Happily Ever After For Now

There were so many excellent and well-reasoned responses to my EAACON post I was sitting there itching to see the comments come in. There were also a few comments that really showed that either I had not expressed myself very well, or the readers had mistaken my meaning.

My post was not an attack on Erotic Romance writers. Firstly, they’re not a herd. They’re a group of incredibly diverse individuals. Some of them consistently write for ER publishers and some will publish with an ER publisher if they’ve written something that they think would suit the conventions of the marketplace.

Let me reiterate again: there will always be wonderful, vibrant stories that lend themselves to a HEA of HFN ending. I’ve written stories myself that simply must end that way because the characters are searching for that, ready for that, or because fate conspires to make that a possibility. I’m not saying that every story with a HEA or HFN ending is contrived.

My point is that when the convention of a genre is so rigid that no other ending is possible, then that’s a problem. It’s a problem for our scope of growth as writers. It’s a problem for publishers who are supposed to be the instrument by which a branch of literature advances. It’s a problem for readers in the market who become so trained to a certain very specific outcome that they cannot tolerate another.

It is very easy for publishers to shrug their shoulders and say that HEA and HFN is what their readership wants. The market drives demand. I have two major problems with this. First, this understanding of the marketplace is very old and has been proven by market research to be untrue. What is available has a great deal to do with market expectations. If the vast majority of the content out there in the Erotica market is HEA, that is what readers will become acclimatized to. Humans are strange animals. Even though they say they like surprises, the truth is that most of them don’t. At the same time, humans have their deepest revelations when confronted with change. We grow most when confronted with things outside of our comfort zone.

My second problem with this is… since when are publishers nothing but a mail-order clearing houses? I object to anyone who treats the written word like it’s a plastic dildo.  Since when is a publisher’s role in the culture of a society simply to satisfy market demand? (I’ll answer my own question – for about 30 years – with the rise of Reganomics and the seminal change from producing good products which made profits to generating profit by any means necessary).

I’m going to make what to some people is going to be a very controversial statement. Romance Publishing houses like Harlequin Romance and Mills & Boons don’t deserve to use the word ‘Publisher’. Yes, technically, they receive manuscripts and pump out pulp. But in terms of the very important part that publishers have played in transforming the cultural landscape, I’m sorry. They don’t rate. A number of incredibly good surveys of the romance genre have been done. People have gone in and mapped the story and character arc of thousands of romance books, and the template is stunningly rigid. It’s not just the ending that is proscribed, but the character arcs, the depth of drama in the conflicts, etc.

People who write romance novels (I’m talking straight Romance here – not Erotic Romance)  for a living want to see themselves as ‘writers’ and producers of literature. But they can’t claim legitimate status as authors any more than someone who paints by number can claim to be on par with Picasso. In return for their rigid adherence to the template, they could expect a decent and steady living from the production of countless novels. Something most writers and painters could never expect. You can’t have it both ways.

With the rise of Erotic Romance, publishers took the Romance Publishing model and have, to all accounts, simply added explicit sex to the mix. I’m not saying all Erotic Romance novels are currently as rigidly templated, but I warn you… they will be. Give it a couple of years. Because most publishers have no qualms about becoming as rich and successful as Harlequin at the expense of any obligation on their part as ‘publishers’  to enrich the cultural landscape. They’re in it for the money and they will turn whatever tricks are necessary for the greatest profit possible.

At this point, there are a lot of capitalists standing back and thinking… and why is that bad?

It’s bad primarily because a publishers first role is not to make money. It’s to participate in the evolution of our cultural heritage and to make enough money to continue doing so as a consequence. When the large media conglomerates took over most of the publishing companies, they blithely broke their social contract. To be fair, Harlequin never had one.

So, what about the readers? After all, if readers didn’t keep buying HEA novels, the Erotic Romance publishers wouldn’t insist on it as constraint.

Lisabet Sarai is a woman I respect deeply as both a writer and an editor (she edited my Coming Together anthology). In her comment on my EAACON final post, she wrote:

I strongly disagree with your assertion that romance readers consider that HEA/HFN somehow sanitizes explicit sex and thus allows romance readers to indulge in erotic content without feeling guilty or “dirty”. Based on my conversations with my readers, this is just not what’s going on. Not at all.

