Tweaking The Trope: Writing What Sells

What exactly does that mean?

I've been writing for a quite a while now and someone who heard it during an author's speech about bestselling books advised me to do this. My response? "I thought I was already tweaking the trope." And might I add, sometimes to the dislike of big chunks of the readership, who, despite what they might post online, really REALLYREALLYreally don't like any stories that aren't inside the box of romance or science fiction or whatever genre they're reading. Mostly, in my humble opinion, the romance readers are the toughest when it comes to tropes.

Take, for example, the romance heroine. In a historical, 90 percent of readers will say that they want her a virgin, or at least, a virginal woman if she'd lost her hymen at some point outside/before the story. Courtesans and mistresses are harshed at; if the heroine is a courtesan, she better be a fake one (not sleeping with dozens of men), with a heart of gold, who has fallen from grace, and her redemption theme better be there.

There are* exceptions, of course, but, like I said, twisting the trope can mean sales death for either that book or a future book. I'd think a smart author, unless she was known for it, wouldn't really twist any trope on the last book of her contract, just in case.

Even if the heroine was a widow, some authors even write in a "fake" widow trope, in the sense that she really never had sex because her dead husband had been "incapable" or even turned out to be gay! Now, I'm sure this was NOT the kind of tweaking the trope over which many are rah-rah-ing.

Then there is the romantic suspense heroine, the genre I represent. The "kick-ass" heroine didn't start till the late 90s and I'm not being bigheaded to say that I'm part of the original group of romance authors who ushered that term and that kind of character into romance readers' consciousness.

When I first started reading romantic suspense, the heroine in those stories tended to heroine-in-distress type. She was on the run and the hero had to protect her. She was always getting into fixes that needed hero/male intervention. Or, she was the pawn between hero and his enemy. She was usually the clueless one.

The other type of romance heroine is what made me stop reading and start writing. She is the "tough" heroine, maybe in law enforcement or even a spy, or she's the super-amazing savvy business woman, or she is an expert in some male-dominated field. During the late 80s and 90s, when the genre was blooming, I was screaming at these heroines because the authors usually made them do the stupidest things. The heroine would NEVER kill. She would never see what's at the end of her nose till her male counterpart points it out. She would risk everything for the wrong reasons and without logic. Also, she was a virgin, even if she was the deadliest spy who ever lived, who could entice men with some spy-glamor, and had been in the business of seducing/killing men for many years.

There were many a time I groaned that the set-up character in the previous book was a woman who talked back, was exceptionally smart, absolutely sexually open and frank, who showed her experience sexually without fear, and then I get to her story and what happened? She was really, secretly, a virgin. Or hadn't had sex but that one time and it was such a bad one she never did it again. Forever and ever, till, of course, the hero showed up. Seriously? I mean, SERIOUSLY?

Or, she was shown as a really intriguing assassin type through earlier books, and when HERS came out, she didn't even know how to handle her weapon. Or had never killed anyone. This book (and versions of it) had really existed and I'd had metaphorically stabbed my head and used a butter knife to saw at my wrists many a time. SERIOUSLY?

For myself, at that point, I wanted a REAL kick-ass heroine. Debra Dixon's Bad To The Bone was the first one who made me sit up. I wanted to write bad-to-the-bone heroines, the kind that really kill if that was their job. The kind that was not apologetic about their sexual experience without flaunting it like some third-rate starlet showing the public her pantylessness. The kind that just blows the hero's mind away outside the bedroom (but a plus, of course, if her talents also did that to him in bed!).

When I first starting pitching stories to editors, I used the term "bad-to-the-bone" but found that totally un-catchy. Besides, the editors always seemed to think the word "bad" in a phrase was bad, as if the heroine was a bad person. "Bad," in their eyes, by the way, was more often "immoral," as if I'd said "Slut-to-the-bone" instead. A pitch had to be short and pithy and I was mostly trying to sell Into Danger at conferences, so my selling hook was: Navy SEAL vs Kick-Ass Spy Heroine. That was short and pithy, and I got quite a number of interested queries for submission, which was the goal--get the manuscript in front of an editor.

Into Danger's Marlena Maxwell was very lonely out there in the pubbed world because she wasn't your usual heroiine. She was a tough sell because she was so different from the RS heroine trope. Her kick-assness was a liability for many acquiriing editors who wanted their romantic suspenses more like those offered during that era--the (early) Linda Howards, Ann Stuarts, Sandra Browns, Tami Hoags and many more who were drawing in millions of readers. I'm not saying those authors didn't write great heroines (I love my Howards and Stuarts like a kid loves candy) but I wanted a bit more.

My many rejection letters included:

"Heroine too tough. She sounded like a man!"
"Heroine not feminine enough."
"Too much plot."
"Heroine too strong, overshadowing the SEAL hero. And her sexuality might put off some readers. Can you make her a virgin?"

