong about that.
Yeah, the Lani Diane Rich book was The Comeback Kiss, and I called Jennifer to tell her that she COULD get a romantic comedy published even with all sorts of un-PC-ness! Very exciting!
Do middle class people smoke anymore? I don’t know anybody who does. Two of my three sisters quit. None of my neighbors smoke. I mean it’s not really very fun anymore, what with all the huddling on the street corner at least twenty feet from a building’s entrance. *shrug* How much have the numbers gone down? I’d think substantially.
Personally, I think it could work for some characters, but the only person smoking in any of my books was a vampire who couldn’t stand the smell, but still indulged about once a year. Hey, that’s me! Wait, not the vampire part.
NR has Roarke smoke occasionally through the In Death books—and several of the secondary characters do too, for one reason or another. It’s acknowledged as an addiction while not making a huge deal out of it.
Suzanne Brockmann has a SEAL struggling with quitting in two of her Silhouette’s TD&D, if I’m not mistaken [Wes Skelly].
Personally, even back in the 80s smoking characters bothered me—the breath thing, because I have never smoked but shared a room with my sister who to this day smokes like a chimney. Add the health risks and consequences…
… and I’m rather happy to have less cigarrette smoke drifting around the pages of the books I read.
Off-topic hot promo hype:
Oh, SB Sarah! Look at that beautiful blank spot under “SB Sarah’s TBR!”. . . Jennifer’s book would look PERFECT there! :cheese:
Now I know I’ve read some smokers in the past, but I can’t recall what they were. They were either cowboys or some kind of throwback-type hero, and they were all definitely in the past.
Heroine who smoked were even more rare—and when they did, the heros were all “that’s not ladylike” because they were probably historicals or something and then he’d have to beat her into submission and giving up the Virginia Slims or whatever.
The only romance I’ve read recently where smoking is a problem habit, but the character doesn’t really care enough to make a serious effort to quit has been the Bridget Jones books. There’s the times when she goes on a self-cleansing kick and gives up, but she invariably goes back to smoking in the bathroom and needing to buy more cigarettes and freely hating those characters who are all blithe and cheery about having given up smoking ages ago and having no problems with it.
Sidenote: I feel like I’m the only person who’s seen Thank You For Smoking. Tell me I’m wrong.
P.S. Y’all have a point about the cops and Navy people smoking. If WWII Navy duty could get my grandpa into two packs a day and alcoholism, it should do the same for romance novel heros.
>>… and I’m rather happy to have less cigarrette smoke drifting around the pages of the books I read. <
<
azteclady, you remind me of how much I DESPISE checking out a good book from the library, cracking it open, and finding that it
reeks of stale cigarette smoke. *gack!* Oh, and the time my library book reeked of old pot smoke was even worse.
Look at that beautiful blank spot under “SB Sarah’s TBR!
Ha! Patience, young Jedi. The long and luxurious wait for SB reviews is detailed under the link FAQ U. Tho I do look forward to hearing SB Sarah’s opinion, much as I looked forward to seeing my SAT scores.
I have to say that I’m one of those that’s extremely turned off when characters I’m reading about light up a cigarette. Same with characters who are snorting snuff every time they turn around. I was raised in a non-smoking household, and even though several of my siblings have smoked in the past, most of them have quit.
The possible exception to my smoking rule is cigars. Call me sentimental, but my favorite grandpa smoked cigars, and I loved the smell….still do. My older brother will occasionally light up a cigar, and I’m really not bothered by that. Would I want to date someone who regularly smoked cigars? Probably not. BUT…a hero who lights up the occasional cigar…especially a western character…for some reason does appeal to me in some way.
Go figure.
I sometimes have my heroes smoking the occasional ciggie, but not chain smoking. They’re usually trying to give it up though… I’ve had heroines who are ex smokers too.
Strangely enough though, I’ve never smoked myself, and I don’t like to be around smoke in real life.
