Edition 8 - February 15, 2023

by V.L. Czerny

 

 
Romance writing. It’s scoffed at, it’s misunderstood, and it often has to be defended. I know because I’ve been in all three places. But, one day, my friend, Leah, taking up the position of defending it, pointed out how persistently popular it has been and continues to be. That information didn’t surprise me too much, but I began to ruminate more and more about it. I used to enjoy reading romance novels. When I was around age thirteen or fourteen, I read them often. However, after a while, they began to bore me. Let’s face it. Most people will immediately acknowledge that they can figure out the plot of a romance novel in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Those who scoff at the idea of romance writing usually focus on its formulaic obedience, declaring that formula obliterates originality. However, if the ritualistic plot is so easy to identify, why, then, do so many readers keep reading? The answer is, of course, that originality is not obliterated. The answer emerges from beyond the genre itself.
 
When I decided to major in English in college, I determined that I wanted to learn all about the Romantic era—that is, to focus on the works of the writers who were called “Romantic”—with a capital “R.” The Romantic writers did not write love stories, but the ideas that we associate with romantic (with a lower-case “r”) love stories are derived from the thinking that emerged out of the Romantic age. I wrote my thesis about William Wordsworth, a British Romantic, who teaches us that the growth of the mind should be our overriding focus. The Romantics believed that we should strive to access the sublime, that nature assists us in that pursuit, and that the use of our imaginations—instead of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment concepts that focused heavily on reason—can transform our lives. Through the power of our minds, we “half create” the very conditions of our lives, Wordsworth tells us in “Tintern Abbey.” Again, departing from the Enlightenment’s rational approach and the educational theory that we are born with a “blank slate” of the mind upon which we write our lives through experience, the Romantics believed in the beauty and strength of our “infancy” and celebrated the child-like mind. They did not write books for children—such as how to go to the potty, how to recognize shapes and colors, or even how to say goodnight to the moon. Instead, their works teach us, as adults, to recall our own childlike thinking—that is, when our minds were most imaginative. To illustrate: A child is rarely if ever surprised at being told that a little girl in a red cloak can easily and conversationally talk with a wolf. It’s easy for children to believe and accept that state of affairs, of course. But something happens when we grow up, and then we scoff at the idea of wolves speaking to humans. What happens? Reality becomes fixed like cast iron in our minds, and we lose the ability to “half create” our world. We lose the ability to “become a living soul,” as Wordsworth tells us in “Tintern Abbey.” We lose that “eye” that, once upon a time, was able to “see into the life of things” (Wordsworth, lines 45-49).
 
Throughout my years of reading and teaching literature, I have discovered that writers write about the same topics. All good writing presents some major struggle, and each of those struggles, as John Updike once pointed out, demonstrates that what are considered the “worthy, inevitable subjects” of fiction involve “[d]iscontent, conflict, waste, sorrow, fear,” all of which depict “the human plight of limitation and mortality.” Yet, he tells us, “our hearts expect happiness, as an underlying norm, ‘the fountain-light of all our day,’ in Wordsworth’s words” (Updike 395). As I search for fresh works of literature to teach to students, I find the same themes expressed, over and over. Is fiction itself formulaic? Yes, in some ways. Can we argue that the sonnet form is formulaic? Just as I know that Hamlet is not going to end well, so, too, do I know that Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis will also not end well, nor will Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” end well. Why? Because the “worthy, inevitable subjects” of fiction, as Updike knew as well, fight against what our hearts expect:  happiness—the Wordsworthian “fountain-light” that is the effervescence of hope, and of love. Literature that tends to foster an audience of children strives to provide what our hearts expect, which, I believe, is more difficult to write than traditional fiction. Why? Because traditionalists scoff at happiness. The whole conventional canon of literature is against it.
 