Romance readers want to feel loved, cherished and wildly desired – not just during a single encounter but for the longer term. They want the characters with whom they can identify, so that they can vicariously enjoy the experience of both sensual satisfaction and emotional fulfillment. I don’t think the notion that sexual activity becomes “permissible” because it ends with a kind of commitment is a very strong influence, at least not for most readers.

Romance readers don’t seem to like casual sex, and certainly that rules out a significant amount of what we’d call “erotica”. However, their objection is emotional, not moral.

Although I find myself agreeing with Lisabet on practically everything, I can’t agree with this. It ignores thousands of years of social & moral conditioning. We have simply gone from ‘good girls don’t like sex’ to ‘good girls only like sex when they’re in love’.  And if readers claim it is emotional, then in my view it is an externally imposed morality internalized. Of course they are going to identify it as an emotional preference. And again, I apologize to anyone I might offend in saying this, but a steady diet of nothing but HEA simply reinforces that normative hegemony.

But let me step away from that. Because I don’t believe writers have an obligation to be feminist activists or re-engineer social models of acceptable behavior. Nor do I believe that it is a writer’s job to provide readers with predictable and comfortable emotional creches.

I believe that a writer’s obligation is, as Hemingway exhorted, to write the truest thing you know. I think he meant emotional truths. We aren’t obliged to constantly write hyper-real scenarios, but we do have a duty to write realistic characters who feel, act and react in realistic ways to the fictional environment and bring the journey to a realistic conclusion. And the emotional truth – take a look around – is that the majority of either romantic or erotic encounters don’t end happily ever after.  It’s not a good or bad thing. It’s what it is. It’s our emotional reality.

We don’t have an obligation to constantly confront readers with brutal outcomes, but neither do we have an obligation to pander to by constantly pumping out highly unrealistic ones.

Why do I care? Another commenter, Lou Harper, makes this this insightful point:

Pitting erotica and erotic romance against each other is an artificially generated conflict. They are two different genres with a large overlap. Nobody is forcing you to slap HEA or HFN on your stories. Readers will be disappointed of their lack if they expect romance, and that means that you reached the wrong audience. The reasons may be varied, including mislabeling your work as romance.

If “erotic writers succumb to the HEA or HFN convention out of economic necessity” that’s perhaps because erotic romance genre is more popular. That is a choice the author makes for him or herself. With the rise of electronic publishing you can publish pretty much anything.

Here I have to come back to my previous point about market acclimatization. This assumes consumers have free will and they drive the market, but in fact a steady diet of HEA along with thousands of years of imposed expectations of women’s attitudes to sex means that this reasoning will result in the virtual paralysis of a genre. I simply want both writers and publishers to take some responsibility for how they shape reader expectations and tolerances. And ultimately how they act as guardians of the genre.  Are we willing to accept creative paralysis for profit?

I’m not.

And I’m not ignoring the remark that this is two very different genres that have crossover readership. But in that case, what were all those erotic romance writers and publishers doing at EAACON? The vast majority of marketing material and 50% of the publishers represented were Erotic Romance concerns. So… I get to be concerned. I get to challenge when I feel my genre is being pushed further and further towards a Harlequin romance understanding of genre conventions.

Furthermore, when I meet Erotic Romance authors, I notice that they all want to be taken seriously as writers. They don’t want to think of themselves as hacks who churn out book after book of cookiecutter plots, characters and conflicts. But that’s where I fear this genre going. So excuse me if I don’t just let that happen without comment.

In conclusion, I want to address the damage that I think this prevailing trend is doing to the art of writing erotica itself. And Catherine Leary‘s comment spoke to this so eloquently, I’m not going to paraphrase. I’m just going to quote her:

I think that when you place a mandatory HEA/HFN ending on a story, you end up truncating that story’s potential. It’s like planting a seed in a very small pot; the lack of space limits the ability of the roots to spread out, and the growth of the plant is curtailed. There’s lots of room in the world for stories about sex that are interesting, revealing, deep, and—yes—full of love, that don’t end happily, and are every bit as authentic and satisfying to readers as the ones that do.

