Want to cash in with the perfect romance novel? Keep your bodices unripped, avoid the “P” word and for God’s sake, give ’em a happy ending.

By RICH SHUMATE
Atlanta Magazine/January 1992

Katrine Campbell screamed and tried to make a break for it. But her kidnapper, Raith MacLean, quickly grabbed Katrine, clamping a hand over her mouth.

“Try that again,” he whispered, “and you’ll become intimately acquainted with my dirk.”

Intimately acquainted with his what? I was only on Page 10 of “Tender Feud.” They couldn’t be ready to do that already. Where were the pages and pages of verbal foreplay? Where was the plot line where boy meets girl, they hate each other instantly, then fall in love, then deny their love, then accept it, then lose each other, then meet again for passion and happily ever after? And what was going to happen in the other 290 pages? Extended afterglow?

I scrambled for my dictionary, only to discover, much to my relief, that dirk is a Scottish term for a type of dagger. This made sense, given that Tender Feud was set in the Highlands in the 1760s. It seems Raith was threatening to kill Katrine, albeit in a way that was suggestive of something else, something that perhaps would be more pleasurable.

She was indeed frightened now. She was scared out of her wits. A knife at her throat, a hard male body pressing against hers — surely enough to disturb the natural sensibilities of any gently reared young lady!

Surely.

Katrine quaked. Did he intend to murder her?

Surely not.

For in the world of Raiths and Katrines, the endings are always happy. It is the cardinal commandment of romance writing, one authors are loathe to violate because readers will not brook such transgressions. So even though Raith holds Katrine hostage, even though their families have been bitter enemies for generations, we readers know he will do her no harm. The story is as time-honored as the tales of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, where deliverance lies in the triumph of love between a strong man and a good woman.

A predictable conclusion? Yes. But the woman who created Raith and Katrine says the mandatory uplift at the end is not a limitation, but rather the genre’s attraction.

“It’s the idea of love being able to conquer all,” says Anne Bushyhead of Duluth, who writes romances under the pen name Nicole Jordan. “The good things in life triumph over the bad.”

Of course, the good things in life do not always triumph over the bad. We all know people do evil stuff to each other, and fate is frequently unkind. So it would be easy to dismiss romance novels as unrealistic fluff, as many of the genre’s detractors are quick to do.

Easy, except for the fact that these books sell. Romances account for 40 cents out of every dollar in paperback sales, some $200 million a year. While their genesis reaches back into previous centuries, when Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela” and, later, Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” established a pattern for writers, romance novels began to enter big-time popular culture in 1958, when Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises began mass producing paperback romances, heavily marketing them and selling them at a reduced cost. At one point, they even gave them away in boxes of detergent.

Now, some of the biggest names in publishing — Bantam, Penguin, Warner Books, HarperCollins — have a romance subsidiary. About 120 titles are released each month for a readership, estimated at 22 million, that is extremely loyal. And the audience has spread beyond America and into languages other than English.

Upon learning these tidbits, my questions were twofold. First, what are the inherent intricacies that make these novels so popular and such a cultural phenomenon? And, more importantly, what would it take for me to write one and cash in?

Well, let me preface my tale of how I learned to write the perfect romance novel by suspending reality just a bit.

The three Georgia romance writers whose brains I picked all informed me that anyone who wants to write romance novels should both be familiar with them and enjoy the format. Patricia Potter, who writes three to four novels a year at her home in Stone Mountain and whose works have been translated into Portuguese, Swedish, German, Italian and Japanese, says she gets somewhat offended by people who think they can just plop themselves down and whip out a romance for the money — in other words, people who attempt what I’m about to attempt.

“The good ones are written by people who enjoy doing it,” she says. “You have to want to write one.”

So I proceed from this point, with apologies to Patricia, by admitting that I was not a romance aficionado prior to setting out on my quest to learn how to write one. We’ll just have to pretend that I know what I’m doing — we’re writing fiction, after all.

Of course, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So I had to spend several weekdays propped up on my couch, a package of Oreos at my side, reading books entitled “Tender Feud,” “Follow the Sun,” “Rainbow” and “Twice Blessed” — much to the chagrin of my friends who have to work for a living at real jobs.

But hey, all this skipping back and forth through history is tough work. I went from modern-day California to 18th century Scotland to the antebellum South and then to the New Mexico Territory, circa 1878. I met geriatric Swedish diamond thieves, slave owners involved in the Underground Railroad and a Texas ranger who faked his own hanging.

