In the course of writing The Book, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why I read romance, and what it is that I’m looking for when I read romance. After spending way too much time contemplating my reaction to romances, I came to the conclusion that I love romance reading because I like being induced by a skilled writer to feel and empathize with the characters, to care about what happens to them, with the unwavering reassurance that no matter how bad it gets, how scary, how awful, how heartbreaking, it will all be ok in the end. There will be a happy ending.
However, a recent trend, and by trend I mean, ‘I’ve read this technique in a few books and it’s pissing me off,’ is profoundly upsetting me, and I am ranting about it.
There are a couple of tv shows, particularly the crime dramas, that I have lost patience with because the writers were relying on cheap and easy methods to demand an emotional response from the viewer, methods I could not tolerate because they were weak and easy, and because they, if I could indulge in a moment of presuming the writers’ motivations, demonstrated little respect for my intelligence, my sensitivity, and my ability to care about the plight of adults.
Of course, it’s tv, and generally the set in my living room doesn’t stand up when I sit down, proclaiming to one and all that I am to be presented with the finest in erudite entertainment. Unless, of course, I am watching Thirteen or my local PBS affiliate, because then it is usually “Game on, Bitch. Hope you brought your brain with you.” Most of the time, when I watch tv, I am hoping to engage in entertainment, not in having my heart handed to me by thoughtless and inappropriate pathos in the dramatic narrative.
That thoughtless pathos has made its way into romance of late, and I have to say: stop. Stop it. Stop it right fucking now.
Stop using the unresolved and shabbily revealed death, injury, and irrevocable harm of children for dramatic impact in your stories.
Knock it the hell off already.
Romance novels are not hour long television shows that can introduce a secondary story and forget to give it closure. I have higher expectations of romance than I do of most tv shows, which is why I am presuming to write an open letter to writers of romance to beg them to back away from the same cheap, easy, thoughtless pathos.
It is not entertaining nor enjoyable to read about horrible, hideous, dreadful things happening to children, particularly when that backstory is used as the slowly-developed basis for a rather grumpy or wounded character, but even more specifically when the big theraputic reveal of the reason behind the emotional wound is at the end of the goddam book.
For example, I could not review The Secret Passion of Simon Blackwell no matter how many times I sat down to write it, even though it was a book I should have loved. It touched on all my favorite romance tropes: wounded hero! Secret passions! Hidden depths! Rar!
But (spoilers alert) what was the secret passion of Simon Blackwell?
More like secret pain that was revealed in the last few pages of the book: his children and first wife were killed in a fire, and his last memories of his toddler son are of the boy crying for him because Simon had scolded him, then gone out to tend to the horses. While he was gone, the building his family was in caught fire, and his family died.
I can’t even think about it without feeling ill. That final twisting of the emotional screw in the last pages completely dissolves the happy ending for me. Grief is not the feeling I want when finishing a romance.
This is not to say that hearty emotional damage has no place in romance. That’s not my point at all. What infuriates me is what I call The Cheap and Easy Hurt Child Pathos. Specifically, I hate the placement of that pathos in the backstory of a character, so that it is revealed in full in a big historically anachronistic therapy session so the character can get over it just in time for the happy ending – leaving me, the reader, just beginning to deal with the fallout of the mental image. No happy ending. Just grief.
It absolutely enrages me. Books hit the wall for this reason. I could love every other element of a book, but one dose of The Cheap and Easy Hurt Child Pathos drops a book any number of grade levels, and I feel more like warning people, “OMG, Prepare to have your heart thrown at you” than examining what worked, because what didn’t work left me feeling fucking terrible. I can’t review a book when it means giving away the ending and discussing how much it depressed me.
So please, consider this a plea from the sensitive reader: don’t think of the children. I know in historical times, children were kept in horrible conditions, and certainly there are numerous examples of how children in the backstory of a character helped craft the hero or heroine that readers loved, but the last-minute denouement of cheap and easy pathos to reveal and heal the character’s pain over a hurt or lost child comes at the expense of this reader’s happy ending. Please. Don’t think of the children.
As so many have said here, there are moments when this plot moment rings true, and when it feels like a practiced, calloused hand on our heartstrings, yanking away for the fuck of it. If I figure out at the beginning of the book that, blah blah blah blah rape, blah blah blah blah pain, blah blah blah blah child endangerment—I’m pissed too.