Just as ingenuity is not squashed by the “inevitable subjects” of literature, so, too, is originality not quashed in stories that formulaically steer us from conflict into happiness. Some of the great triumphs that have come to be defined as literature for children persist due to their ability to depict the possibility for happiness. We can turn to fairy tales, such as Cinderella, Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast, or look at some of the Disney stories, such as Lady and the Tramp or The Aristocats, to discover not only happy endings but also love stories. Even P.L. Travers’s character, Mary Poppins, hints at a strong, bright admiration for Bert—which is reciprocated—and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne-with-an-E falls for Gilbert, who has warmly fallen for her far in advance of Anne’s awakening to it. All of these stories convey the “inevitable subjects” of sorrow, fear, waste, and discontent, but the difference between their plots and the traditional plots of the literary canon is that their plots end with the possibility of happiness portrayed and solidified—solidified because they are a part of our collective unconsciousness, an unconsciousness that, underneath it all, celebrates the triumph of love. Speaking about poetry, the oldest form of storytelling, the Transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was inspired, in part, by the Romantics—tells us that poetry “must be as new as foam and as old as the rock” (Emerson 36). The “rock” is ancient, foundational, inevitable, formulaic. The “foam” is the fresh idea, the unique friend of the protagonist, the peripheral characters who assist in shaping the plot. The “foam” is the birth of Venus—beauty and love emerging in fiction to teach us how to search for beauty and love, how not to give up on them, how to seek, as the Romantic John Keats urges us, their truth in each new, unique way that we perceive and feel them. The melodies or strains that are initially unheard—that exist in our individual imaginations—are not to be scoffed at. They reveal the “fountain light” that, once shared with and disclosed to others, shines “into the life of things.”
 
Traveling beyond the genre of romance writing in order to learn about it, we can discover that it fits well within the parameters of good fiction and even can not only fit but, like good children’s literature, reach beyond the “inevitable subjects” of fiction to remind us how to seek after love, even when the possibilities for it seem hopeless. Reading children’s literature can help us catch a glimpse of the imaginations we used to possess. It can also assist us in recognizing the timelessness of plots. Bearing that in mind, to find further direction, we can turn to a nursery rhyme (or what has been labeled as one), where we can discover that the working plot seems always to continue to do what it has been doing for years—freshening and fertilizing the “old” soil of tradition, planting the new “seeds” of thought, and harvesting the “grains” that nourish and uplift, while the central “living souls” live—actually live—because their focus is on love’s royal inheritance, which is the gift of knowing how warmly to unify with and also to see (truly and completely) each other:
 

      Lavender’s blue, diddle, diddle,
            Lavender’s green
      When I am king, diddle, diddle,
            You shall be queen.

      Call up your men, diddle, diddle,
            Set them to work,
      Some to the plough, diddle, diddle,
            Some to the cart.

      Some to make hay, diddle, diddle,
            Some to thresh corn,
      Whilst you and I, diddle, diddle,
            Keep ourselves warm. (Zipes et al. 1139)

 
When my friend, Leah, defended romance writing by pointing out how unfailingly popular it has been and continues to be, she was highlighting romance writing’s power to pull us back into its origins, which go further back than the Romantic movement into the ancient past, where poetic utterance conveyed stories that would be remembered from generation to generation, where lyrics and melodies (like the later “Lavender’s Blue”) would echo in the mind with ancestors’ voices, and where the importance of imparting such stories would energize both the storytellers’ and the listeners’ minds and hearts.
 
Inspired to write romance, I know that I am embarking upon a time-honored craft that addresses an audience that has been listening and that continues to listen—ever attentive to embracing fresh ways of understanding love. It’s not only the eye that imaginatively sees into the life of things, but it’s also the ear that listens that makes romance an abiding communication within our human culture. As I learn to listen more and be influenced by friends and by ideas that have shaped our powers for cultivating goodness, beauty, and love, I see myself connecting with that “motion and a spirit,” which, as Wordsworth says, is something “far more deeply interfused,” that, together with my mind and heart, will also “roll through all things” (lines 96, 100-02).
 

Works Cited
 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Poetry and Imagination.” Letters and Social Aims. James R. Osgood and Company, 1876, pp. 1-67.

Updike, John. “Preface to The Early Stories 1953-1975.” Literature for Composition: Reading and Writing Arguments about Essays, Stories, Poems, and Plays, edited by Sylvan Barnet et al., 8^th ed., Pearson Longman, 2008, p. 395.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” The Bedford Anthology of World Literature: The Nineteenth Century, 1800-1900, edited by Paul Davis et al., vol. 5, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003, pp. 245-48.

