Do romance novelists have responsibilities?

February 5, 2010

My dear friend and RNA member, Rosy Thornton (and when she bought me that latte yesterday she didn’t tell me this was coming!) has written a very thought-provoking post for Strictly Writing today

Rosy writes romantically themed novels – and if you write romance you should take a look at her post.

I’ve quoted a bit of here that’s relevant to romance but please read the whole post – I don’t want to take this out of context.

Even though much of my work is romantically themed, I would never write a story in which a female character relied for her self-worth, her entire happiness, her ‘redemption’, upon finding a man. I would not write a moody ‘alpha’ hero who is mean and even cruel but whose meanness is portrayed in a sexy light – even though there are whole swathes of genre fiction pedalled to young women which are based on precisely this scenario. I would only ever write female characters who are strong and independent and follow their own ends, and are in control of their sexuality.

Comments

1. On February 5th, 2010 at 9:03 am
   Nell Dixon Says:
   

   Interesting post, but people in real life as well as in fiction aren’t cartoon characters. They aren’t wholly black or white. I see my responsibility as being to write characters which are true to my fictional world but recognisable and understandable to readers in the real world.