These things HURT. They hurt to read, they hurt to write about they hurt just because they exist and because they ACTUALLY HAPPEN to living, breathing human beings.
If these moments of human pain are not in the book as an integral part of who the people are, if they didn’t HURT the author to write, they don’t belong there. I’m in the middle of writing an emotional trainwreck of an end of a book. I’ll be sitting at my laptop, sobbing, and the family will be going, “Mom, what’s wrong?” “sob sob sob…writing…”
It’s exhausting. I’m DYING for this book to end, so I can get to the part where I’m happy. If we’re reading a book with all sorts of horrible shit in it, if it didn’t rip the writer up as much as it’s killing us (and somehow we know, don’t we?) then it’s a cheap tactic to eviscerate us as we sit. It’s not fair. It’s not real, and these horrible things about children are all too real to exploit like that.
(and btw? I stopped watching Law & Order & SVU for all of the above mentioned reasons.)
I stopped watching it because it started to suck hardcore. And also b/c I developed a serious sensitivity to storylines involving rape. But mostly the former.
I sort of agree with you, but I think it’s a different set of expectations. A lot of fantasy—urban or otherwise—is really about warfare. Our “adventure” heroes are out to save the world, and when you set out to do that, people die. If you save the world and lose nothing, it rings false. (And this is why Joss Whedon owns my soul—he rips out my heart, stomps on it, and still has me begging for more.) In a romance, there’s less at stake, so you can get through the novel without any death at all.
Even in fantasy, though, some deaths can seem gratuitous. (JK Rowling, I’m looking at you. Still mad over that Hedwig thing, you know.)
Oh, totally.
Please don’t do the child death thing in Romance /Romantic suspense novels -especially at the end.It’s not necessarily bad writing, but it breaks the promise of romance that there will be a HEA.
A non-romance book left me absolutely distraught and I swore nothing but HEA’s from now on in. I know I’m not the only one who was devastated by Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper,and I know for a fact that many women have thrown it hard enough to take out plaster. Actually all her books are about children’s death, suicide, suicide -by- cop,etc. She is a wonderful writer – but I can’t handle it. As a mother, a former caretaker of profoundly retarded children for many years, and as a teacher – I don’t need to read about misery to know it exists
PDX Jane: I too am so very sorry for you loss.
All this child torture/murder is just getting overdone. It’s sad when it is thrown in there gratuitiously to amp up a book. Some authors have done it well, and I thank them for it. They are able to make me feel along with the fictional characters. I think SE Phillips, Mary Balogh, Loretta Chase, Eloisa James, and Julia Quinn are very good at this type of emotionally impacting authorship (although not all of them use this child suffering trope).
But some authors just don’t have the ability to write something with enough emotional depth to make it worthwhile.
It’s not only kids, either. I personally stopped reading and buying Nora Roberts a few years ago when she a little too gleefully described the serial killers’ point-of-view as he tortured and murdered an elderly woman. I felt “dirty” after reading it. It totally turned me off. I haven’t read one of her books since.
The post about “Pay It Forward” (now I’ll never rent that one!) reminded me of the movie “Phenomenon” w/ John Travolta. That was a fun movie for awhile, while we were all wondering, “wow, how is he a genius now—is it aliens, is it God….) and then….it’s a *&^&%%$ brain tumour??!!!! Give me a *(^^$## break! My father died of a brain tumour and it was a long, ugly death. He wasted away in a coma until it shut off every organ he had (this was in 1983—they can do a lot more now). He sure as heck didn’t invent stuff and solve complex problems. I don’t know why brain tumours show up in movies (wasn’t there one in PS I Love You, and the one where Michael Keaton does this diary for his son?), as if they’re somehow the more romantic forms of cancer. They suck. Cancer sucks. They take you and your family down to the dirty, gritty realities of human existence. And another thing…..terminal illnesses are scary things—it’s unfair and unrealistic to depict people who are experiencing them as automatically heroic, or loving, or virtuous, or brave, or angelic or wise.
OK, off the soapbox. Thanks for indulging my rant.