But sometimes, alas, it looks so glamorous in the movies. Like Humphrey Bogart, and also Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate. He has a cig on all the time in that…
I thought of another: Beverly Brandt’s Room Service. Here the heroine smokes as a marker that she’s a rich, spoiled party animal at the beginning. The book is being made into a movie starring Jessica Simpson. We’ll see if the cigarettes make it in.
This whole topic is hilarious. It had never even occurred to me as an issue, but then I write historicals. And yep, my hero smokes . . . and so does my heroine (since she was conceived as “a chick who’s a dude” if you know what I mean). No one has ever pointed it out as a problem . . . hell, no one has ever even mentioned it.
I don’t often read comtemps, but I think it might bug me. It would depend on the context. Bridget Jones smoked, but it was presented as one of her “adorable flawsâ€.
As smoking becomes increasingly a minority vice, I think that it is becoming harder to have a character who smokes without that representing something, to the reader if not to the writer.
If smoking is used to symbolise something – a character finally quits after some or other key event, for instance – then the writer is probably OK. If a character smokes just to give the writer something to do with her words, then the door may be left open for the reader to infer some symbolism of their own devising, and this may be something that the author never intended. That could result in an unsatisfactory read if the imputed symbolic issue never gets resolved.
The last book I read with a smoking main character was a thriller. The hero smoked, and I think that it was intended to indicate that he was his own man, somebody who bucked the system, did things his way. I’m not sure whether it was the smoking, or the fact that violence was fairly near the top of his list of responses to awkward situations, but one way or another I found him deeply unsympathetic.
But that may just be me, who finds anybody smoking in a restaurant about as appealing as Phelps at a funeral.
Hey! People are talking about me! Yay! I truly exist!
Sorry. 🙂 You know us writers, horribly insecure, whores for attention, etc.
Yes, Victoria and Jennifer, it’s true; you can be very un-PC and still get published. I don’t deliberately try to not be PC, but I really work hard not to make choices for my characters that are based on anything but character and story. Finn smoked. He just did. He was planning on quitting when he turned 30, but at the end of the book he hadn’t yet, so he didn’t.
In Time Off for Good Behavior and Ex and the Single Girl, both the heroines are occasional smokers. Probably because I’m an occasional smoker, and it seems like every time there’s a smoking character, they’re three-packs a day, and either a villain or trying to quit. It’s like you can’t be a decent human being and smoke, which is totally stupid. And smoking has been over-villified, far as I’m concerned. Yes, it does have severe health consequences, but so does eating at McDonald’s, and those people aren’t considered evil.
Now there’s the “dirtying up my air” line, and I’m with you on that. I think all smokers should smoke outside, absolutely. But smokers aren’t evil simply because they’re smokers. They just have a bad habit that’s hell to quit.
So, yeah, sometimes my good characters smoke, and I haven’t heard word one about it. Haven’t heard much about the talking dogs in my books, either, but that’s another topic altogether. 😉
Smoking doesn’t symbolise anything for me. A cig is just a cig…
And who is Phelps? Us thickos don’t know these things! 🙂
I’ve never smoked, so for me, smoking is a facet of a chacter that doesn’t resonate with me when it happens. Descriptions of a heroine lighting up throw me out of the moment, because it’s not something I would do or have done. It feels foreign to me.
Silly, isn’t it? I love books about people living lives I’ve never experienced, but smoking seems too alien to me and makes me feel less connected to the heroine.
I wish I could remember the books I’ve read where this happened. I know it has …
Sometimes I think there are more smokers than non-smokers in my city, Pittsburgh. Gawd forbid you take a 15 min break on the computer to surf the net to clear your head, but hey going outside to suck on a cancer stick, alrighty!
Rant aside….
You do see more paranormal characters smoking, especially vampires. To quote Janette from Forever Knight, “Filthy habit…..,but at least I know it can’t kill me.”
azteclady, you remind me of how much I DESPISE checking out a good book from the library, cracking it open, and finding that it reeks of stale cigarette smoke.
Try working in a used book store and processing romance novels that reek of stale cigarettes and an oddly…. fishy smell. Eww.
