SHE WROTE: Keeping It Real

Bob is teaching his seminar today and most if not all of the students are romance writers. This should be good. Bambi meets Godzilla times eight. Bob being Bambi. He’s trying really hard to understand the genre but he keeps snagging on some things that just wouldn’t happen in thrillers. No, not the living-after-sex part. It’s the gaze thing.

You know the stuff I mean: The heroine sees the hero for the first time (or vice versa) and the action stops while she takes inventory, right down to the cotton content of the clothing (no, I’m not kidding). Or she looks into his eyes and sees despair, longing, a lifetime of doubt, and a sale on leaf blowers at Sears. (I have not read any of Bob’s students’ work so none of this is in reference to any particular manuscript I’ve just read a lot of manuscripts.) Bob said, “Is this kind of stuff all right in romance writing?” I said, “No, but it’s like you describing the Gatling Gun, writers do it and get away with it because it fits the reader’s expectations.”

The first time I saw Bob’s first sniper scene (the one that began “In the darkness, there is death”), the sniper fired a gun. But it took two paragraphs between the time he pulled the trigger and the time the cat died (it’s okay, that’s gone) because Bob described where the gun was made, how the gun was made, what the sniper was doing in slow-mo, what was happening inside the gun (how the gases were doing something), how the bullet was made, what happened when the gases expanded or contracted or whatever, how it spiraled out of the barrel . . .

The thing is, it was really well-written. It was fascinating. It was absolutely accurate. And I cut that sucker so fast, Bob didn’t have time to bleed, although he screamed a lot, because before it killed the cat, it killed real time on the page. I will believe that time slowed down for the sniper because that happens in moments of high stress, say in the middle of an automobile accident, it really does feel as though it plays out in slow mo. I will not believe that he thought about the gases in the gun or traced its path.

The same thing happens in romance writing. Yes, it does happen that you look across a room and see a person of desire and you stop and stare. But you do not take inventory (“crisp white cotton shirt, Levi’s 501s, curly black chest hair, Phi Beta Kappa key in back pocket . . .”) nor do you stare long enough to have a paragraph’s worth of thoughts, not unless you’re hidden behind a palm. There’s a time limit to looking at people in our culture just as there’s a personal space limit. You can glance at people, you can even look longer if there’s something that catches your eye, you can even smile if they look up and see you watching, but then you look away. Because if you look longer, it becomes what psychologists call “the copulatory gaze” and it’s a deliberate come-on. And if you look longer after that, you’re just flat out staring and it’s rude and in some cases frightening, especially if a man is staring at a woman.

So when you go back and look as those paragraphs of descriptive gazing, they have to play in real time. That is, they can only take as long to read as the act would take if it were really happening. And that’s about two sentences. It’s probably not a paragraph and it’s never more than a paragraph because then you’re into stalking/staring mode.

Okay, but suppose your point of view (POV) character is behind that palm? Can she or he stare longer then? I don’t know, how would you feel if you turned around and caught somebody hiding behind a palm staring at you? Somebody you didn’t know? Somebody who was clearly determining the cotton content of your shirt and gauging despair and leaf blowers in your eyes? You can play that scene for fear or you can play it for laughs but you cannot play it as a moment of sincere romantic attraction because it's about the gaze, it's about objectifying the person being stared at, it's about physical attraction (which I'm all for) and not about character (except the character of the gazer). If your POV character stops and stares for paragrapahs, it’s pretty much either stalking or slapstick.

So I told Bob that while description and internal monologue were important and therefore more prevalent in romance, no, paragraphs of staring and description are not good because of the whole social/real time thing.

But here’s the kicker: Stuff like that gets published all the time. Beyond that, stuff with infodump, like Bob’s sniper scene, gets published all the time, and that’s another violation of real time, those places where the author drops out of the story to say:

“Susan had always liked her uncle Bill because he’d taken the family to the lake on the third Saturday of the month every August so when he dropped dead choking on an asparagus spear, she was saddened, but her sadness turned to delight when he left her the eight-room cabin at the lake, although she had to battle forty other relatives to take possession and ended up filing restraining orders against two of them. In the ten years that had passed since then . . .”

Writers go on for paragraph after paragraph with that stuff and it’s not story and it’s not in real time. It’s authors dumping back story into the narrative, information they want readers to know so the rest of the story can be understood. It’s called infodump and it’s awful, right up there with headhopping as a way to screw up your pacing and throw the reader out of the Now of the story. And it’s lazy writing because you can get all of that stuff in the real time of the story if you give somebody a reason to want to it. Most of the time though, the reader doesn’t need it. Most of the time you can just cut it and go on. Which is what happened to the gun description in the sniper scene.

So what does the hero or heroine see when she or he looks across that room some enchanted evening? Significant detail that can actually be seen across the room (Well cut suit? Yes. Color of eyes? No.) that characterizes the object of the gaze. A well-cut suit in a room of surfers will draw the eye, a well-cut suit in a room of CEOs won’t. But jeans in a room of CEOs will, and it tells you about the CEO wearing them. But it also has to be significant detail that characterizes the person doing the gazing. If the CEO is wearing that white shirt and jeans and carrying a rucksack instead of a brief case, he’s going to be noticeable, but what does the gazer notice? That the shirt is wrinkled, i.e. he needs somebody to take care of him, somebody like the gazer who probably carries a travel iron because SHE'D never be caught wrinkled? That the rucksack is leather which means he’s informal but likes quality and so does the gazer (or that the rucksack is leather which means he supports the killing of cows for travel equipment and the gazer is a PETA member)? That the rucksack is Gucci which means the whole jeans thing is a power play because he loves money and labels and so does the gazer because that's what she noticed or that he loves money and the gazer has had it with labels because that's what she noticed and it made her mad? That his ass looks great in those jeans which means the gazer is all about sex and is considering it with him even though he's a perfect stranger? Writers forget that while they’re describing a character at length, they’re also DESCRIBING THE POV CHARACTER. So those long descriptions that are meant to make the hero desirable in the reader’s mind often just make the heroine shallow and sleazy because they’re all about appearance. Plus she’s staring again.

I could go for days about this and I see by my word count that I actually have gone on for days, that the real time on this sucker is not so much a few passing remarks as it is a lecture, so I’m going to just say, “Remember whose head you’re in because that's whose character you're building, remember where this is taking place, remember to keep it in real time.”

Just keep it real.