Today, the market is full of kick-ass heroines who aren't virgins and who could kill without freezing like a deer in front of headlights. But the box is still there. A big chunk of the romance readership HATES it. Take, for example, Linda Howard's Kiss Me While I Sleep, a true lady assassin, even if her lifestyle was more background info and she was never shown actually murdering anyone. But the voices on online forums:

"OMG! She kills. I hate my heroine who murders people for a living."
"I can't read that because I can't see myself killing anyone."
"There is no redemption! How can I like a character like that?"

The Kick-Ass Heroine Who Really Kills is a rare thing. They don't get a lot of love. Only big names like LH can pull this off in their books and still sell gazillions of copies.

So twisting the trope isn't very good for the majority of the authors, despite what editors or other writing advisors say. I think they really mean "tweak the trope but really, not too much, and only if you managed to hide the fact." Many editors will announce publicly that they wanted something different. Many readers too. But I've had too many rejection slips from the beginning and even now to believe this.

As you know, I've been trying to sell an Urban Fantasy/Alternative Fantasy Romance. No, this is not a real genre ;-) because I made it up. How did I twist the trope, so to speak? I wanted to use the usual UF heroine tropes on my HERO:

1) apocalyptic savior
2) growing powers
3) kick-assness while still running away
4) magical vaginapenis

I "twisted" the trope, besides the first-person male POV, by showing how self-absorbed and sort of clueless my hero was. Just like an UF heroine, he lives in a world with magic, can do magical stuff, and then these Big Things happen to him (and keep happening) and he becomes even more defensive. But I found out that I didn't want him dark, like an apocalyptic UF, so I gave him a sense of laid-back surferboy humor because I figure, you know, after 800 years of living with the ability to somewhat manipulate time (he could timetravel, limited range), he couldn't possibly stay bitter, angry, resentful, stupidly unable to move on with his life, or what-have-you when it came to UF heroines these days. Also, I'm giving him two or more female characters in his adventures vying (in their own ways) for his attention, just like the UF heroines have all their studs after them.

There are many more trope-twisting elements I used, but I brought this project up not to talk about my writing, but to highlight the rejection of those elements. The editors gave very similar sounding reasons to my agent:

1) the first person male POV is too different. Most UFs today, the ones that are popular, use first person female POV. They wouldn't know how to market this.

2) love the concept, but time travel is dead (even though really, my time travel has nothing to do with past time travel tropes, where the character is STUCK in the past. Mine is in the future, sort of stuck, but not really).

3) the sex that early and with a demonness? Not really kosher for UF. And for hero to have more than one love interest? Readers will revolt! Too much romance for a UF too.

4) too little romance (I know that #3 and #4 are contradictory, but that's how it is sometimes).

5) it's TOO DIFFERENT. Readers won't pick up this kind of book so outside their box.

Umm. #5. Yeah.

And that's why, as much as I hear about "you have to twist the trope," I know the buying editors and readers aren't really interested. I know there is a vocal minority who loves those kinds of stories, but in this economy, it's not going to persuade the PTB to shell out money unless you're really, really, really big already, like a La Linda. She can write first person male POV about a timetraveling Viking with a big sword and it would be the Next New Trope Twist. But don't forget you heard it here first ;-).

P/S Aren't you regretting that I've come out of my cocoon of silence yet? All these long, long boring posts!

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What Kind Of Reader Are You?

Alison Morris from Publishers Weekly had this interesting question on her blog, asking her readers whether they are:

1. The Whimsical Polygamist: you dip in and out of multiple books at once -- whichever strikes your fancy or fits your whim anytime, anyplace.

2. The Placebound Polygamist: you read multiple books simultaneously but each in its own locale -- say, you've always got one book you're reading at home, one you reserve for your workplace lunch break, and another that's the sole domain of your subway ride.

3. The Noncompetitive Polygamist: at any one time you are reading one fiction book and one non-fiction book, or some similar combination of multiple books that does not involve reading two books of the same type at the same time.

I'm mostly #2. I have a few books in the bathroom (which makes me a bi-polygamist?!), one near the computer, one in the truck, one in my bag, and Lord knows where else.

If the book is unputdownable, I do carry it with me to bed and finish it.

What about you? Maybe you're a true Monogamist and can only read one book at a time. Or perhaps you're a variation not mentioned above?

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The Reading Experience

There are always lots of talk around the blogosphere about how we read books. The most often--and, to me, the strangest--topic is about romance readers using the heroine as a "placeholder" while reading our stories. A placeholder acts like a "proxy," so in that sense, a reader is experiencing the heroine's story as her own. This is shocking--shocking, I tell you!--because of course that just proves that romance readers, being mostly women, are just unrealistic people who want to be, or fantasize about, being "raped," "forcibly seduced," or any of the romance tropes that bashers always sneer about. Never mind that, if we use this logic, then we must conclude that readers who enjoy crime stories fantasize about being serial murderers and torturers and those who love their fantasies are really fey wannabes, right?

Anyway, this discussion usually results in a hand-wringing party among the romance readers because everyone gets their backs up when they're being accused of actually having "rape" fantasies and living that through the heroines. Like I said, funny how this is often hurled at the female readers, but never at male readers who read hardcore murder/crime. Would they get all worked up if I accuse them they harbor violent thoughts toward women because of their reading material?

