life: profound thoughts.
So lately I've been wanting to write some profound LJ posts. I've got a range of topics I want to do essays on, from politics to racefail. And all I've got to say, as I sit here catching up on Leverage off the DVR, has nothing to do with any of it.
My profound thoughts are thus:
I'm reading my preferred genre a lot lately, NYT Best Seller sci-fi with similar plot concepts as the type of story I've got running around in my head. Partly "checking out the competition" but mostly because, duh, I like this stuff. These particular books I chose either because they were personally recommended or because the story sounded awesome and they had blurbs recommending them signed by recognizable names. I figured if Orson Scott-Card is gonna say it's the best thing since sliced bread, it should be really good. Turns out, he must just know the author personally.
So despite that implied quality, -and pardon me while I sound like a femi-natzi because I swear I'm not - I'm coming to the conclusion that men cannot write women and romance. At least not in that genre. Two of the four books I've read the last 6 months, both written by men, both had women as central characters, and in both, they shoe-horned in a "romance" between the male/female leads to disastrous results. I found myself getting annoyed at the entire book because of the handling of a single element between two characters. It totally takes me out of the story to read that when two characters who don't fit together, get together. If they fit, pls 2 b showing it instead if assuring the reader "trust me, I know them, they fit."
Now, when I say shoe-horned, I mean they took a flat wedge and crammed it into a space that it was ten sizes too large to fit into, and then shoved the two characters together inside of the remaining space. It reads as though the author didn't know how to write the build up, but they try anyway, and instead end up with a female character who just flips a switch in her head, randomly has sex with a guy she hated up until that point, and suddenly decides she loves him after all. It's a tv trope in literary action. If there's going to be a romance angle, make it worth it. Make a relationship if you can't make a romance. Don't make a random excuse to have sex. Or, if you want the random excuse to have sex, bring in a character who happens to be a hooker or a jiggalo and for gods sakes, make your characters be the sort to chase random sex in the first place. Then it at least makes sense.
When independent characters suddenly become co-dependent on someone they just met in the context of the story, on top of the characters then "acting weird" for the rest of the story (Ie: wait, what's their motivation toward even caring about the plot again?) I have to sit through - in one case - a four page long sex scene that is. Just. Wrong. The characters are suddenly a couple and their lives suddenly depend on date-night-sex, but oh-by-the-way there's this actual storyline going on that they have to keep trudging through because I, the reader, insists on it, thank-you-very-much.
In another case, the sex scene is two lines, which is great, not displaying the bad alliteration of the writer, but he's since had the character literally acting like she's had a hangover for two days of the story because she can't get over this two lines of awesome sex. The author is either hammering the point too hard, or he's leading up to some big "SURPRISE! SHE'S PREGNANT!" later, and I haven't figured out which it is yet. In either case... really? I know you're supposed to do gradual build up, bread crumb it here and there, rather than actually jump out and yell surprise with the noise makers blaring. But mentioning a headache and stomach ache every other paragraph spanning two days of time is kind of ruining the surprise...
To contrast those two, the book written by a female author and her husband in a tag-team. The two leads were thrown together by the plot from the first few chapters. You saw it coming from a mile away. The characters saw it coming and fought it tooth and nail, quite literally, as that WAS the crux of the plot. And, while the writing was on par with most fan-fic-readers-turned-published-novels (because that is an entire class of published authors now - not trashing them, just observing) it was STILL better handled than either of the other two. The characters stayed in-character and the story progressed how it felt it should, no jarring square-peg/round-hole moments.
I still had to roll my eyes through two badly written sex scenes - seriously, Harlequins are better than any of the sex scenes turned out by the sci-fi genre. However, the characters reactions didn't seem a contrivance, they felt natural to what had been established to the characters prior to that point. And that's the kicker.
If a reader is supposed to feel that they know the characters they're reading about, then perhaps they shouldn't be left wondering what they missed, even in the ever confusing and complicated L-O-V-E department. Yes, "love at first sight" exists for some people and all that, and that's a fun theme to play with as a writer, but if that's the theme, don't muck it up by juggling half a dozen others and wrecking them all by dropping the hard one.
The only male author I've read in the genre who balanced all of it wonderfully well was Neil Gaiman in 'Neverwhere' and you'll notice that there's not much emphasis on romance in that. Ol' Richard may ogle the ladies, and there's this weird dynamic between he and Door that *could* have gone somewhere, but the only love-confusion he faces is the one that's more or less built in to the character with the role of his fiancé'. But there is sex! Woot! It's all handled beautifully.
So why is it exactly that the rest of the sci-fi genre can't find the middle ground between kick-ass hero/ine and sex-kitten? Or, I suppose, alternately, why is it their publishers don't make them stick to a male-perspective when they botch up the female's?
Just a thought to us aspiring wannabe writers an' all that. Statistically I'm sure my four most-recently sampled novels on the subject aren't an accurate representation. But, damn, is it ever frustrating that two out of four I find personally annoying instead of enjoyable, and the third I can't figure out if it's a fan fiction or a wanna-be teen-geared Harlequin. I know it's fiction, but it's not supposed to insult my intelligence about it, dangit.