Dear Bitches, Smart Authors, March 9, 2009

 

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Jane: Welcome to the Dear Bitches, Smart Authors podcast!

Smart Bitch Sarah: I’m Smart Bitch Sarah from smartbitchestrashybooks.com, and with me is Jane from dearauthor.com.

Jane: Today we’re going to talk about tropes that we like, and then at the end of the podcast we’ll have an interview with Carolyn Jewel, who has worked in a couple tropes that are favorites of Sarah’s. Tropes that I like are the friends-to-lovers theme; that’s probably my favorite trope. I also love the marriage of convenience. I don’t know why, really, but I like the conflict that arises, I think, from the forced connection. I also like the unrequited lovers theme, although I really would prefer it to be the man having the unrequited love, because I think that’s, the other one is done quite often. Sarah, what, what are your favorite tropes?

Sarah: I am so with you on the unrequited guy. I call him the smoldering hero.

Jane: [Laughs]

Sarah: The guy who just absolutely has it so bad for this girl and will never let it, let her know and is too scared or unable or unwilling or knows it’s the wrong time and just, just has it bad for her, and you see it in a million tiny little ways, but she doesn’t for a while, and then when she finally gets it, it’s like, you know, this giant in-, you know, inflammation of awesomeness! This could actually be a drinking game: how many times in the podcast do I say the word awesome?

The other tropes that I really love, there’s one trope that I adore that I’m so ashamed of I will never admit it out loud, but I, I continually look for it, even though it’s a rare one at this point, and I absolutely love the friends-to-lovers, like you do, but I’m also a really big fan of – it is really common; it’s almost hard to describe – somebody changes their life drastically and finds out who they, who they are or a new facet to their personality and coincidentally at that moment meets a person who’s perfect for them that somehow blends their old and their new lives. So it’s both a sort of an old life/new life and also meeting a person who really does complete both sides of your now-fulfilled personality, which you can’t distill into a four- or five-line trope?

Jane: So it’s kind of a makeover theme?

Sarah: A little bit of a makeover theme, mostly a, a complete change of venue. I’m a big fan of change-of-venue romances, like I live here, and now I live here, and everything’s different! Whoa! And –

Jane: [Laughs]

Sarah: – suddenly I really like high-heeled shoes and short skirts, and I’m a ho! No, I’m just kidding.

Jane: I, I actually read a change-of-venue romance last night, or I started to, and it was really horrible, so I’m going to email you the title and see what you think of it.

[Laughter]

Sarah: That’ll entice people! We’ll get nothing but email of, you have to tell us what book it was! I –

Jane: Well, I haven’t read the entire book, so I can’t say that it’s a horr-, a horrible book, but it starts out pretty ridiculous.

Sarah: Hey, I’m so curious, ‘cause I’m always into the ridiculous. Speaking of tropes that we truly, truly love, we have an interview now with Carolyn Jewel, who’s going to join us and talk about her book Scandal, which combines a few of the tropes that I truly love, including a little bit of friends-to-lovers and a little bit of getting to know somebody much better before you fall in love with them, and also the, a really nice twist on the Big Misunderstanding, and underneath all that is a great discussion of female power.

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Sarah: We are so excited to have joining us this morning Carolyn Jewel, who wrote for Berkley Sensation the book Scandal. I had an advanced copy and pretty much devoured it in a matter of three days. Like a lot of the historical novels that Jane and I have enjoyed, it is a story about empowerment, but told from a different angle, and I’d like to ask, because, you know, every author should start an interview with, so what’s your book about? Give us the synopsis of, of Scandal.

Carolyn Jewel: It’s about a woman who marries unwisely the first time around and meets a, a man who turns out to be perfect for her much later in life, but when she first meets who will be the love of her life, he’s completely and utterly wrong, and she goes through a series of terrible events and ends up with the right guy.

Sarah: One of the things that Scandal does that I was fascinated about – fascinated with, rather – is, not only does it focus on redeeming a hero who you can sort of tell is, is going to turn out to be quite a guy, but in the beginning, like you said, he’s kind of a jerk, it also sets up the heroine for a really illustrated and somewhat painful look at how little power women had during that time. Can you talk a little bit about the process that you went through as a writer in developing a character who you knock down and pick back up again several times throughout the, throughout the novel and why empowerment and lack of power was, was a theme for you.

