Romance endings...

Rachel Udin said:

Is it true that Romance needs happy endings?

Click to expand...

Yes

If you want to sell it to romance readers, yes. If you can slant the book toward women's, contemporary fiction, action/thriller, or sf&f, then you have more of a chance at sliding in a bittersweet or sad ending.

The romance readers want at least Happy For Now. They will get vocal if you deny them.

Genre romance guidelines include the optimistic ending. You can write your sad ending and it can be a wonderful and publishable book... just not as romance.

It cannot be shelved in the romance section without that HFN/HEA.

Just to add to the chorus -- yes, to be shelved in the "romance" section, it must have a happy ending. It's part of the definition of romance, insofar as the label is used for marketing.

A lot of the ancient Greek, Norse, and Old French 'romances' have sad endings, but I suspect that had more to do with a different viewpoint on love and marriage.

Marriage was an alliance arranged for the good of families and nations, and neither bride nor groom often had much say in it. Romantic Love esp. outside of marriage was a calamity that spread social upheaval. Courtly Love could only redeem itself because the lovers were not supposed to consummate anything, just spout poetry at each other from afar. (Not that Eleanor of Aquitaine stopped at just poetry.)

Following the same idea, lesbians and homosexuals in 20th Century fiction often died or suffered in other ways, to prove the suspect nature of their loves.

There's reams of this stuff in sociology and history publications, linking the rise of individuality with the approval of romantic love, in an ever broadening pattern. Arranged marriages give way to marriages for love, miscegenation laws are struck down to allow mixed-race couples, straight marriages and same-sex marriages co-exist in civilized societies.

The modern romance genre has grown through all these stages. Whatever else has changed, the happy ending, or happy-for-now, *must* be there.

Yep, by definition a romance novel ends in happily ever after. We want to see the hero and heroine end up together. As a romance novel addict, I wouldn't be opposed to reading a book in which the ending wasn't them ending up together, as long as I felt the choice to take different roads was best for both of them and made them ultimately happy. But no, you won't get your book on a romance shelf in a book story.