I was lucky in that my first truly shitty job came when I was in my forties. Very little of it is terribly funny, and I do have a difficult time talking about parts of it, but it’s distant enough at this point that I can at least acknowledge how it shaped me for the better, no thanks to the assholes paid quite well to grind us down.

Having said that, I’m not sure what my career trajectory would have been had I had that experience many years earlier: would I have been able to take my career someplace else if my first job out of college was that bad? Would there have been a second job in my field if I didn’t know any better and thought they were all like that? So I give a ton of credit to my colleagues who survived that particular workplace in their twenties and then moved on to more positive things pretty much immediately. I don’t know if I could have done it in my twenties. 

One such colleague (who uses they/them pronouns) moved on to be an Editor for Harlequin Romance, and I can follow what they’re up to as long as they continue to post about it on LinkedIn. Not long ago, I saw that the first book they edited from soup-to-nuts was released, and I picked it up. Little did I know how formative that reading experience would be, not because it was particularly well-written stylistically, or originally plotted, but because it was unfamiliar and sent me down a new rabbit hole that I really enjoyed falling into. This is how transformation is supposed to work. Having these moments as I get older is what keeps me going. Who wants to be calcified, no matter how impressive the statue?

My attitudes on genre fiction have changed over the years, perhaps because of how I started my Serious Writing Life in a more literary world. I’m not sure I was judgmental about all genre fiction, though: I have written before about how many Steven King, or Forgotten Realms, or Michael Crichton books I read when I was younger.

I never did read Romance, though, and I’m not sure I ever had much of an opinion on it as a genre. I knew it was popular, and I knew that the wife of one of my father’s colleagues wrote them. I knew early on from her reports that it was a hard market to break into, and that a lot of writers competed for relatively few publishing slots. 

If there were story patterns of Romance novels, I didn’t know them. I assumed (incorrectly, as it turns out, which is usually the case) that Romance books were written for women so that they could vicariously experience an idealized love story. I think I assumed they were mental pornography: just as visual pornography seems to suggest that there are lots of women out there who are perpetually ready to have sex with no foreplay, so too did I think that Romance fiction was basically about idealized men doing what women most want them to do: read their minds, not have any needs, and be willing to spend. 

That’s an exaggeration. But you get the idea. The “Fantasy” label is already used in genre fiction to refer to stories with wizards and dragons and whatnot, but I assumed Romance stories were pure fantasy.

This isn’t really the case. As of now, I’ve read several of these things, and I’ve also been writing them for the last few months, publishing them under two pen names on Amazon. A lot of wannabe writers note how hard it is to get off their asses and actually Do The Work; I was no exception. For whatever reason, Romantic fiction kicked me in the ass the hardest. 

The plots of these Romance stories I’m reading don’t strike me as terribly original. But so what? Like a lot of crime/noir fiction that I love, these Romance stories contain conflict, they have a ton of forward momentum, and they are engaging. It’s another example of an audience of readers–a devoted one, I should add–being very clear about what they want, and then they collectively put their money where their wants are. 

I’m hardly an expert on Romance tropes and plot construction, but I seem to be most at home writing in two subgenres: forced proximity, and bet/dare/wager. There are entire subgenres devoted to “revenge plots,” and these, quite frankly, make me uncomfortable. Paranormal Romance is also quite popular, but not a genre I can get into as a reader, and doesn’t seem to be one that I can think up ideas for. Boss/Employee is another one where the power dynamic is the chief issue in the story, and my goodness can they be troublesome to read (maybe because of that shitty job I mentioned at the start of this post; it’s hard to root for successful assholes, harder still to have them Get the Girl in the end). There are a few more that have their fans, but make me feel icky. 

There is that famous line from the Jack Nicholson movie where he’s a Romance author and someone asks him how he writes women so well. “First I think of a man,” he tells her, “and then I take away reason and accountability.” It’s a funny line, but it’s meant to establish how much of an ass he is more than serve as a critique of the genre. 

There can be a bit of a gross “you complete me” element to some Romance plots, where there’s an implication that you need another person in order to become your best. This is psychologically troublesome, but I prefer to think of it like this: these are really plots about people wanting to be seen and understood, usually by correcting some flaw that improves them as a person and not just a lover. This is one reason why the Hallmark channel has so many movies about sassy single women in pencil skirts leaving their Big City Lawyer Job to go to their small towns, where they learn about vulnerability, looking beneath the surface, giving second chances, and easing off the throttle. Common story pattern, yes, but that doesn’t make it wrong. 

I quote Lawrence Block here a lot, I know, but that’s because I find a lot of what he writes (and what he says) to really resonate with me. He got his start as a writer writing Romantic mass-market fiction in the late 1950s, and has also commented that, given a choice of what to do, he “tends to go with the option that brings money into the house.” Right now, actual money is coming into the house thanks to Romance stories. 

Storytelling is storytelling, and I’m surprisingly comfortable with the detour I’ve taken. I quit my job in 2021 to freelance part-time, as well as to kickstart whatever I could make of a Writing Career. I thought that meant crime writing, but that doesn’t seem to be the entry point at all. I have memories of otherwise well-meaning colleagues and professors steering me (and us) towards Being Writers of Serious Literature, but I’m pleased to learn (and eventually I do learn) that my focus lies elsewhere. 

The formative years of my writing education came in learning how to be the kind of writer that people admire more than they read. Given some kind of outside income (whether a trust fund, or teaching gig) then yes, I can see how pure self-directed writing might be gratifying, even with a relatively small readership. The self-publishing, Independent eBook author simply did not exist when I left my MFA program in May of 2003. I’m very grateful it exists now.