I read and actually quite liked Brenda Joyce’s The Perfect Bride. The Very Traumatic Trauma storyline was handled well enough for me to buy it, and not go, “Oh, come ON! What a cheap ploy!”
I will chime in as another reader who hates the cheap, tacked-on, manipulative, pandering shortcut cop-out that is the horrible child death. And I hate animal torture as a shortcut to a villain’s evilness. JUST STOP THAT!!!
Still, as the Perfect Bride thing shows, one reader’s cheap and irritating ploy is another reader’s emotional candy.
I hate the angst being revealed at the end (Pay it Forward is a perfect example…. we are supposed to be happy that all these people end up “happy” when the kid dies?). But I am not against it being done well sometime during the story in a way that explains and advances a characters actions (Across the Universe is an example of this for me… If the heart breaking scene with the little boy dying in the Detroit riots never happened, then a major part of his older brother’s development would have been missing from the story).
I absolutely agree. Another thing that bothers me is when the writer is crafting a villain and makes him a terrorist but then the terrorism plot isn’t developed at all so I can only assume she was counting on my knee jerk reaction ( terrorist, grr) to make up for the lack of character development. Or when the hero is a SEAL and apparently nothing else because SEALS are all the same and have no personalities of their own. End rant.
PS: I have never been able to watch Law and Order SVU because sexual assault presses all of my buttons. There used to be an ad spot on television for UNICEF where they would talk about the plight of women and children in South America (complete with really upsetting stats about the precentage of rape victims under 4 yrs old!) and even though it was to raise awareness it got to the point that when it came on tv I’d have to leave the room or end up being mad for the rest of the night.
That scene in Blue Smoke is one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever read. Normally, I steal my mom’s Roberts books, b/c she doesn’t like to reread books. That one, I left on the shelf, and it was strictly b/c of that scene. I still haven’t read High Noon, because I’ve been warned that if I’m easily triggered by assault (and I really, really am), I should stay away from it.
That said, however, I usually feel like she has a reason for including the violence or assaults in her book. That scene ruined Blue Smoke for me, but from a more objective standpoint, I think it’s actually fairly brilliant writing.
(The story that has haunted me more than any other, and which I have frequently wished to erase from my brain (something I wish I could do with that scene in BS) was actually a fanfiction. Again, from an objective standpoint, the story was completely brilliant—the emotional impact wasn’t cheap, but it was gut-wrenching. Subjectively? The story left me unable to sleep, and it was literally all I could think about for several days. I couldn’t get past it, or past feeling sick, until I mentally wrote a sequel dealing with the aftermath. But even now, thinking about it, and thinking about Blue Smoke, I feel really uneasy.
But I think this problem is a different one from what Sarah’s talking about. While the BS scene might’ve been gratuitous, it wasn’t put in there just to fuck with our emotions. It was an actual part of the story, and the dude was a sociopath, so the scene was meant, I imagine, to give us a sense of how far he was willing and able to go.
The example Sarah gave of the kid dying—that’s just lazy story-telling. The author can’t be arsed to build a realistic emotional narrative, so she resorts to the last-second “oh, his kid died horribly.” Like everyone else, I think Pay It Forward is the best example. (Or Cruel Intentions, with its painfully stupid ending.)
After just listing my many Reading Issues, I have to say—I hate being a fragile reader. I’ve taken to censoring my reading quite strictly because I can’t afford to lose the time it takes me to work through the aftermath of a devastating book or story, and it’s quite irritating, on the whole, to have to tell people, “No, I’m sorry. I can’t read Lolita. It will damage my mental health.” (I really did have to have that conversation.)
I was the one that wrote about hating Pay It Forward and I’ve seen PS, I Love You, too. Unlike the first movie, I really (and quite unexpectedly) loved that movie. Yes, the husband dies, but to be honest, I can’t really remember what he died of. What I do remember was trying really hard to not be all girly-girl and sob in empathy with the sorrow that his wife felt after his death. He arranged to have her receive letters from him each month with the intent of helping her move forward. Throughout the movie, you see flashbacks to their relationship and how she is struggling to deal with losing someone she loved so much and to learn to live her life again. Parts of the film are laugh-out-loud funny and parts just make you cry. By the time she gets the last letter, I genuinely felt that she seemed ready to move on with her life. I didn’t feel emotionally manipulated at all—I just felt that I had seen woman who had been deeply in love learn to live with her loss and realize that she could love someone else again if she opened herself to the possibilities.