Someone somewhere in some discussion ***g*** brought up an interesting point. If romance readers choose to put on the fictional skin of the heroine, why is there so much resistance among them to read first POV? Many readers just would not pick up a book that starts with "I." I don't have this problem, but many of my friends don't buy those books, or at least, very rarely. When I ask them why, their usual answer is because they want the hero's POV too.

So, does that mean the romance reader actually use the HERO as a placeholder? Heh.

For myself, I read for the emotional engagement. If a story is well-written and managed to immerse me deeply, I do feel angry when the heroine is being unfairly treated. If the hero acts like a bastard, I want to bash him (now is it me who feels that way or me play-acting as the heroine?). On the other hand, I "jump" from one character to another, so if the hero is getting a wallop of a deal, I'm all for his angst and anger too.

This "participation" doesn't make me want to be either the hero or heroine. A good story has the power to take the brain away somewhere for a few hours and most of us who love to read know how we can be swept away to never-neverland by just opening a book. That's the magic in reading. The experience itself is a placeholder/proxy of my day (or few hours, actually). It's like this--hmm, washing dishes or walking in a bad-ass world with vampires and magic? Or, hmm, doing bills or bantering with a lord in a Regency about horse-riding and ahem, studding? Or, hmm, clean the fridge or getting into the mind of super male spy and how to take down super female spy in some mind games?

With the popularity of urban fantasies these days, which is mostly told from first POV, I'm wondering whether those who have been so resistant to it have changed their minds and are now enjoying these books? I must admit, even the best written ones made me one frustrated reader when the heroine (main character) acted incomprehensibly mullish and thickheaded. Yes, Danny Valentine, I'm talking to you.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about how you read your romances. I understand how some readers really see themselves as the heroine. Doesn't bother me at all. I realize it's only for a few hours and that it's a form of daydreaming. I do that all the time on the roof, LOL.

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Literary Conversations Between Two Roofers

It's funny seeing it from a man's perspective, it really is. Take Ranger Buddy and his English Lit classes, for instance ;-). I listen to his moaning almost daily now. This, from a man who never moan about any kind of work. This, from a man who can work like a maniac eight days a week. This, from a man who can work out and look sculpted from sheer will. This, from a man who is going to run with the bulls in a month. But reading English lit and discussing the themes and meanings for three hours twice a week is sheer torture for this man.

It's funny because he tries and fails miserably. I have these accounts from eyewitnesses:

1) He smacks his head with the book when the teacher brings up "sexual connotations" or "the old south vs the new south" or "what the author really meant underneath the story."

2) He makes tortured noises when he hears assignments like "Is the woman behind the wallpaper?" or "When Kowalski raped Blanche, does it mean the new south 'raping' the old south?"

3) He turned the text upside down once when the teacher said, "Some people see a reference of the woman behind the wall paper as having a lesbian lover and the husband killed her for the betrayal" and shook it hard. When I asked him later why he did that, he explained that he thought he might had some hidden paragraphs that he'd somehow missed since there was no mention of a lesbian lover in his version of the book ;-). He'd hoped that by shaking it, those paragraphs would magically appear. Male sarcasm at its best.

4) He takes out quotes from the plays and makes it his own. Like when he locked himself out of the truck and had to call me for the spare key, but as you know, he doesn't own a cell phone. He had to borrow one from his teacher and after using it, he said, "Thank you. I always depend on the kindness of strangers." I bet his teacher rolled her eyes.

5) He asks me for help with thematic references in the story and spends two hours arguing with me by retelling the plot over and over. I have to keep saying, "RB, no matter how many times you retell it, the story is still the same, you know." I know what he was trying to say, of course, because I've known the man for two decades; what I was telling him about subtext wasn't in the book.

6) "I'm turning into a sissy," he moaned to the woman next to him. "Quick, give me a hammer to hit my head with."

Another very unique point of view from most males: RB doesn't see any reason why he need to reread any book ever. Once read, it's done--why revisit the story? My book shelves are incomprehensible to him. Why do I reread my books? I already know the story. Read something else.

I know there are plenty of men who reread their books, don't get me wrong, but most of the time, in a conversation at a party/normal gathering with casual readers, most of the males would tend to agree that rereading a book/article is of no interest to them whereas most females would say they've reread a book/scenes once or twice. I find that interesting. Guys tend to say there is no "value" to the rereading experience. Women, on the other hand, says they enjoy revisiting the "journey" by the characters, which in turn makes the men gag.

Because he has to take these classes, RB and I have been having some really good conversations about reading and literary themes. For me, I enjoy it--both the opportunity to talk the kind of topics that I used to when I taught in college and also as entertainment because it's fun to watch him struggle a little. Hee. Me mean. For him, he doesn't enjoy it so much because he sees no reason why he should give the same opinion about "sexual connotations" as a million other writers from the past. He much prefers last quarter's English papers that had to do with fuel prices, the economy, and the Federal Reserve. You see, THAT stuff, he can talk off his head about ;-).

Why do you reread? If you don't, is it because you see no value in it?

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