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lauraanne_gilmanBeen working all day and brain may not be all that, but I promised to address the following question from (edited) comments in an earlier thread:
Basically, I've put in a proposal that has both romantic elements, and dark gritty urban elements and it seems to straddle the line too much...So what I'm trying to figure out is what to do before we go forward. There is a dark quality to these chapters--violence, swearing, torture. And then there is a certain amount of the romance element combined with shifting into both male and female protagonists' points of view.
What I'm wondering is this. Is this more likely to go if I make the romance clearly secondary, keep the darkness (because I want it) and switch into my female protagonists point of view only (because I like her) and go forward with the story?...
The following, btw, is only my own long-term observations as author and genre editor, and not endorsed by any official organization or persons...
The essential question in all of this, I suspect, is twofold:
1. which aspect will get this project sold/do well in the marketplace?
2. how far can you push the envelope on either side?
Both of them are more cold-blooded business questions than heat-of-writing questions, so I'm going to approach them from that direction.
At the risk of being accused of selling out or otherwise overly commercial, IMO the romance market is the one to target. It's simply, bluntly, a larger audience, and while there are many who only read One True Flavor, there are many who will read anything that looks interesting, and be damned the genre, so long as it satisfied the emotional aspect as well. And because of that, there are more slots available because there are more readers. So keeping the romance first and foremost, and making it a mainly female POV will probably open up the salability of the project.
However, romance asks for/demands HEA (happily ever after). Because of that HEA requirement, there are limits to what you can get away with in romance -- killing the hero is pretty much Right Out for most series, and the level of darkness has to be balanced with the HEA. The darkness you mention (in terms of violence, etc) isn't a problem so long as there the heroine/hero are scarred in interesting/overcomable ways. Romance readers, contrary to the sugar-and-flowers image held by non-romance readers, can not only handle the dark, they like it. Hurt/comfort is a traditional romance trope. Really. It all leads to the emotional interation of the leads, so....
All that said, HAE is probably the greatest stumbling block for any fantasy/sf writer moving sideways into romantic fiction, because we Just Don't Get It, instinctively. SF/F can have a happy ending but it's secondary to the INCIDENT resolution. In romance, it's first and last and must be served by the story.* In fantasy, we tend to want to get into the meat of the worldbuilding, the action, and the ripple repercussions, more than the satisfaction of the emotional connection.
So if you want to aim at the larger, more lucrative market, you have to keep the structure in mind. If your darkness leads naturally to a HEA (or at least HFN -- happily for now), then you can keep the male/female leads even (romance readers seem to like getting the male POV, actually), and be pretty dark, and still draw the readers in.
If, however, the story calls for damage that can't be repaired, or there is an ending that does not result in hero and heroine together, then odds are a romance editor is not going to snatch it up, because a large percentage of readers will reject it. If that's the case, then putting the romance into a secondary position and focusing on the incident/action is probably the better way to go. And any gender POV is fair game, there. Although any sort of romance, even secondary, probably is going to fall toward the female or male/female mix POV.
um. Did that help? Did I muddy the water more?
*(I, clearly, do not write romance, at least not as LAG. This has caused me some trouble as Luna readers came looking at first for The Romance. Thankfully, they seem to be staying for The Relationship. The sales force still occasionally stumbles on it, alas...)
Basically, I've put in a proposal that has both romantic elements, and dark gritty urban elements and it seems to straddle the line too much...So what I'm trying to figure out is what to do before we go forward. There is a dark quality to these chapters--violence, swearing, torture. And then there is a certain amount of the romance element combined with shifting into both male and female protagonists' points of view.
What I'm wondering is this. Is this more likely to go if I make the romance clearly secondary, keep the darkness (because I want it) and switch into my female protagonists point of view only (because I like her) and go forward with the story?...
The following, btw, is only my own long-term observations as author and genre editor, and not endorsed by any official organization or persons...
The essential question in all of this, I suspect, is twofold:
1. which aspect will get this project sold/do well in the marketplace?
2. how far can you push the envelope on either side?
Both of them are more cold-blooded business questions than heat-of-writing questions, so I'm going to approach them from that direction.
At the risk of being accused of selling out or otherwise overly commercial, IMO the romance market is the one to target. It's simply, bluntly, a larger audience, and while there are many who only read One True Flavor, there are many who will read anything that looks interesting, and be damned the genre, so long as it satisfied the emotional aspect as well. And because of that, there are more slots available because there are more readers. So keeping the romance first and foremost, and making it a mainly female POV will probably open up the salability of the project.
However, romance asks for/demands HEA (happily ever after). Because of that HEA requirement, there are limits to what you can get away with in romance -- killing the hero is pretty much Right Out for most series, and the level of darkness has to be balanced with the HEA. The darkness you mention (in terms of violence, etc) isn't a problem so long as there the heroine/hero are scarred in interesting/overcomable ways. Romance readers, contrary to the sugar-and-flowers image held by non-romance readers, can not only handle the dark, they like it. Hurt/comfort is a traditional romance trope. Really. It all leads to the emotional interation of the leads, so....
All that said, HAE is probably the greatest stumbling block for any fantasy/sf writer moving sideways into romantic fiction, because we Just Don't Get It, instinctively. SF/F can have a happy ending but it's secondary to the INCIDENT resolution. In romance, it's first and last and must be served by the story.* In fantasy, we tend to want to get into the meat of the worldbuilding, the action, and the ripple repercussions, more than the satisfaction of the emotional connection.
So if you want to aim at the larger, more lucrative market, you have to keep the structure in mind. If your darkness leads naturally to a HEA (or at least HFN -- happily for now), then you can keep the male/female leads even (romance readers seem to like getting the male POV, actually), and be pretty dark, and still draw the readers in.
If, however, the story calls for damage that can't be repaired, or there is an ending that does not result in hero and heroine together, then odds are a romance editor is not going to snatch it up, because a large percentage of readers will reject it. If that's the case, then putting the romance into a secondary position and focusing on the incident/action is probably the better way to go. And any gender POV is fair game, there. Although any sort of romance, even secondary, probably is going to fall toward the female or male/female mix POV.
um. Did that help? Did I muddy the water more?
*(I, clearly, do not write romance, at least not as LAG. This has caused me some trouble as Luna readers came looking at first for The Romance. Thankfully, they seem to be staying for The Relationship. The sales force still occasionally stumbles on it, alas...)
