It’s funny how life works, isn’t it? I mean, I was reading a book for review and one of the characters was learning to snowshoe. Oddly, just that morning, I’d made my first attempt at snowshoeing. Purely coincidental, but I could totally agree with the character’s equating his ability to stay upright down with success. My advice? When your husband yells, “Hey, look at this!”, turn slowly and deliberately.
Helpful, that’s me.
Then there are other coincidences. I believe I’ve mentioned my RomanceWiki project about a million times, right? It’s going great — and as I build up the past, I learn more about the present. I mean, you can’t really grasp just how popular the doctor-nurse romance was until you scan the list of Harlequin titles released in the late fifties to late sixties. Seriously, those books were all the rage.
So I’m at this party, and I’m talking to a woman who I’ve been told is about to publish her first novel, a mystery. A mutual friend has been trying to get us together for years because we have a lot in common (weird because both of us have been attending said mutual friend’s annual holiday party for about a dozen years).
It turns out that her book was neither her first novel nor a mystery. Way back in the dark ages, she wrote romances for Candlelight Ecstasy. Needless to say, I was fascinated, for the above-noted reasons. We’re talking early eighties and the dawn of sexy, sexy in romance novels. It turns out that there was a lot of throwing stuff at the walls and seeing what stuck when it came to sexy in those days. She recounted the frustrations of editors who “suggested” that authors write on spec, experienced authors who should have been writing to contract. There would be revisions and revisions and then a big “no” because, well, in those days, there was a thing as too sexy.
She also told me the story of the time she was given a week to write a Regency. Now, this was a person who knew less than nothing about the Regency period. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the sub-genre knows that a week isn’t even scratching the surface. Still, the book got written, thanks to the powerful resources of the New York Public Library and good bit that coincidence I was talking about. Maybe it was another writer with the same impossible deadline, maybe it was a magic elf, but the exact book she needed to get started just happened to be sitting on a nearby table.
She got out of the romance game due to frustration as much as anything.
Then she was laughing and telling me that somewhere in her files, she has old tip sheets — you know the helpful guidelines prepared by romance publishers to ensure that submissions are entirely appropriate for the lines? Yes, I can see all of the editors and former editors out there laughing. She wanted to know if I maybe wanted to make copies for the Wiki. Of course I did. It’s all part of the history.
At the next party (’tis the season and all that), she handed over a manila envelope filled with the tip sheets she could locate. I’ve OCR’d them and will be posting them on the Wiki soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a few favorite lines…just to remind us of where we’ve been in this industry — and the end of the year is a great time to relive the past. I’ve copied the lines as printed on the tip sheets (including typos), because, well, as you can see in the example from a love scene, it’s all about sentence structure.
The only pain permitted is the sweet pain of fulfilled (or unfulfilled) desire (Silhouette Books)
Her lips parted at the moist insistence and mastery of his sensuous mouth, and with a stifled gasp of disbelief she felt his tongue enter and probe. Instinctively she began to use her own tongue to expel it, an action that proved to be her undoing… [later] He slid his hand beneath her evening blouse and as, after unclipping her bra, he took one firm small breast into his hand she truly believed her virginity must surely be nearing its end… (Silhouette Books, example of a love scene)
Her figure is always perfectly in proportion, usually petite, and slight of build. He is usually dark, though we have seen some great Nordic types, and recently, we have been introduced to a stunning redhead. [The Other Woman is] usually mean, over-sophisticated, well groomed. She NEVER gets our hero. [Other Characters are] stock, easily recognized, cameos. (Silhouette Books, Character guidelines, excerpts)
She must be likeable, though she may also have some personal problems…Examples: selfishness, jealousy, sibling rivlery, difficulties with parents, stubborness, imagined figure problems, fear of hand ling money. (Richard Gallen Books)
If the heroine is interested in some other men, there should be no more than two. (Richard Gallen Books)
Rape scenes are not recommended. If the author is compelled to do so, only one will be permitted… Should a rape occur, it must move the story forward. Preferably, the heroine is rescued in the nick of time, or it happens to another female character. (Richard Gallen Books)
Ah, yes, it’s always preferable when the rape happens to someone else. We certainly don’t want our heroines suffering emotional trauma. And making your secondary characters stock is always a good idea. It’s not like they’re important to the book. As for the stunning redhead, hello?, I want to read this book. I’m still going through my closet, worried that my day blouses have been mingling with the evening blouses, and, yes, I’ve stopped kissing my husband. Turns out that tongue kissing will be my undoing.
And here I thought it would be petty larceny and gossip.
In these tip sheets, I see the genesis of today’s romance cliches. As I read the guidelines of yesterday, I see story elements that won’t die, right down to the ne’er-do-well brother who needs rescuing. There are suggestions of tortured descriptions to avoid the actual use of the word “penis”. Reminders (in the 1980s) that jobs are good, but women really need a husband and kids to fulfill them. Other women in the hero’s life must always be bad. Heroines should always be able to dress with flair, even on a dime. Certain professions are good, others are taboo.
Which reminds me. The husband read through these guidelines as he was scanning them. He was particularly intrigued by the possible jobs for heroes and heroines, and he came up with the perfect romance:
No-kill matador meets PETA activist in a vegetarian restaurant – hilarity ensues.
You know, we really have come a long way, baby.
