Keeping It Real

How much reality is too much?

For those who don’t know, while recovering from whatever it was that laid me flat during the holidays and whose coming – I think – caused my exhaustion and decision to go on vacation, I spent a lot of time reading romances. In fact, I’m still reading the stragglers, during my exercise in the morning (it’s funny that I can listen to audio books while walking outside, but walking on the treadmill [have you seen the weather in Colorado?] I need to read a book. I think it’s because outside I’m looking around. Inside, it’s not so interesting.)

Yesterday was the turn of Scarlet Angel by Elizabeth Thornton. It’s a regency, and I thought I knew what regencies were all about, but this one surprised me. It starts with an absolutely riveting scene – the prison massacre during the French revolution.

I was halfway through the book before I realized my exercise time was over, I was done with breakfast, and had just plunked down at the breakfast table and read for an hour.

The book is riveting. What it isn’t is a classical regency romance. I confess the interludes where it lapses into “classic regency mode” including the kiss that is like no kiss didn’t bother me. First, they didn’t bother me because I’ve been reading a lot of regencies, and it was expected. It would be like getting mad because there are drawings in comics. Second, they didn’t bother me because in this particular book she gives a very good reason for the characters to react to each other the way they do: the female is unusually inexperienced (at being a girl, at all), the male is singularly guarded. So their meeting would be devastating.

But once I was done reading the book, it occurred to me to wonder how well it did with romance readers. I wouldn’t have liked it even a week ago when I was sicker and expecting pat, silly regencies. You see, the book, with a little editing to make it lean that way, could have made a very good, scary-good historical.

It wasn’t just the graphic description of the massacre, though that was part of it. One rarely finds anything that graphic, unless the book is either horror or a thriller. It was well done, with a light hand, but still graphic enough to induce sort of a “blow to the head” state.

But what set the book apart from the other romances I’ve read lately, was the realistic scars that both the characters suffer from having come through the French revolution (sort of on different sides. It’s complicated.)

That sort of societal and governmental upheaval leaves scars of course. And yet societies heal after it. Of course. And yet those – both the upheaval and the healing – are devilishly difficult to capture. Most people trying to do it pick one side and make it… facile. Thornton doesn’t. The characters and the situation remain, to the end, complex and complicated and difficult and though there is a Happily Ever After it’s a realistic one. You know this couple will have to deal with their scars – some of them mutually inflicted – for the rest of their lives.

Perhaps the book hit me so hard because right now my current pursuit in my writing is “not flinching away from the real.”

Real in stories doesn’t mean real in the real world. I don’t mean I’m giving up fiction. I mean fiction has a sort of internal logic and internal narrative need which, if ignored, will make the story less than satisfying. Say you read a story where they sacrifice babies, and there’s the woman walking forward, holding a baby, towards the idol. Would you be satisfied if she explains in this case it’s just a blessing-ceremony and she’s not afraid at all? I wouldn’t. The baby can escape but, no matter how repugnant that scene is to write, you must try it… For the sake of keeping it real.

I think Darkship Thieves was the first novel in which I went there. I mean, really went there. It’s certainly the first novel in which I became aware of “flinching” from such moments. The moments I flinch from are weird. I don’t mind hurting characters. Jumped that hurdle LONG ago. But I DO mind my characters – particularly male characters – appearing weak. So when Kit keeps getting wounded, my inner self kept flinching and wanting a less hurtful plot, one in which he wasn’t shown as having any weaknesses. As you can tell, if you read the book, I conquered that impulse.

Now, again, I don’t know if Thornton would have sold better with that book if it had been the “expected” like glancing regency, instead of a “real” book. I know I wouldn’t have liked it half as much. And one must, of course, admire the… chutzpah of mixing something as shocking and as in your face raw as the worst excesses of the sans coulottes with the mannered and expected regency romances. It doesn’t matter how close they were in time, in narrative they’re eons apart.

And I don’t know if my fans want me to or would appreciate it, but I hope I can manage to continue writing “real” stories, for whatever the internal reality dictated by the story is. Real stories aren’t boring. They rip the veil of illusory reality and show us the world – and our mind – as it really is.