WRITING HISTORICAL ROMANCE: The Regimen of Rules

The Regimen of Rules You know the era that intrigues you. You have characters in mind. You have a story. The whole point of this brief tip: Stick with YOUR story!
Perhaps you have heard or been advised of the “rules” for writing romance. Here are some that I’ve been told, not by casual pals but by prestigious editorial houses. “Girl and boy must meet in the first few pages.” Not necessarily! Maybe that is not how your story goes. That is not how my stories go. In one, yes, she meets him in the first chapter. In another two they meet by the second chapter. In another she hears about him but doesn’t meet him until Chapter 3. In one I’m working on now, they meet quite early on, but not before the reader gets to know exactly who she is. That might not suit the rules, but that suits my story. I am not going to change the story to fit the rules, and, in my humble opinion, neither should you.
I would even make bold to suggest that you can weaken a good story by bringing in “the meeting” right away. Before Chapter I is half over, the reader knows who’s the “he” and who’s the “she.” So much for that angle of suspense.
Another “rule” is that romance must be from the woman’s viewpoint. Usually that works. We women are the great romantics, and our readers are women. But I wrote one story in which it did not. Writing it from the heroine’s point of view simply did not work plot-wise. It had to be from the man’s point of view. Why not? Men fall in love, too! We women don’t mind a few glimpses into that process. Would "Sleepless in Seattle" have worked solely from the heroine's viewpoint? So I wrote my story as I envisioned it, and I’m happy with it. I would urge you to write your story as you envision it so that you can be happy with it.
If you deform your story by putting it in a strait jacket of rules, you won’t be happy. In the back of your mind, haunting everything else you write, will be the ghost of that story as it should have been. In art there is creation and there is imitation. Imitation follows the pattern, the rules, the forerunners of the genre, the other imitations of the tried and true. Not much great ever comes of it.
But for publishing houses and movie producers it is safe, and their concern is all the money it costs to print or produce. Consider for a minute all the re-makes that flood the silver screen and all the series. It worked once , people liked it, so it is the financially safer route, even if nothing very interesting ever comes of it. How many re-makes really make it? Lethal Weapon was better each time – definitely an exception to what usually occurs. Most series start falling off. But formulas are the safe investment. Creative non-formulas are not. When two first-three-chapters of Harry Potter were sent to two different publishers, one publisher rejected it almost by return mail. It was not the standard children's story. Don't you wonder what that editor is thinking now? Don't you wonder if that editor still has a job? Aren’t we all glad that George Lucas didn’t follow the rules? Aren’t we sorry we bothered to rent that DVD that turned out to be “yet another….”
The point: If you have a story you want to tell, tell it your way! You might want to consider that, if all those people who lay down rules for writers were infallible, they’d be writing their own stories and not rejecting the Harry Potter manuscript. Have faith in your own story.
Unless you like writing by formula. Some writers actually do. That’s for you to decide.
Either way, write on!

Comments or questions?
Just e-mail me at Aubry