Related posts:
Those guidelines sound fascinating, Kassia. Will you be taking copies of current guidelines too, so that they’ll also be preserved for posterity? I’ve seen a lot of current Harlequin/Mills & Boon guidelines online, but perhaps that means that in the future, when the guidelines change, people won’t have kept copies, and they’ll be lost.
Wow – great information. It explains a lot about how people’s perceptions of the genre have grown over the years – and why so many non-romance readers and writers have this stilted, stereotypical notion of what “romance” means. Can’t entirely blame them, I guess!
I think I read some of those romances. Glad that times have changed.
Those are the romances my mother read by the case lot — or the granddaughters of the ones she read, she was buying them for 25-cents each in the ’60s. Sampling her collection kept me away from the entire romance genre for decades.
Good to know the writers knew to follow the rules, though.
And even better that the rules have changed.
Thanks for sharing that hilarious historical information. It shows just how far we’ve come…and maybe how far we have yet to go. In the American Title Contest’s last round, judge Hilary Ross commented that she didn’t like my heroine because she didn’t believe women should participate in combat. Is that just an updated form of prejudice? Are there certain restrictions people impose on women in every age–the restrictions just change with the times? I find the concept intriguing.
Oh, fascinating. I love discussions about the genre’s history.
The physical standards for women haven’t changed very much. The heroine can be average height or tall but she’s still usually slim or delicately built. The word delicate is used frequently when describing romance heroines. There’s almost always got to be a great physical contrast between the heroine and the hero. That even applies to skin tone. The heroine is generally paler than the hero. I rarely find stories with tall, strongly built heroines, for instance. I guess they’re not feminine enough. I’m not saying that there are no romance heroines that don’t fit those old physical guidelines but they’re still in the minority in my opinion. The romance definitions of femininity and masculinity are very limited and somewhat old-fashioned.
ROFLOL! I so want to read your husband’s book. *GRIN*
Her figure is always perfectly in proportion, usually petite, and slight of build.
Has this really changed? Because goodness knows we can’t have a heroine with a zaftig figure otherwise the hero will be emasculated by all that flesh.
Is it weird that one of my “problems” with romance has always been these tiny, delicate heroines? I just can’t identify (not when I’m nearly six feet tall and not delicate unless compared to a professional football player). Give me a tall, strong, athletic girl who can “bring home the bacon and fry it up in the pan” any day! I’m so glad we’re seeming more of these types in Romancelandia.
Welll. . .I’ve written short and slender, tall and slender, short and zaftig, and tall and zaftig heroines. Oh, and a few totally average gals, too.
When the voices speak, I don’t ask them what size they wear.
And, thank goodness, neither does my editor!
Kassia, long time, no see!
I very much enjoyed the title and the topic of your blog post, and am madly searching for the Harlequin guidelines I filed away in the ’80s, which I recall including gems about stock secondary characters and slim, attractive heroines. If I find it, I’ll zap you a copy…
Tina — cool! We’ll have coffee (you know, when I actually have time to do more than wave at coffee) and share. I’ll chide about you the getting a website and not telling me later. I have some semblance of class, you know.
Laura — yes, I do want to try to capture the guidelines throughout history. I think that while they’ve certainly become less rigid over the years, it’s a valuable barometer of where the genre is. If anyone has guidelines to share, contact me — or add them to the Wiki under the right line. Or both. I’m easy.
I have to say that I loved reading these guidelines even as I was laughing. I came from the tradition of female relatives handing over shopping bags filled with old Harlequins — classic Romance from the 60s forward and Presents — and even then I thought the women were horribly old-fashioned. Didn’t stop me from reading them, of course, but, you know, I was wondering what planet those impossibly perfect women came from (this was not an idle question as I grew up on Venus, one street down from Mercury, with Uranus and Jupiter bracketing my block).
I don’t know why the feminine ideal of small, delicate, whatever has become enshrined in romance. Part of me wants to blame male publishers because I have a hard time imagining any woman buying into that fantasy, without shaking her head and saying, “Yeah right.” Even reading the guidelines, I felt they were some sort of male ideal. But the perfect heroine has become the ultimate romance cliche, so it would be hard for me to say that it came from the male perception of what a romance should be.
But yeah, as I read them, I could also see how so many current day perceptions of the genre developed. I mean, the guidelines out-and-out state that secondary characters should be stock. It goes against every writing rule in the world, but there you have it. It’s also interesting to me that these particular guidelines were issued at a point when the genre was changing so dramatically — in a way, they were old-fashioned even then.
I’m told the heroine should be somewhat of an ideal, so that the reader fantasizes about being that woman. I disagree to an extent. I want to read about someone whom I can imagine being–that is, if she’s too perfect in any facet of her life, I can’t buy it. I wouldn’t find myself in her perfect size 6’s, when I started wearing size 10 shoes in 7th grade. I want to admire her or empathize, but I don’t want her to be perfect! How freaking boring.
Grace, you hit it on the head for me. Perfection is incredibly boring. I like reading about all types. I wouldn’t balk at reading about overweight, or plain heroines or heroes. When I read romances it’s the emotional attachment that draws me, not the beauty of the characters. I would love to see more variety but maybe I’m in the minority on this. I’m not one to fantasize that I’m the heroine so maybe that’s why I don’t need perfection.