So, um, I guess that’s a recommendation.
Going by the description, the Simon Blackwell book (which I haven’t read) seems to employ what I call an instant trauma generator. The protagonist lost his or her wife/husband/child/mother/father/brother/sister in a tragic way = voilá, instant trauma. The death of an instant trauma generator doesn’t bother me, because they are not real characters with an existence of their own, but only exist so their death can generate a trauma for the protagonist. They’re the redshirts of the twenty-first century, characters only existing to be killed off. I rarely feel for the death of these instant trauma generators, because the story rarely gives you a sense of who the characters were before they are killed off. And yes, TV sure uses a lot of instant trauma generators. Just think of all those cops and forensic specialists still upset about the unsolved death or disappearance of their mother/father/brother/sister/pet hamster twenty years ago.
Using children as instant trauma generators makes a cheap trick even cheaper. I don’t like children dying or being hurt in films or fiction but I don’t mind it either, as long as there is a damn good reason for it. Cheap instant trauma generation isn’t a good reason. Just as killing fictional children for shock value is wrong. The TV show House is particularly bad about this. House usually cures his patients. But whenever the patient is a baby, you can bet that the poor little baby will die, to prove that House is a daring show.
However, the one thing that really, really annoys me is when established characters are randomly killed off with no other reason than to prove that anything can happen and anyone can die. This is usually done not for a good dramatic reason but for pure shock value and sometimes to cull burgeoning cast lists. Nor does it really prove that anyone can die, because the characters who are randomly killed off are usually strictly secondary characters or characters who are not particularly popular with the readers/viewers, while the popular characters and the protagonists are safe nonetheless. Most of the characters deaths in Joss Whedon’s shows or George R.R. Martin’s books fall into that category for me. Comic books do that sort of thing, too.
A TV show I really loved (title not mentioned because of spoilers) just did something like that. In the latest season the characters started behaving differently from the characters I had come to know and love. Plus, the female main character was sidelined and subjected to all sorts of humiliations, which are apparently justified, because some vocal viewers thought she was a slut. And then, to top it off, they killed off my favourite character (played by the best actor, too) for no reason at all except for shock value (this in a show which had never killed off a prominent character permanently but always brought them back) and because that character was less popular with a certain segment of fandom than other characters. I was depressed for a long time, because not only did I lose my favourite show, but I cannot even rewatch the older episodes I did love, because I cannot forget how it all went to hell.
I think the outrage over the cheap dead kid trick has been well-expressed by those with a great deal more right to be livid about it than I do. I want to chime in on the HATE for unnecessary animal cruelty/death. I’m super-sensitive to animal death as it is, but if it’s done right and I can go along with the character as they grieve, it’s something I can stomach (the example that comes to mind is the deaths of FitzChivalry Farseer’s dogs in Robin Hobb’s books. Took my heart right out, but was beautifully handled and right for the story. I also think FitzChivalry and the Fool are the best non-traditional OTP anywhere outside of the romance genre, btw, but that’s just me). I might be a crazy cat lady, so little pushes my emotional buttons like the loss of a beloved pet, and done right it lets me connect with the character emotionally. When it’s a cheap trick it’s. . . inhumane. Not only will book meet wall, author and I will be done. Sorry. End of rant.
Spamword: series96. It sure feels like there are 96 books in the Farseer series.
No kidding! When I read a romance, I read for a happy ending. If I wanted to be sad, I’d read a different type of book. There is enough crap to deal with in everyday life. Reading romance is my escape!
Slight tangent here: I’ve noticed a lot of ‘shock value’ stuff going on in romance or so-called romance lately and it seems related to the general desensitization that sensationalist media coverage has wrought. The more blood and gore the better the publishers seem to like it, which might also explain why some hardcore UF books somehow end up with romance labels on them.
I’ve also seen authors talk about how they want to shock readers, because they don’t want to be confined by the HEA.
I don’t get it. If you don’t want to write romance, fine, write fiction, call it a love story, but I really don’t understand what the deal is with wanting to push the envelope and selling a non-HEA story as a romance genre book. And I really disliked this ‘us’ vs ‘them’ mentality I detected in some of the authors’ attitude. Like readers are the enemy for wanting romance authors to stick to the ‘formula’ and provide a HEA.