Zipes, Jack, et al., editors. The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature: The Traditions in English, W.W. Norton, 2005.

How to Hear Friends and Be Influenced by People by V.L. Czerny

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V. L. CZERNY is a writer of fiction and poetry, scholar, storyteller, professor of English, and an avid reader and interpreter of classical children’s stories and fairy tales. She has recently written novellas and short stories for both adults and children with fictional plots placed in colonial America and in biblical settings. She is working on a romantic short story for an upcoming First Coast Romance Writers’ anthology, as well as on a novel for children and young adults that relates ten-year-old Penny’s adventure as she is recruited to maneuver into the dark dominion of the trees with the assistance of a fox, burrowing owl, dragonfly, alligator, bear, her own cat, and other animals on a heroine’s journey to upset the applecart in a restrictive world.
 
Val was recognized by John Hamant, the Director of the “Legends” storytelling program at Colonial Williamsburg, as the best female creative writer/embellisher and storyteller, has performed at local venues, libraries and schools, has traveled to Paris to present her interpretations about Mary Poppins at the conference of “Children’s Literature in the Interwar Period” at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, and has presented papers at conferences throughout America. She also produced and edited a college journal, Essais: The Journey of the Mind.
 
Val’s published dissertation is entitled, Let Them Run Wild: Childhood, the Nineteenth-Century Storyteller, and the Ascent of the Moon. Chapters she has published in books include “Doorway Composition” in the anthology, Gateways to Completion, and “Baffling the Beards” in Women Moving Forward: Justice, Toward a System of Right Relationships. A few of her articles are: “Mary Poppins: L’Entre Guerres, Sojourneuse Consciente” in Strenæ; “A Return to the Wild in Anne of Green Gables” in The Lion and the Unicorn; and, about Beatrix Potter, “Constrained by Performance: Women Write the Wild” in Women and Language. 

Dream of My Soul

by Debra Jess

Rangers of Acadia

by Kari Lemor
 

 

by Debra Jess

Need writing inspiration? Read in another genre
 
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King
 
Stephen King knows what he's talking about when it comes to "getting words done." There might be a debate about how much writing is enough and how much reading is enough, but enough can only be defined by the writer. At the end of the day, only the writer can delegate how much time to spend on each task.
 
Whenever I'm on deadline, my ability to take time to read suffers and I can see it in my work. Not right away, of course. I always think my first drafts are perfect and brilliant until I get my edits back. Then I can see exactly where in the story I had stopped reading. My words sound bland, the sentences wander, and my descriptions don't shine. So, even though I struggle to find the time to read some days, I remind myself that if I want to keep on writing, I also need to read.
 
I'm a science-fiction romance and paranormal romance author. In the first half of 2022, I finished my small-press published Heroes of Andromeda series with Andromeda's Guardian, and I debuted my new indie published Dream series with Dream of My Soul. When I mentioned to one of my beta readers that the biggest influence on Dream of My Soul was the Noble Dead series by Barb & J.C. Hendee, they were surprised. The Noble Dead series is nothing like Dream of My Soul except that it also has vampires, wolves, and elves. It's a secondary world, dark medieval fantasy. For genre purposes, it's not a romance. Dream of My Soul, on the other hand, is a modern-day paranormal romance that takes place in the real city of St. Augustine, Florida. Yet, the Noble Dead series has two romantic storylines.
 
It does take fourteen books to get the happy endings. What I learned during the journey was how to balance my romance storylines with all of the other high-energy action in my books. There's subtle art to keeping the story true to your heart and still fulfilling reader expectations. What I learned and applied to my own writing wasn't something I could learn by limiting myself to reading just paranormal romances.
 
Now, I'm not saying you should dive into an extended series like I did, and you should never read anything that might make you uncomfortable. But if you're not sure what genre to explore, take a look at other genre organizations such as the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) or Mystery Writers Association. Most of these organizations have prominent awards that will give you a long list of award-winning books to peruse. If you're still unsure, you can always contact your local library and ask the reference librarian for a recommendation list.
 
Reading outside my genre taught me many lessons about writing, but most of all it helped me become a better writer. Now, when I reread my final draft I can see where the books I have read made my manuscript shine.