As one of the many people on this planet who is violently allergic to tobacco, I find that a character who smokes without consideration for the consequenses is highly unsympathetic. Mostly because I’ve been around too many people who honestly didn’t care that their smoking was a danger to not only themselves, but also the people around them.
However, a charcter that knows that the smoking is a bad habit, and spends even a single sentence thinking about it is slightly more sympathetic for having enough depth to really think about the consequenses of their personal actions.
MelissaP: I’m from Pittsburgh, and you are so right about the number of smokers. There are a LOT of them there.
SB Sarah: You should hear my mom rant about that. She works as the receptionist at the Career Center in CMU and she has to get someone to cover for her just to go to the bathroom, while the two smokers in the office are allowed to take their own sweet time outside.
Btw, what part of the Burgh are you from?
See, that drives me nuts. There’s a couple people here who I really like who take breaks all the time for “lung candy,” and that’s fine. But man, take five minutes to look at the news online and it looks like I’m goofing off.
I’m from Point Breeze – graduated from Allderdice. Are you a Pittsburgher, too?
Usually in my own writings, characters who smoke are trying to mask a psychological neurosis—they’re control freaks, or nervous people, or else they’re trying to damp down their own cynicism—so yes, the “bad guys” tend to smoke more than the good guys. Cigarettes are my way of signalling to the reader that this character has emotions that s/he is trying to repress (In one particularly telling instance, a character was a former smoker who had kicked the habit for five years when a stressful incident, similiar to the one that started her original habit, reoccurred, triggering the subsequent return of a number of other identical behaviours). But that’s just my two cents’ worth; as a writer, that’s what I use it for.
There’s usually a significantly smaller percentage of smokers in my little written world than I have noticed in real-life. I myself am a smoker. I hope this doesn’t mean I’m really a villain!
I dunno, Sphinx, do you smoke AND have an oily moustache, a sneering expression, dark, flat eyes, and a propensity to be mean to animals? Congratulations! You fit the villain stereotype perfectly!
If you’ll be riding on a steamboat on the Mississippi, please stop by and pick up your dirty brocade vest and big honking overcompensatory pistols at the main office.
I’ve written one smoking hero (a vampire) and am in the middle of writing another (a demon, for whom smoking is not an unhealthy thing to do.)
Neither of them are heavy smokers, but I admit-I think it’s kinda sexy. My heroes tend to be flawed, and usually have things about themselves they’d rather forget. Smoking is an extension of that.
They tend to drink a lot, too.
Maybe because I, too, do both. I dunno. But characters whose health would be affected by smoking don’t, and my heroes pretty much never smoke around the heroines indoors, even if they normally do smoke indoors. Which gives me another way to illustrate stress-if the hero lights up in front of the heroine, things are pretty bad.
I wrote a smoking hero in 1999 A Magical Moment (It’ll be out in August again in the Perfect Passion volume).
The heroine was a new age, psychic, vegetarian health nut.
He was trying to quit, but couldn’t, hated vegetables and was red meat and potatoes all the way.
I HATE smoking. I’m completely turned off by characters that smoke. Both my parents smoke. They have 5 heart attacks between them, I have asthma, and my dad died a long, painful, gruesome death from smoking-related mouth cancer. So, I’m kind of a nut about it. And yes, I am also formerly of western PA (Greensburg in Westmoreland County).
I used to work in the drug and alcohol field so I’m very anti smoking. I hate characters who smoke and everytime I see Nora Roberts make a hero smoke, it pulls me right out of the story. I find it socially irresposible so it doesn’t sit well with heroic behaviour. When I saw Good Night and Good Luck at the movies, that was the thing that struck me so much, everyone smoked. In that case it was totally true to the time and well done but I’m grateful we live in different times.
I’m from Greenfield; graduated from Allderdice, too. 🙂
In the JD Robb books, Roarke smokes. Yuck, yuck, yuck! I’d rather have a hero with a paunch!
I’m fine with it in historicals, weirdly, when it’s the after-dinner cigar. Cigars aren’t as nasty as cigarettes, though.