HEA is why I read romance. Because I’m interested in the character’s story, how they get to where they are going, but I because I also know, however wrenching their journey is, there will be a happy resolution of some kind. Dead kids/spouses/pets, separated h/h 20 pages from the end do not a Happy Ending make! But HEA does not mean white picket fence, marriage, a bunch of rug rats either, it just means, we have a commitment from the main characters in the story.
I just want to chime in agreement with a few people making the point that we get bothered by deaths more when
a) We’re sensitised: just been bereaved, assaulted, become a new parent: something that temporarily or permanently breaks our “whatever” stance on the thing that now pushes our buttons
b) The author, genre or rest of the book does NOT set up the expectation (I expect K J Parker to rip out my heart and stomp on it, so I only read his stuff if I’m not feeling Delicate in some way. Same with Mary Gentle and other authors that have set up that expectation with me)
c) They can’t write well enough to do justice to the level of trauma.
Somewhat on a tangent, I read J R Ward’s Dark Lover the other day. Not to trash the writing unduly, but I can say now there was a scene where a character cuts her wrist down to the bone to save her One True Love. The intensity WAS NOT THERE: the emotional impact of it was that she was ripping off a bandaid.
Compare that to the anguish other authors can invest in what appears to be a fairly trivial event. It’s the feelings, it’s the sense you get that the character is suffering, and the author is telling you something about the suffering you didn’t know.
To go back to my earlier point: there are times in my life when I want my guts ripped out, to feel, to get that catharsis the Greeks so loved about tragedy. I love tragedy as a form.
There are other times when the delivery’s not up to it and I’m just grumpy, rather than moved, or there’s a pull the rug out from under “TA DAH” reveal where you’re not set up for the pain or given enough time afterwards to feel anything came out of the ashes but misery.
I also loved CRY NO MORE and DREAM A LITTLE DREAM. I think authors who have children of their own probably write them better, peril or no peril. I remember that Simon Blackwell scene and I thought it worked. I like having my heart ripped from my chest and handed back to me with a bow on it! Tear-jerkers rule.
What I don’t like: precociousness. Six year olds who speak like adults. And unrealistic situations where I think “a normal kid wouldn’t say that,” or worse, “a mother with half a brain would never DO that.”
Cry No More left me feeling bitter and twisted for days after reading it and I have never looked at a Linda Howard book the same way again. I hated reading that book. Of course once I started I had to keep reading because … this was romance and I would get a HEA and then I would be healed … no. That was not the feeling I was left with. Great writing, but never, ever again. I also stopped reading quite a few of my previously favourite authors as they seemed to move more into suspense that had child harming as a major storyline. If I think there is a chance of a child being hurt I wont read the book. To spring one of those plots or descriptions at the end of a book with no lead up infuriates me too.
Yes, I am a mother and admit that, of course, this is probably a major part of my reaction.
I just read a book by Eloisa James where a child gets ‘rat bite fever’ and is so near death that the hero and heroine must spend so much time together to deal with it. I think it wasted so much time in their story. They eventually split because he can’t handle that she’s a duchess (because that is a great reason to break up with someone). I think that was lazy story telling on the author’s part. The use of near death illness that lasts for over a week is unecessary. The plot was mving along at a perfectly good clip and then WHAM-O sick child to bring them even closer together even though they had already reached a deep intimacy.
Anything can be written well, including the death of a child. Even one at the end of a story or book.
Relying on a happy ending, though? That, seems to me, is lazy reading.
Hm. That seems unnecessarily judgmental to me.
Say what you will about “formulaic” writing, the one thing we expect fairly consistently from romance is a happy ending. And it doesn’t mean that we’re lazy readers because we prefer that. I mean, the world is a fucking mess—why shouldn’t we seek some kind of hope in fiction?
A happy ending is only cheap if it’s not done well—and then it’s not really a happy ending at all, is it? Tragic endings are easier and more highly respected, but given how much we all face some kind of misery in our lives, how much harder is it to write happiness and convey it to others.
In short, the more I think about your comment, the more offended I am.
