MODERN romance
Novelist Fiona Harper finds that romance is far from dead
Fiona Harper
I am a romantic novelist. There. I’ve said it. But far from being embarrassed to admit it, I’m proud to stand up and say I write romantic fiction, even though people sometimes respond by asking how many I ‘churn out’ a year or when I’m going to write a ‘proper book’. Us romantic novelists get a lot of stick. Our books are called ‘fluffy’ if they’re even a little bit humorous, or ‘trashy’ if they dare to include sex, or are simply just dismissed as unimportant.
I started off my career writing for Mills & Boon, and I’ve lost count of the amount of times people asked me if there was a ‘formula’, as if, unlike any other type of fiction, you can just punch in a couple of character names, give them different jobs and new location and – voila! – out comes a well-constructed romance novel. Sometimes (usually when I was stuck and had resorted to cleaning the bathroom instead of writing), I wished it really was that easy, but unfortunately, just like any other book, writing a good romance requires a little imagination and a lot of hard work.
Close to our hearts
However, despite all the flack romance writers and readers get, romantic fiction is one of the bestselling genres in adult fiction. According to Romance Writers of America, in 2014 romantic fiction sold more than the crime, science fiction and fantasy genres added together, which begs the question: why wouldn’t I be proud to stand up and say I write romance for a living?
There is a popular misconception that romantic fiction is what your grandmother reads, that it’s oldfashioned. Well, granny may well pick up a romance now and then, but so do a lot of other people – according to Nielsen, the average age for a romance reader is between 30 and 44 years of age and 15% of them are men. Some academics are now arguing that romantic fiction, and Mills & Boons in particular, should be considered feminist texts. Not much old-fashioned about that!