Occasionally I’ll pick up a Regency romance or Western novel as brain candy, dessert after large and fiberous helpings of Cheever or Emerson. But much like in my actual diet, the crap far outweighs carrots.
I don’t know why I read these things. They’re awful, both as books and as moral compasses (compii?). Sometimes I tell myself it’s because I need to know how not to write, in the event I wake up one morning firmly decided to turn from literary personal nonfiction to romantic fiction set during the Napoleonic Wars. Georgette Heyer novels are excused on account of being old, and non-crappy by comparison, and therefore classic. By this measure, of course, any daughter of Jim The Small Child Nephew might well read Valley of the Dolls in her Intro to American Literature, under the banner of “Unit 4: Understanding Your Elders, Or Why Pfizer Owns Us All.”
They’re tough to write. No, wait–they’re tough to write well. The author must integrate and scintillate. Nonfiction is difficult, but fiction even more so, which is why I don’t write it. You need to make that *&%$ up, and you have to make it sound for real. I can barely recount conversations that actually took place without it reading like an especially wacky day at Bayside High. The trick to writing an historical romance novel is to make the romantic plot seem as if it has happened at some point in history, without making it seem like you’re making it a historical romance. When this works, Clark Gable will take your calls and say “Damn” all day long when actors just didn’t say “damn.” When it doesn’t, you have Titanic on every possible level–boat, book, and movie.
I remember reading one novel which was so clumsily written–I’ll not name names or ripped bodices here–but it was so bad that I read it right to the end, every single page, because 340 pages of self-punishment is just how I roll. It was set in the Western frontier, and the author had gotten herself a Word document and access to a Wikipedia page detailing Things That Happened When U.S. Presidents Had Beards, and man, she was going to use both. People said things like, “Why, have you heard what the Wright Brothers are up to?” and “I understand that the Cincinnati Red Stockings defeated the Philadelphia Athletics in base-ball, three games to two!” After all that, nobody had any sex until the very end, and even then it didn’t seem worth all the petticoat removal. Neither Wright Brother, even after a long, lonely day of wing-fixing, would have been interested.
At least the author actually wrote the thing. The big buzz in chick lit these days is a plagiarism scandal concerning the pulpy Shadow Bear, written by Cassie Edwards, and her thoughtful discussion of ferrets, written by nature journalist Paul Tome. “Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population,” the heroine announces, post-coital. Hot.
When I started teaching writing at the college level, I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to bullseye stolen passages. “Don’t worry,” I was told many times, in many ways. “You’ll know.” And I did. Maybe it the was the fact that a student who for four months could barely string two sentences together and was suddenly churning out the King’s English on the final. Maybe it was the way the font changed from one voice-shifting paragraph to the next. Or maybe it was how a few phrases, when fed into Google, magically popped up, fully formed, on such sites as ExampleEssays.com. But somehow, I developed an amazing second sight, a truly good eye. It is worthy of base-ball.
F minus at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