However, when growing your seed-story in a very small pot becomes a requirement for admission to the market, you end up with a shelf full of plants that are all more or less the same size. The market homogenizes.

I don’t write these posts to piss off Erotic Romance writers. I write these posts because if we just carry on without questioning our direction, then we will – both readers and writers – be victims of circumstance.  If we don’t just want to end up somewhere we really don’t like, we have to take responsibility for the direction the genre goes it.  And, in terms of publishers: you DO have an obligation to honour your position in society. You have inherited incredible historical capital as defenders of a free press, as champions of freedom of expression, as architects of our cultural landscape. You don’t get to choose profit above all other considerations and still smugly call  yourselves ‘publishers’. If you feel you have the right to, then have the decency to go into banking instead of homogenizing my readers and preying on and profiting from the perpetuation of repressive moral hegemony we have suffered under for so long that we have internalized it and labeled it emotional comfort.


Comments

16 responses to “Happily Ever After For Now”

  1. I’m pretty sure the *shareholders* of the publishers would argue that their first duty is to be as profitable as possible. Indeed, unless a publisher is a private company with no shareholders at all, they have a legal duty , as I understand it, to make their best effort to maximise the shareholders’ return. I’m not saying that’s *right*, I’m just saying that it *is*.

    But writers nowadays have options, which include *self* publication. This has already opened the marketplace up to works which would *never* be publishable any other way, some of which may *already* include the non-HEA types that you’re looking for. What’s needed is a way of finding these – a kind of “Google for Literature” if you will.

    1. You know what, Steve? FUCK the shareholders. I’m sorry, but money is not and should not be the only reason anyone does anything. And there was a time in this world when that was the predominant view. That you did things WELL, and if you did, you’d make money.

      That publishers have allowed shareholders to dominate their decision making process might go some way to explaining why they’re in such a world of shit.

      1. I don’t disagree – but I’m afraid that the Law is what it is, not what we could wish it to be. Not only that, but if a company board set out to do otherwise they’d be booted out quickly enough once the share price started tumbling.

        Do I think that’s good? No. I expect a new paradigm to emerge that bypasses conventional publishing altogether.

        1. Here I have to disagree. I’m not going gently into this good night. And the more people who just shrug their shoulders and resign themselves to it, the faster their culture will be dumbed down to fruit-fly standard.

  2. I wanted to read that book! I’m soooo disappointed.

  3. I wrote a post responding to your original article before I saw this one. It’s here: http://www.besplace.com/2011/09/28/the-future-of-the-erotica-genre/. I also hadn’t seen Catherine Leary’s comment on your final reflections post.

    I happen to agree with Catherine. The issue is the market. While I’m happy to write in the erotic romance sub-genre so I can make a few bucks, that’s not all I want to write. It is too limiting for many of the themes I want to explore. So what’s the best way to expand the genre? I think it’s to offer an alternative to ‘publishing for the sake of profits only’ and show that it’s viable (and note that viable and profitable are different).

    Finally, in the current upheaval in publishing, I think things are going to be both worse and better. Traditional publishers are in a bind–they can’t take the financial risks they used to. The “chase the best sellers” and the “safe” books has taken over their part of the industry. So, from the big conglomerates, you’re going to see nothing but what’s safe (vampires anyone?).

    At the same time, we’re entering an era where small press and self-publishing is actually viable. The opportunities are there and, I believe, the audience will eventually find them. I certainly hope so, because that’s where the juice is likely to be.

    1. I would contend that publishers are in the financial bind they’re in BECAUSE they haven’t taken risks.

      1. A valid point. Customers can’t buy books that aren’t there. If you publish three kinds of books, and customers buy those three kinds of books, you can’t conclude from that that they wouldn’t also buy (or even prefer) two other types of books. Or books that aren’t any “type” at all.

        Having worked in-house for a large NY publisher (not erotica), I can assure you though that at least the publishers I know are all watching each other. THAT is the value of having erotic romance publishers at conferences like EAA, together with independent presses and self-publishing authors. That is their (mainstream traditional publishers’) chance to see that authors want to write outside of that box, that other publishers will publish those works, or that some authors would prefer to publish on their own in order to be free of externally imposed restrictions.