Disney’s puts out Fairly Tales & the absent parent is a standard trope in that genre. It has to do with the child being independent and finding his/her own power, etc. If the child has a caretaker that is present, competent & loving you have a totally different type of story.
Anything can be well written, but some things almost never are. As the saying goes, so many books so little time. You have to have a method for choosing which books get your limited time and if you skip the ones that include things that are generally poorly done you may miss a few gems but you’ll miss way more crap.
Also, it’s not necessarily lazy to know what you want/don’t want. The HEA debate is old & doesn’t need to be revisited here, but sometimes I’m in the mood to branch out & experiment and sometimes I’m not. I read romances when I need the HEA. If the book doesn’t have one I want it to be called something else so that I know to read it some other time.
I agree with all those who said they were okay with well-written traumas. I also agree that for many writers dead kids/rape/horrible murder of a loved one is a lazy device that allows the author to create a traumatized character without any work and forces the reader to feel sympathy for that character even if he/she is otherwise stupid, mean, irrational, etc. I think part of the problem for authors is that it is so difficult to explain emotional or psychological problems without a key trauma to point at. Look at the real world—most people have some sort of issues or personal difficulties, and I think for most of us these cannot be explained away by pointing out one horrible event in our lives. We are effed up by various small factors in our upbringings, childhood experiences, little betrayals or disappointments. But how do you write that into a short novel?
The best works like this I’ve ever read don’t actually come out and identify the trauma. The character reveals the trauma through his/her actions, reactions, thought processes, decisions, etc. The information emerges naturally and implicitly, and not in an infodump of telling.
“Fuck you, asshole!”
Jessica flinched awake as the shout echoed through the hallway outside her flimsy apartment door. She held her breath against the nausea, straining to hear over the pounding of her heart.
Had she remembered to lock the deadbolt before she went to bed? Of course she had, she always did. Didn’t she?
“Fuck you!” the shouter yelled again. The heavy tread of feet stomped unevenly, and something large thumped against the wall.
Jessica lurched out of bed, heart racing, as she stumbled to her door—yes, the deadbolt was in place. She stood, vibrating, staring at the door, straining to hear footsteps leading away.
She could almost feel hot breath against her neck. She wouldn’t look. There was no one behind her. There was no other way into the apartment. She was alone. She knew it.
She whirled, looking wildly behind her. Nothing./i]
versus
Joe’s jaw clenched in anger and disgust as he viewed the remains of the horrible event. It was especially poignant as he was himself a survivor of this same trauma as a child. He could still remember the pain…
Or, you know, something better than that.
JP, why are you here if you dislike romance? That certainly seems to be the case from your comments.
Feel free to take your genre-sneering (because every genre has a formulaic requirement equivalent to the HEA) elsewhere.
Hah, tell that to me and the other fans of House M.D. I loves me some formulaic House, baby! Oh and, JP, while you’re patting yourself on the back – great flexibility by the way; I always seem to pull a tendon – consider why you’ve chosen to take time away your industrious reading, come to a romance blog, log in, and post a snide comment. If you’re not here for the happy ending, then you’re in the wrong place, m’dear.
As for the Tragic Child device, I must say that I require a little bit more than oh noez a CHILD died. It seems that some people think that the fact that the person was a child should be enough to imbue the scene with the trauma that a person involved with the child would feel at losing a person so integral to their life. At the risk of sounding heartless, it is not enough for me. I want the kid to have a personality – even a sentence stating that he liked watermelon or that she dragged a dirty, stuffed aardvark around all the time and refused to have it washed. I want to feel that a person was taken away, not a two-dimensional character that just happened to be under the legal drinking age.
Thank you, thank you, for bringing the subject of this trend to the forum!
I totally agree this sickening manipulation is sadly becoming a predictable trend in many romance and paranormal novels – STOP THE MADNESS!
JP, I’m not sure we’re debating whether or not it can be written well. In fact, I would have said we were talking about situations where it’s not written well or unnecessary. Anything CAN be written well. But was it?
I can’t deal with stories where emotional trauma comes flinging out of the back-story to wallop me on the head. I like to know there’s an issue (better if I can’t guess the issue). You want to see it like Suze expressed above. But when all of a sudden you are throttled by a serious issue and then it disappears into the HEA…
not fun.