Whew! As a writer of historicals I feel like I dodged a bullet on this one!
Lessee….two of my heroes smoked, one didn’t. I did made a point of saying Rand Washburn, the hero of Smuggler’s Bride, was one of the few Crackers, male or female, who didn’t chew tobacco.[g]
I have a dirty confession: I think certain types of boys look really, really hottttt when they’re smoking. They’re usually the sultry, pretty musician types. The smell doesn’t thrill me, but it’s not all that bad. I’ve certainly dated my share of smokers, and that usually wasn’t the addiction that bothered me the most. (Alcoholism, on the other hand….) What I DON’T like, however, is how inhaling too much second-hand smoke gives me a vicious hangover. I’ve stopped going to non-smoke-free clubs for this reason.
I am curious as to whether one can trace the use of cigarettes in romance fiction among protagonists alongside the increasing negative publicity surrounding smoking.
God, I wish I’d thought of this for my master’s thesis in public health. I could have spent my graduate school career reading romance novels instead of whatever crap I did (who can remember?)
Former smoker here.
Started in high school and continued through college and well into corporate America.
There was one incident in college, a disgusting, drunken fraternity hook-up where the guy kissed me, pulled away immediately, looked at me liked I’d lost the last good piece of my mind, went into his bathroom to retrieve a tube of toothpaste, and offered me a schmear of it on his forefinger. I sucked it off of his finger and we resumed our activity, but the encounter always stayed with me. Not enough to stop smoking, but still…
Later, whilst working at a fab job that paid a living wage, I was induced to finally quit. What did it for me was not the health rhetoric, which while true didn’t move me the way fear of carbohydrates did. It was the fact that I smelled. My hair stunk and my index and middle fingers had a strange, yellow-ish stain. I was convinced my teeth were turning unnatural colors and I couldn’t shake the image of that fraternity boy feeding me toothpaste so he could properly molest me.
I have no recollection of reading about characters who smoke, but I know that if I encountered one, I’d wonder how in the world kisses could be described as hungry and delicious when I know they taste like the ashes of yesterday’s barbeque.
Thus far, I haven’t written any character who smoke, but I’ve written only historicals up to this point and haven’t included any tobacco use. I am planning on writing a contemporary where the hero, a Brit in the US, starts out as a smoker, since it is more prevalent overseas. Over the course of the book, he will attempt to quit smoking as part of his character arc. I’m also working on a futuristic (yeah, I know, can’t confine me to one genre of romance…) and have been thinking about what kind of addictive behavior people might engage in in lieu of smoking.
My grandmother died from pancreatic cancer, a direct result of her lifelong smoking habit. I think I was one of the only kids who actually paid attention in health class, so smoking never appealed to me, and, in the case of my grandma, got to see its effects up close and personal. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, actually.
For the most part, I find it repellent, but I, too, have a tiny, tiny weakness for a certain variety of man smoking. There was also some guy that I dated in college who hand-rolled his own Drum tobacco cigarettes, so occasionally I catch a little whiff of smoke on an attractive guy and my girly bits flutter to life.
I don’t think I would ever write a character who smoked because it seems like an endorsement of dangerous behavior, and not the good kind of dangerous behavior. Someone earlier mentioned that it’s difficult to envision the HEA when we know either the hero or the heroine (usually the hero) is headed towards a battle with cancer.
I was thinking that perhaps one of the reasons why we almost never see heroines smoking is because of the old social stigma attached to women smoking—i.e., it was only for “fast” girls. Putting something between your lips! And enjoying it! And that stigma carries on when we see a woman in a novel who isn’t the heroine smoking, it becomes a quick indicator of nefarious character, like the woman who engages in casual sex without desiring commitment. Punishment usually follows.
Smoking characters doesn’t bother me. I don’t see it as an “endorsement” if it’s true to the character, their personality and background. I would hate to read a book full of flawless saints with no bad habits.
Of course, I am an ex-smoker so I might be biased.
MelissaP: what year did you graduate? I wonder if you were in my math class or something.