Parv, Valerie (1993): The Art of Romance Writing: How To Create, Write and Sell your Contemporary Romance Novel. Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, St. Leonards, Australia.
This is a how to book which out lines the basic steps for writing a novel with specific focus on romance novels specifically. Valerie Parv goes through the steps for character creation and how she goes about getting her ideas. She also focuses on the fact that the romance IS the story, rather than a story with a love interest in it. This distinction is grammatically subtle, but has profound implications on the structure on of the novel and your freedom of how the love story plays out. Romance novels are fantasy and therefore are always happy endings, do not explore untraditional sexual norms and definitely always 99% from the (third party) perspective of the heroine. The author also talks about sending proposals to publishers, which is the most useful (and shortest) part of the book.
A neat observation was that Parv wrote the book in the exact same format that she insists one writes a romance. This is interesting, because this is a how-to book, not a romance. But she has exactly ten chapters, despite the fact that the tenth chapter is not warranted, and she ends the book is a punchy sentence.
Reading this book gave me a good general idea of what a romance should entail, and made me realize that romance is prolly not what i want to write, since i can't be sarcastic and ironic. yep that's a deal breaker right there. but perhaps, i might get inspired and give it a shot, after all. At the end of the day, I want to write something and romance might be a good place to start as the plot is not complicated and other parts of the story don't need closure; only the heroine and hero must be together in the end. This really simplifies things because there is a set framework to work within.
Although the book was a helpful introduction into novel writing and into the dynamics of romance writing, I feel my self left unsatisfied. More knowledge is needed.
As a finishing comment, this book made me reflect about one of my favorite books Life of Pie by Yann Martel. This is a fiction novel whose message is that truth can be stranger than fiction, or that stories are more real than actual events, or that you could never really tell if a story is real or not based solely on the events in the story. At any rate, Parv points out that dialogue has to sound real in novels, but that dialogue in novels isn't how people actually talk. Specifically, in order to make fiction believable you must alter reality. I think this is prolly the most appealing aspect of fiction literature to me.
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