“You can do bizarre things. The quirkier you can be, the more you stand out,” says Deborah Smith, a romance writer from Dahlonega who once worked as a reporter for the Marietta Daily Journal and whose books have sold more than a million copies. And Deb knows quirky. In her book “Follow the Sun,” the heroine starts out as a jewel thief’s widow living on a boat in Long Beach who rediscovers her Cherokee heritage in north Georgia and then learns that she is actually the rightful heir to the throne of a small, albeit fictitious, Scandinavian country.

When she frets about not really knowing where she belongs, the hero — whose name is Jeopard Surprise — has the answer:

You can be a Cherokee and a Scandinavian queen at the same time.

Yes, dear reader, you can have it all.

The next task I faced was to find a pseudonym. Many romance writers write under a name that is not their own. This is not, I discovered, because they are ashamed of what they are doing. In fact, they believe their craft is getting a bad rap from those high-and-mighty critics who dismiss, with an upward turn of the nose, anything that does not meet their definition of Literature with a capital L. After all, they sniff, Danielle Steel is the role model here, not John Steinbeck.

“We’re sort of like Rodney Dangerfield — we don’t get any respect,” says Potter, who believes the writing in romance novels is equal to or better than that in other genres. “It’s a matter of educating people to take a look at them.” She’s now got her 82-year-old father reading them.

“I frankly make no apology for what I like to write or what I like to read,” says Bushyhead.

“I think the readers are more sophisticated than before. And the writers are more sophisticated. They treat this as a business,” says Smith. “Nobody’s taking this lightly.”

The Barbara Cartland-esque image of romance writers as matrons reclining in lacy gowns, dictating their fiction between bonbons and sips of tea, or as bored housewives dashing off a chapter between the dusting and the laundry, don’t hold true. Indeed, today’s romance writers insist they are serious, driven professionals.

“We hate Barbara Cartland,” insists Smith. “That image has done us more harm than anything.” She and Potter came to romance writing from careers in journalism. Bushyhead has a civil engineering degree from Georgia Tech and worked for Procter & Gamble, overseeing the production of Pampers, before deciding to write her first book. For these women, this is clearly more than a way to while away free time.

“I want to be on The New York Times best-seller list, and I want to be rich,” admits Smith.

And today, romance writers such as Sandra Brown, LaVyrle Spencer and Jude Deveraux do get their books published in hardcover and do make the vaunted best-seller lists. Potter’s newest book, “Lawless,” is coming out in hardback.

And while everyone breathing in Georgia knows of the phenomenal punch of Alexandra Ripley’s “Gone With the Wind” sequel, many may not realize that her previous books can be found in the romance sections of local bookstores.

Faced with outside skepticism despite their commercial success (many prominent book critics still refuse to review romances,) romance writers have banded into a close-knit community. About 250 published and unpublished writers in the Southeast are members of a group called Georgia Romance Writers. Nationally, the Romance Writers of America organization has 5,000 members. It even has its own award for excellence, a la the Oscar, called the Rita.

Local romance writers get together weekly to critique and edit each other’s work — a process they refer to as “tough love” — with published authors helping newcomers get started. It’s a camaraderie born of a common calling.

Or, as Smith puts it, “When you’ve spent your whole day thinking of a euphemism for penis, you need to get out and talk to somebody who understands.”

Many romance writers use pseudonyms because some of the publishers in the field, including Harlequin, still the industry’s giant, require them to do so. The publishing house then keeps the right to use the name. (Romance readers tend to follow particular authors, and the pseudonym system keeps writers from taking their followings with them if they switch publishers. Not surprisingly, writers are not big fans of the process.) In other cases, a pseudonym is used when two people collaborate on the same book. And some writers who work for publishers that would allow them to use their names create pen names anyway to foster the image that goes with their books.

“Bushyhead is an old Cherokee name. It is not a particularly romantic name,” says Bushyhead, who chose Jordan because it is her middle name and Nicole because she liked the sound of it. (Smith and Potter use their own names.)

I had to pick a pseudonym for another reason as well. Most romance writers, and virtually all of the genre’s readers, are women. Though a few of these books are written by men (3 percent of the membership of the Romance Writers of America is male,) you’ll find few masculine names on the covers of the romance section. Male romance writers usually take a female pen name.

