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Def. of Cheesiness - Somewhere between absurd, cliche, and inconsistent, the main property of cheesy things is that they are unable to be taken seriously.
As a romance writer, do you come up with story ideas they you then decide are too cheesy to ever write? Do you see published romance novels and think "OMG I can't take this premise seriously enough to read it!" or "This interesting premise (or character) is totally ruined by the cheesy way the author developed it (or failed to develop it)."...?
Usually when I go into a bookstore and look at the (historical/SFF) romance novel section, I see the books as being about 50% Unbearably Cheesy, 30% Fun Reads, and 20% Literary. I have been reading romance novels for 4 or 5 years now, so over time I've gotten to the point where I can immediately recognize some of the common formulas, and I'm also running out of books on my local bookstore shelves that look interesting and I haven't read yet.
Somewhere along the line I got into the habit of saying to myself, "Oh here's a book with formula X, I would only be interested in that if it was done in ways A, B, and C." Specifically I like the formula where there is a dark horse hero, who initially seems somewhat like a villain, and he probably takes the heroine captive or at least blackmails her. So now I have this book idea in my head, but I'm not sure whether I can take it seriously enough to be motivated to write it, whether I would be embarrassed to have people know me as the woman who wrote that book, or whether on the other hand it would be easy to write because it's simple, formulaic, and I can't take it too seriously.
Anyway I would like to hear everyone's thoughts on this issue.
As a romance writer, do you come up with story ideas they you then decide are too cheesy to ever write? Do you see published romance novels and think "OMG I can't take this premise seriously enough to read it!" or "This interesting premise (or character) is totally ruined by the cheesy way the author developed it (or failed to develop it)."...?
Usually when I go into a bookstore and look at the (historical/SFF) romance novel section, I see the books as being about 50% Unbearably Cheesy, 30% Fun Reads, and 20% Literary. I have been reading romance novels for 4 or 5 years now, so over time I've gotten to the point where I can immediately recognize some of the common formulas, and I'm also running out of books on my local bookstore shelves that look interesting and I haven't read yet.
Somewhere along the line I got into the habit of saying to myself, "Oh here's a book with formula X, I would only be interested in that if it was done in ways A, B, and C." Specifically I like the formula where there is a dark horse hero, who initially seems somewhat like a villain, and he probably takes the heroine captive or at least blackmails her. So now I have this book idea in my head, but I'm not sure whether I can take it seriously enough to be motivated to write it, whether I would be embarrassed to have people know me as the woman who wrote that book, or whether on the other hand it would be easy to write because it's simple, formulaic, and I can't take it too seriously.
Anyway I would like to hear everyone's thoughts on this issue.
) But I needed to get at this question of cheesiness because it has been bugging me as a writer. I would definitely agree that all genres have cheesy aspects, often some of them are beloved things readers feel nostalgic about or cherish as guilty pleasures. And another thing I've observes, pretty much every novel idea sounds cheesy when reduced to a 1-sentence logling, even when the novel itself isn't at all.