by
Joanne Phillips
Have all romance writers led wildly romantic
lives? Have they loved and lost, had passionate affairs, endured multiple
marriages and nursed broken hearts? Possibly – but not necessarily. You don’t
have to have lived through heartbreak to imagine its devastating effects, or
have found the love of your life to be able to write touchingly about happy
ever afters. If writers had to possess first-hand experience of everything in
their novels, most crime authors would be locked up!
But romantic plot-lines, while inspired and driven
by imagination, still need to be authentic. Readers can spot a fake instantly,
and many an author has come unstuck trying to turn their hand to the romantic
genre, believing (mistakenly) that it is easy to churn out novel after novel
following a prescriptive formula. Today’s contemporary romances sparkle with
originality – to stand out from the crowd you need to apply the rigours of
research to your writing to make sure the romance rings true.
So where can you look for research material into matters
of the heart? Apart from the very young, most of us have a failed love affair
or two in our dark and murky pasts. In fact, most romance writers I know were
drawn to the genre in the first place by a need – conscious or otherwise – to
right the wrongs of the past, to work out their demons on the page. For romance
to do its job – which is to give the reader a powerfully emotional experience –
it needs to go deep. A writer must plumb the depths of their own experience to
find the emotions and unearth the words that will best describe them.
This isn’t an easy task. When writing is most
painful is when it is closest to the writer’s most challenging memories. I
recently cut an entire subplot in my latest novel, the sequel to Can’t Live Without, which saw one of the
characters suffering from post-natal depression. While I felt – and still feel
– this is an important topic which is often overlooked in ‘mum’ fiction, I was
too close to the subject to be able to write objectively. My daughter is only
four, and I have suffered from PND myself – while I might be the perfect writer
to bring this experience to life one day, that day has not yet arrived.
One of the wonderful things about writing romance
is that we can bring the good and the bad experiences from our past to life,
and then re-write them – often a very cathartic process! I have written about a
character based on a man who hurt me quite badly, and then had him lose
everything and become a figure of ridicule at the end. Oh, that felt good!
Before I met my husband, as a single woman in her thirties despairing of ever
meeting ‘the one’ I invented Paul Smart, the hero of Can’t Live Without, who has proved a massive hit with readers. Only
recently a reviewer said she ‘loved Paul and wished she could meet him in real
life.’ Could I have brought to life so vividly this fantastic romantic lead if
I hadn’t known how it felt to be single and lonely? If you delve deep enough
there are emotions buried that, while painful, may just be the seed of the
perfect romance – should you be brave enough to try.
A final thought: In my early thirties, insecure
and listening to my biological clock ticking away, I had a boyfriend say to me:
‘If you were anything special you’d have been snapped up by now.’ This was a
defining moment in my life (he became an ex very quickly after), and is
certainly wonderful material for a character in a novel! He will certainly
suffer at my author’s hand one day. That’s what I call putting the ‘ex’ into
experience.