So what will it be? Well, let’s follow Bushyhead’s lead. My middle name is Louis. That’s not really a last name, unless we change the spelling to Lewis. For the sake of continuity, let’s use a first name that starts with an R. Rebecca? No. Something more dignified and regal, perhaps. Regina? Yes, Regina Lewis. A new star in the literary galaxy.

Now, Regina is faced with the task of naming the two characters who must be in any romance novel — the hero and the heroine.

These protagonists don’t go by names like Sam Smith and Jane Jones. Nothing so mundane is permitted. In romance novels, you’re more likely to run across Meara O’Hara and Quinn Devereux.

“Most women are married to men named Bill and George,” says Smith. “Women are looking for something they don’t see every day.”

And just how do authors come up with these unusually melodramatic monikers?

“You want to know the real secret? We all have those baby name books,” says Potter. Telephone books are popular as well. The idea, the authors say, is to create an image through the name.

Of course, the names picked will also depend on the type of book being written.
While there are degrees and slight variations, romances generally fall into two broad categories, historical and contemporary. From here, the process is further refined.

Romance publishing houses have what they call “lines,” series of books that come out under the same title, such as Harlequin’s Superromance, Bantam’s Loveswept, Silhouette’s Desire, Signet’s Regency or Berkley Books’ Second Chance at Love. Books in the same line contain common elements to appeal to the same audience. Smith, for example started out writing in the Loveswept line, contemporary romances with an emphasis on humor that are “highly sensual,” according to the publisher’s introduction. Bushyhead has written a number of Regency period novels, a particular segment of romances that are all set in early 19th-century England and fall in line with the very formal manners and mores of that era. Readers buying a particular line or a particular author know in advance what to expect from the book.

There are also two different formats for the novels. Many of the books that hold to a particular line, particularly contemporary series books, have fewer than 200 pages and come out with a stock cover that varies little from book to book. They have a unique title but, given the large number of titles produced each month, are also given a number (Smith’s story of Jeopard and the Cherokee-Scandinavian princess is also known as Loveswept No. 326.) Writers are required to write to a particular length, and editors make sure that the books don’t stray from the guidelines.

Those thicker paperback books you see in the grocery store — frequently emblazoned with a muscled, shirtless hero and a heroine whose silky bosoms are straining against her bodice — impose less structure on the author. The plots are generally more complex, and, in the case of historical novels, the research more elaborate.

Potter has a stack of obscure reference books, with pictures of popular fashions through the ages and the weapons of the Civil War, materials to which she refers when writing in an effort to keep the details as authentic as possible. When she decided to send the protagonists in her book Rainbow to Murray, Ky., she called its Chamber of Commerce.

“For my plot, I needed woods,” she explains. “If that part of Kentucky didn’t have any woods, I would have gotten letters from Kentucky. Readers will write you if you do not have your history correct.”

Yet, in these historical romances, it is the romance, not the history, that takes center stage. The historical details — the proper clothes, the proper weapons — are but props for propelling the hero and heroine into each other’s arms. These are not epics like Herman Wouk’s “The Winds of War,” where the romantic entanglement between two characters is interrupted by chapters of commentary on military strategy and where the protagonists interact with Hitler, Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt. For in “Winds” and other works of historical fiction, the characters are the props, used to impart the historical details to the reader in a compelling fashion. The fact that the characters fall in love is a sideshow.

Thus, that quintessential Southern epic, “Gone With The Wind,” would not be a romance novel under the strict definition of the term. The story of the death of the Old South was as much the focus of the book as was the romance between Rhett and Scarlett. Besides, Scarlett was carrying a torch for Ashley, and neither relationship ended happily. (But then, if Ashley had fallen into Scarlett’s arms after Melly was dispatched to the Great Beyond, professing his love for the Irish vixen, we would have to reconsider. In the next sequel, perhaps.)

In their quest for accuracy, authors also have to be careful not to use any slang terms that were not actually being slung during their character’s lifetimes. And when picking names for a character, the writers have to check their etymology, being careful not to give a Jewish surname to an Irish Catholic. Contemporary characters need contemporary names, and it is not a good idea to call your 16th-century French heroine Debbie. Raith, the name of the hero in “Tender Feud,” was actually in use in 18th-century Scotland. (Bushyhead says she had few good choices for that character. Men in that time frame usually went by not-so-dashing names such as Hector.)

