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So I’ve read at least twenty romance novels since October—they’re the only thing I was able to focus on during my peak election anxiety. The vast majority f/f, mostly from lesbian small publishers. And I noticed something.
I feel done. I feel like I’ve read them all.
I feel done. I feel like I’ve read them all.
Obviously, I haven’t. There are dozens, hundreds, that I haven’t read. But I feel done. At first, I thought it was because I’d read all the tropes—city girl goes home to small town, high school rivals meet again, enemies to lovers, fake dating. You know. All the ones.
And I’ve been thinking about this feeling, because I’ve read way more than 20 fics, and I don’t feel done. All those same tropes, I’ve read each of them at least 20 times alone. I know that we—and I—always talk about how fic and romance are so similar, but this is so different.
I feel done because these books are, honestly, all the same. Sometimes identical. Not just the same love story arc, but even all the side details are the same. Just move it from a small town to a big city, change their jobs a little, new names. That’s it.
It’s clear they’re not trying to make them distinct, just to roll them out. And I know romance novels are supposed to follow a certain formula (I’ve read the books on it), but these go beyond that. They’re not trying to be different because they don’t have to be. It’s capitalism.
These presses survive to sell books, and these books sell (well enough). Capitalism isn’t asking them to get more creative. They aren’t incentivized to spend more time/resources on editing, dreaming up totally new ideas, marketing new types of plot lines, or building new worlds.
Absent capitalism, fic can be as creative as we are. The sky is the limit, because no one is expecting anything—we kill people off, get angsty, do all kinds of things disallowed by the genre—and we don’t have to convince anyone but ourselves that our project is worth our time.
We know that. But it’s more than that. It’s not just that this is free and that is paid. I think it’s something much bigger.
They have to create characters—that’s the only difference from one book to another. We don’t.
They have to create characters—that’s the only difference from one book to another. We don’t.
We don’t create characters, so we have to create everything else. Just look at this Big Bang we just did. I don’t think I read a single story that followed the canon closely. There’s a standard plot there for us, and we all ignored it.
We wrote about wrestlers and dinosaurs and black-and-white Hollywood starlets and Greek gods and werewolves. We write crime novels and high school sweethearts and space operas on the regular. That’s all about a thousand degrees more creative than what gets published.
And it’s not just that we’re awesome (we are) or that capitalism is an oppressive wasteland of sameness (it is). It’s that our genre demands more creativity, and I don’t think it’s appreciated nearly enough.
A fic that takes canon characters and settings and just changes their names and jobs gets boring really quickly. (I know, I’ve written them). After a few of those, you’d feel done too.
But we do more.
But we do more.
We have to, because our genre demands that we take the sameness we’re handed and get really fucking creative with it, and we’re really good at it. We make ridiculous plots in crazy worlds, and twist the tropes into all kinds of new shapes, while staying true to the characters.
People who don’t know about fic say things like, “why don’t you come up with your own ideas?” and these few months have only reaffirmed for me that we come up with our own ideas MORE than many professional romance novelists, and no one talks about it.
I think I’m done with romance novels, at least for a while. At least the ones put out by these presses that run things through their machinery like this. In the last few days I’ve returned to fic, and it’s felt like a breath of fresh air.