Carolyn: Since I’m a writer, you can probably guess that I was a tremendous reader, and I read anything and everything, you know, throughout my whole life, and I’ve always particularly enjoyed sort of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, nineteenth-century novels, and I was in graduate school for many years, ‘cause I was working full-time; it took me a long time to get through!

[Laughter]

Carolyn: We were doing a lot of reading within that period, and with, so the great thing about that was you get a lot of the history and cultural background behind that, and one of the things that’s very clear when you read the literature, when you study the history, is that women, in fact, did have, in a broader sense, very little power in their lives, and there were things that could happen to them that would, that could and did destroy them. Fortunately, within that cultural context, the role of the men was to take care of the women, and you have to say, as painful as you might find it today to say that women needed to be taken care of, fortunately, at least, some men did take that seriously. They did feel it was their duty to, if their sisters never married, they knew that it was their duty to, to take care of them, but what happens if there’s no one left?

Sarah: And that’s a tough situation for, for your heroine to face.

Carolyn: Yes! And there are huge realities. Well, when I was in graduate school I did a lot of reading about, I was doing a particular project on a, a woman writer, and so I had to read about the reasons women would write, and a lot of it was money. They didn’t get very much, but there’s a, a little description in a big long footnote in a book I found that describes how the author Charlotte Smith actually stood out in front of her publisher: here’s my book. I need my five pounds now so I can go home and feed my children!

Sarah: Holy smoke!

Carolyn: Because her husband had abandoned her.

Sarah: Holy smoke!

Jane: In, in, in the situation where you have the heroine having so little personal power, how do you create a re-, a realistic situation where you feel that the, there’s equality between the hero and heroine in the relationship?

Carolyn: Because I think there are cultural inequalities, and then within a relationship you, a relationship has a balance of, of power, if you will, and in that personal sense it’s more than possible for a woman to, in fact, have more power over the relationship than the man does, and that’s not related to whether she’s economically empowered, because in that time period, for the most part, women were not economically and politically empowered. But within a relationship, that’s different. Someone can love more than the other person, and that’s a tremendous imbalance, and that can happen on either side of the gender equation. So that was something that I really – in Scandal in particular, once my hero realizes that, for him, this is the real thing, he may not get the woman he loves! And he loves her more! For quite a while. It takes her a while to figure out that he’s actually changed. So that’s a different set of, of power imbalances.

Sarah: And in a lot of ways, romance novels really do undermine and equalize the power imbalances between men and women, whether it’s contemporary or historical society, because you have to balance out the political, the economic, and the emotional regard for, between the characters. It, it makes –

Carolyn: Yes.

Sarah: – it, it makes historical romance, particularly with that utter lack of, of power for women economically, it makes it a very ripe setting to explore what power women did have.

Carolyn: Yes. Yes, I agree, and that’s one of the things I love about, about the period, and I think that, you know, for a while, historical romance was really focused on these wonderful, frothy, just enjoyable-to-read books that didn’t really touch on that lack of power. And it’s, it’s, for me, one of the things I wanted to do in Scandal was to say, hey, there’s another way to look at this.

Jane: Do you think that the market for the historical romance is changing then, or do you think readers are changing? What, what do you perceive – or, or are you just trying to see if there’s a readership for what you would like to write?

Carolyn: I think it’s probably a little bit of both. Within a market of reading, for a while you couldn’t sell an angsty historical to save your life, because if you couldn’t write light, you were just, you know, you had to expect that it would take a little while, but – so there’s always a pendulum and always a change, but I, I think that there’s room for both. I know in my life, there’s times where it’s like, I don’t want to go near an angsty book.

Sarah: I hear that.

Carolyn: [Laughs]

Sarah: So thank you for joining us this morning and for sharing a little bit about your book.

Carolyn: It was fun! Thank you very much! Thank you!

Sarah: You are very, very welcome!

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Sarah: If you’ve got any feedback or questions for Jane or Sarah or topics to suggest, we’d love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected]. That’s S-B for Smart Bitch, J for Jane, and podcast for podcast at gmail dot com. We’d love to hear from you if you have ideas or questions you want to ask us. We might answer them in a future podcast or answer them on our websites, but either way, give us an email; we’ll definitely read it.

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