The argument could be made that your average 20th-century American romance reader would not be sufficiently versed in the history of Georgian Britain to know a name was incorrect. That’s not the point. The writer would know.
“I hate to make historical errors,” says Bushyhead. But she admits she did rewrite history on one point. People in the time frame of “Tender Feud” did not bathe. They thought water would make them ill. Katrine, however, takes a bath in the book because, Bushyhead says, “I just didn’t want a dirty heroine.”

Now at this point, Regina is a torn woman. She can’t decide whether to go contemporary, put her characters in 1840s Oklahoma or in an early 20th-century Western mining town (cut her some slack — she hasn’t been doing this very long.) Awash in indecision, she decides to take a shortcut and pick her names form the Bible. Yes, those should be adaptable to just about any setting in the Western world in the last 2,000 years. Besides, basing the names on the Good Book opens up an array of catchy titles possibilities — “Biblical Interlude” and “Scriptural Fire” come to Regina’s mind.

For the hero, how about Philip or Andrew? Both are noble names that can be shortened into nicknames quite easily. (This is something romance characters seem to have a penchant for doing. Jeopard becomes Jep. Meredith becomes Merry.) No, these are just a little too plain. Jesus? Regina thinks that might get her in trouble. Herod? Well, he did have some blood on his hands, but the name connotes ruling strength combined with a wee bit of roguishness and danger. Yes, that will work. And for the heroine? Esther and Bernice will have to be rejected. Mary? No, she needs more fire, a name that’s more esoteric. Drusilla? Voilà. Herod and Drusilla.

Now, it’s time for a plot.

Back in what many romance writers consider the bad old days, shading in the outlines of Herod and Drusilla and sending them out to wind their way through a romance would have been simple. Until the early 1980s, these novels were written according to a strict formula from which writers had little freedom to vary.

The central focus had to be on the heroine. In fact, the entire book, while written in the third person, had to be told from her point of view. If Regina were constricted in this fashion, readers would never get inside the head of Herod or any of the secondary characters, only Drusilla. They wouldn’t know what he was thinking — they would only know what she thought he was thinking.

The women, pre-1980, were generally in their late teens or perhaps early 20s, from a lower socioeconomic background, pretty but not overtly beautiful. The men were in their mid-30s, wealthy and extraordinarily handsome. They were complex, often brooding, with a secret in their past. But they were also Supermen, without flaws, possessing an unwavering, sturdy character. Worldly problems — alcoholism, handicaps, social disease — never intruded on the fantasy. Virginity on the woman’s part was usually a must, although the man was more, shall we say, worldly. And in the relationship, he was clearly in control.

These novels also came to be known as “bodice rippers” because the hero frequently raped the heroine, who promptly fell in love with him. Today, in times of raised consciousness on the issue of violence toward women (at least, raised in comparison to a decade or two ago,) rape is rarely an element in the interaction between the hero and heroine. But the impression created by this outdated tradition of assault continues to dog modern romance writers, much to their consternation.

“I’ve never had a bodice ripped in any of my books,” says Potter. “It’s an image we are trying to fight.”

The rape scenes, and plot lines where women were the victims of gratuitous violence, stopped under pressure from both readers and writers. And during the 1980s, authors were also successful in convincing the powers-that-be in romance publishing — mostly men — that the audience, while enjoying the basic format, would accept and, indeed, appreciate more sophistication, with better plots and better writing and characters more richly drawn. Smith says the emergence of more female editors, who better understand what women want in romantic fiction, also helped lead to the changes.

The traditional plot elements have not disappeared. Writers still use them, but they are no longer required to incorporate all of them. The focus must still be on the relationship between the characters, and the ending must still be happy. But other than that, there are few hard-and-fast rules or verboten subjects.

Today’s romances are told from points of view other than the heroine’s. We now know what the hero thinks, and the writing can even be from the villain’s point of view, formerly a major no-no. However, there is one caveat to this, according to Smith. When a female writer tries to put herself inside a male character, she has a tendency to create a man who reacts emotionally in the way women want men to react to them, not the way they actually do. “If I wrote a man who acted like men really do, (readers) would probably hate him,” she says.

Oh, I see. What I have to do is to use a female mind-set in writing Herod so that he will think in the way a female thinks he ought to think, rather than the way I would have him think, operating from my male point of view. Of course, in putting myself in the female mind-set, I will probably make the female react like I would want her to react, instead of the way she would really react. (Regina is getting a headache.)

