Katiba said:
However, it's style that's different, not craft - these authors still start their books with action, weave backstory into the story and avoid info dumps, go sparingly on the adverbs etc. For the most part, even series books in YA follow the rules of craft. So the question remains: why is romance different?
I that any possibilities have to take into account the original poster's actual question - why is romance different? - even if it's just to say that the poster is wrong, and romance isn't different, and here are the reasons why I think that.
Reph's question related to the fact that Harlequin books are massively popular and so the readers didn't seem to mind the craft flaws she saw in the samples she picked up. But I'll get back to Reph's question later. Let's start with your premise in this post.
All YA's start with great usage of craft? They start with action, weave backstory in small bites, avoid the information dump? Even the bigwig authors?
Okay, I have some bigwig YA's sitting on my shelf. Let's take a peek at the openings of some of my favorites:
Maniac Magee was not born in a dump. He was born in a house, a pretty ordinary house, right across the river from here, in Bridgeport. And he had regular parents, a mother and a father.
But not for long.
One day his partens left him with a sitter and took the P&W high-speed trolley into the city. On the way back home, they were on board when the P&W had its famous crash, when the motorman was drunk and took the high trestle over the Schuykill River at sixty miles an hour, and the whole kaboodle took a swan dive into the water.
And just like that, Maniac was an orphan. He was three years old.
Okay, so that looks like a big start with backstory to me. Granted, this isn't a brand new book.
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli (a fabulous book, btw!) has a 1990 copyright.
Okay, so let's look at something a little more recent. Let's look at something with a 2000 copyright date, another fantastic story by a very talented writer.
Holes by Louis Sachar:
There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it it just a dry, flat wasteland.
There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.
During the summer the daytime temperature hovers around ninety-five degrees in the shade -- if you can find any shade. There's not much shade in a big dry lake.
The only trees are two old oaks on the eastern edfe of the "lake." A hammock is stretched between the two trees, and a log cabin stands behind that.
The campers are forbidden to lie in the hammock. It belongs to the Warden. The warden owns the shade.
Out on the lake, rattlesnakes and scorpions find shade under rocks and in the holes dug by the campers.
Where's the action there? I don't see any action. That's all setting, and setting backstory. Look at all the "to be" verbs - that's another thing that many writers get all upset about. "Try to limit your passive verbs" writers are often told, with good reason. (Please note that passive verbs are NOT the same thing as passive sentence construction, and many times people confuse the two.) There's no character POV here. It's a narrator. There's no showing, only TELLING.
So, does that example meet "the standards" for "perfect craft?" If you read that without knowing it's a great book, without knowing anything else about the story, would it grab you? How would you judge the writer based on that beginning? If given that piece to critique, what would you tell the writer? <G> What would you have told Jerry Spinelli about the Maniac McGee opening if you were critting it?
What's my point? My point is that I don't know how anyone can say that one genre has worse craft than any other genre. There are romance novels (unfortunately some of them written by some "bigiwgs" who've been around a long time and sell many, many copies) that make me just want to throw the damn book at a wall. That make me cringe with their slaughter of craft. On the other hand, there are others (including some by "bigwigs" who sell millions and millions of copies) that sweep me away in the characters and story, who use craft very well so that I never stumble in my reading of their tale.
Because there is such a high demand for romance novels does NOT "excuse" poor craft. Trust me when I tell you that it's not easy to sell a romance novel to a big publisher. They get ridiculous numbers of submissions each year to fill the slots they have. And don't forget that the competition for those slots is first among their current stable of authors, then the unpubs.
Sometimes crap happens. Sometimes writers produce books under very tight deadlines and huge amounts of personal problems in their lives. So not every book may be the very best they can produce - it may simply be the best they can produce at that time, under those pressures. Maybe their mother died. Maybe their husband walked out on them. Maybe they're trying their best to deal with issues with their kid while writing this book.
Do you know what the turnaround time can be for substantial story revisions? Two weeks. That's the average turnaround time. And I'm not talking for writers to tweak - I'm talking about when the editor has some substantial issues with the plot and wants a number of plot areas addressed - things that require scraping big chunks of the story and rewriting from scratch. Sometimes that happens and the author also has a dayjob that she has to attend to during the day, and then try to cram that rewriting in at night and get it back to her editor on time.
That's the reality of this business.
You learn to roll with the punches and produce the best you can at the moment. I'm very concerned with my quality over quantity. But quantity is what helps you build a name, helps you pay the bills. (Although I dare say that quantity without quality isn't going to matter for very long.
)
Reph wanted to know if readers care as much as we do. She said:
Harlequin's books are popular, so apparently the readers don't mind. What gives? What are the standards, really?
The readers don't know the tiny details that we do as writers. Craft matters to them only to the point that anything that makes them stumble in the reading, or anything that pulls from the fictional reality (<G>) is NOT a good thing. Every reader brings their own POV to the story. Look at it this way -- I love CSI. I watch it almost every week. But someone who actually works in law enforcement, or a criminal lab might HATE the show because of all the "flaws" that they spot in the storylines and lab work. That's how it is with us writers as readers. We've got too much information. It makes us really picky readers. We can't shut off the internal editor long enough to just enjoy. I find myself doing it even with movies. "Who wrote this and who let them get away with writing this? That's crap dialogue." <G>
Picking things apart becomes second nature for us. Which sometimes makes it darn hard to just sit back and enjoy something.
Susan G. - sorry to be so long-winded this morning.
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