Introduction!

Romance novels are an interesting genre. It’s formulaic and often cliché nature makes it an easy joke for society and one of the best selling genres in the publishing world. Dealing with TV, movies, the internet and video games, romance novels still earn millions of dollars. In 2008, romance novels earned $1.37 billion, according to Wikipedia.

Obviously romance novels have their readers, dedicated ones. (In the 80’s, despite economic downturns, readers would still spend up to $40 a month on romance novels.) So, why is the romance novel an accepted easy joke?

The truth is, like many airplane books, romance novels aren’t going to be the pinnacle of high writing. Readers don’t want them to be. As a romance reader, I enjoy the lack of pomp in the romance genre. I find them to be a simple, easy read that doesn’t pretend to be anything more. This lack of hypocrisy is what draws me to romance novels as a writer. It’s what I seek in my writing.

Writing as art has never appealed to me, and I have never trusted it. Often when I read ‘high writing’ I find it over written. What the romance genre excels at is telling a complete story in a short space. Romance novels are one of the shortest books sold there, category romances being as small as 55k words.

Now, this small spaces means romance novels relies heavily on quick writing tricks and accepted short cuts to get the story told. They use ‘tropes’. Tropes, as defined by one of my favorite websites TV Tropes, are “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.”

Romance novels love tropes. They love formulas. While the great romance novels might rise above them, or learn how to play with them, a writer can’t get too far away from them without the audience rejecting your work.

So this is what this blog is for, to take a cold hard look at these tropes and try to analyze them. I’d like to say objectively, but that’s not going to be true at all. This is going to be my opinion on all these tropes, as they are going to be my livelihood.

I am Nica or, as I’m more commonly known online, Flamefire123. I have finished five romance novels. I have ideas for a million more. I’m twenty-one and a lot of time on my hands. I’m a proud romance writer who thinks a lot about my field.

This blog will peal back the glossy veil of the romance novel and look at the cold, calculated insides. I will discuss how I think certain tropes work well, which ones I think need to be left behind and discuss character types and models. I’ll write this half as a reader, half as a writer and all as Nica.

Strap in folks, it’s about to get talk-y.