Today, the women in romance novels can have a sexual past. They are also stronger, more of a partner with the man than his handmaiden. “You’re also less likely to find a hero who has bedded everything female,” Smith says. The distasteful side of the real world intrudes as well. Heroines are former prostitutes. Heroes can be recovering alcoholics or dyslexic — or perhaps both. Jeopard Surprise whips out a condom during a love scene with his Cherokee-Scandinavian queen (however, the “c” word itself is not used — it’s referred to as “a small package that she recognized immediately.”)

However, there are still a few things that are frowned upon in the romance genre. While a heroine can have a sexual past, she cannot hop from bed to bed between the covers of the book. Clinical names are not used for sexual organs, particularly male sexual organs (thus, we read about Raith MacLean’s “splendid arousal.” No mention of the “p” word.) After they meet, the hero and heroine rarely become romantically involved with anybody else. And Drusilla, it seems, should not be caught cussing like a sailor. Our star-crossed couple must adhere to certain standards of proper conduct.

“You don’t have your heroine going around smoking dope,” Bushyhead says. “You might have a secondary character do that, but there would have to be some reason (in the plot.)”
Also frowned upon by many authors is gratuitous sex. The explicitness of the sex scenes in these novels varies from extreme to tame, depending on the author and the line. But all three writers insist on having a mutual attraction and affection between their characters that motivates them to have sex — and the aspect is as important as the actual description of what’s going on between the sheets.

“They may be going at it like bunnies, but you talk about the emotional side of it,” says Smith. Bushyhead describes it as “the difference between (writing about) making love and copulation.”

However, one bizarre plot device still pops up frequently in romance novels. The hero, it seems, has a penchant for kidnapping the heroine, who subsequently falls in love with her abductor.
In “Tender Feud,” Katrine is accosted in the first paragraph. Seventy-eight pages later, she makes the observation that was crossing my mind as I kept seeing kidnapping as a prelude to affection:

It would be imbecilic in the extreme to develop an attraction for her lawless captor.

Yet Katrine proceeds to do just that.

“It’s a fantasy, but it’s also possible,” says Bushyhead, pointing, as an example, to the case of Patty Hearst, the California heiress who joined the terrorist group that kidnapped her. Indeed, the abduction scenario is an illustration of a long-held observation about romance heroines; namely, that the woman’s attraction to the man is not willfulness on her part, but rather something that is out of her control.

And what the readers also know that the heroine doesn’t is that the hero is usually doing her a favor by kidnapping her. Jeopard kidnaps his Cherokee-Scandinavian queen to save her from assassins sent by a smarmy, wicked pretender to the throne named Olaf. She, of course, forgives Jeopard when she finds that out, even though he chained her up in a cave.

Believe it or not, romance novels have actually been the focus of collegiate study. Yes, the ivy-covered halls of academia have thundered with discussions of whether these novels are yet another tool of male oppression of women — whether the escapism they represent is harmful or helpful.

An assistant professor of film and literature, Tania Modleski, in a book subtly titled “Loving With a Vengeance,” put forth the theory that the books are a way for women to deal with the men in their life. A common feature in romances is that the hero, even after he falls in love with the heroine, refuses to admit his love and acts with hostility toward her as a defense mechanism. Modleski subscribes to the notion that, by showing male hostility as a manifestation of love, these books allow women to believe that male hostility in their own lives has the same motivation. (Regina thinks Tania ought to lighten up a bit.)

The authors themselves — the people from whom, after all, these novels spring — subscribe to theories that are not as psychologically deep.

“This is the one genre that speaks to women’s fantasies and doesn’t degrade them,” says Smith. And she rejects those pundits who believe women become addicted to these novels in an attempt to escape the deficiencies in their own worlds. “We know the difference between fantasy and reality.”

Bushyhead attributes the popularity to the “feel-good” aspect of the books, believing her readers are simply people who “don’t want to wallow in pain and agony (when they read.)” And Potter hits upon what might be the most basic reason of all.

“They’re good entertainment,” she says. “They have likable characters, and they are generally pretty fast-paced.”

So the bottom line appears to be that Herod and Drusilla have to be likable, redeemable and, despite twists and turns and tension that keep them apart, desperately in love with each other. He will probably kidnap her at some point — but only for her own good. She won’t spend her idle time chugging tequila or watching porno movies, but she won’t be sitting in her room doing needlepoint and waiting for her prince to come, either. When they make love, the experience will be ethereal, not carnal. And, of course, they will live happily ever after.

Regina has her marching orders. See you on The New York Times best-seller list.