      2. Well, absolutely. They shot themselves in the gut (much more serious than the foot) when they decided to outsource their slush piles and then also decided to gut their midlists and small niches so they could put more copies of the best sellers on the shelf at Walmart. They ate their seed corn, so to speak. How are they going to find the next new voice? Heck, how are they going to find the next Dan Brown–a midlister until he got a hit?

        Big publishing put itself in mortal risk on purely economic terms, completely independently of any position in society that may be ascribed to them. It was dumb, and the question is, what are we writers and small publishers going to do in the shadow of this colossal blunder?

  4. I’m going to veer slightly off topic here and point out that all of these HEA/HFN endings we read in books has a direct influence on how our social expectations have changed. We expect to LIVE happily ever after, because that’s the novelistic paradigm. What happened to the Anna Kareninas of this world? Or the idea that a long term relationship takes effort?

    1. Who was it who said that Americans are the only nationality that think death is optional?

      I think there’s an influence on people’s expectations by reading stories with a narrative arc–you expect that after a conflict there will be a resolution and then… well, then the cover closes. I think I know more people who struggle to know what to “do” after the resolution of a conflict than I know people who believe their lives will be happy because they’ve read happy books.

      As someone who writes a lot of stories with cheerful endings (or at least cheerful implications), I know I get tired of being told (subtly or not-so-subtly) that my world view is somehow shallow. Really? Happiness is less profound than unhappiness? That I would strongly disagree with. Based on my own life and the people I know, I don’t consider happiness more unrealistic, either.

      But my impression was that RG wasn’t arguing that happy endings are “bad” or not literary; rather that the problem is they’re overly *required*. If a story ends happily, let it end happily. If it doesn’t end happily, then you can’t force it to, any more than you can (successfully) force a sex scene into a book where it doesn’t belong, or keep Americans from dying. It’s hard to prove that readers will respond to your non-formulaic story if you can’t get it published in the first place.

      1. exactly! There are stories that MUST end HEA – they are just ripe to do it. It’s the artificial imposition of that ending that I object to.

  5. I’m almost ashamed to admit how much I love a HEA/HFN after the last two posts. But I will. And I’ll note that (for me, at least), it’s not about legitemising the sex with love, it’s simply about the fact that HEA/HFN delivers the most hope for the future. With as much emotion as I invest in a story, I find a downbeat/hopeless/tragic ending very difficult to deal with. (yes, I know – I’m a total wuss, emotionally) There has to be a nugget of hope *somewhere* in the ending… This is true whether I’m reading erotica, romance, spy thriller, aga saga or whatever. And it can’t be just me. For good or ill, I think most of the reading public like to be taken out of themselves. It’s recreation. Escape. It doesn’t mean I (or they) *don’t* want to be challenged. just not all of the time.
    erm… not actually sure what point I’m trying to make here, being a bear of very little brain. Just wanted to mention that HEA/HFN can often go a long way to help me stay sane, whether I’m fooling myself or not.

  6. While I believe there is a place for all sorts of endings it’s the tough stories that make me feel like I grow as a person. Maybe some people don’t think that’s what erotica is for. To explore the unknown, the painfully truthful, the sometimes disturbing stories are adventures for the mind. They test your limits and help you discover new things about yourself. This goes for any kind of literature. While I have personal limits to what I will endure, I don’t think limits should be placed on an author’s voice. I don’t know if I agree that romance novels have as much sway over women’s opinions of sex and morality as you think. I think movies and tv are far more influential and there are quite a few one night stands and unhappy endings to be found there. Some people are sheep, many are not. When I found romance/light erotica wasn’t doing it for me I went to the Internet (and I found you). Don’t dismiss the self-publishing revolution that may take place. I don’t know that much about it but it seems possible.

  7. You sure have a knack for writing the truest thing I know!

    From a slightly different angle, this piece made me think of something else: I feel the same way about the prevalence HEA/HFN endings that I feel about relationships in real life. There seems to be this overwhelming idea that if something ends (badly) then it has failed. It’s a trend I feel we need to get out of both as writers and as human beings. Our stories don’t need happy endings to be valid.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

seventeen + sixteen =

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.