En Passant: Writing for love… and money

LAST WEEK I received an invitation to the Romance Writers Organisation of South Africa’s conference in September. Don’t ask me why. The women in my life, were they to convene a conference of their own, to formulate a collective opinion as to my deserving of the label “Romantic”, would probably conclude that I am as romantic as whooping cough.

I was told that the Romance Writers conference is to be held at the Devon Valley Hotel just outside of Stellenbosch, which piqued my interest because I have actually stayed there in the past. Well over a quarter of a century ago I did a wine course in the Cape, and our base was this hotel, and as far as I can remember it was a very comfortable hotel, set in beautiful surroundings. Yep, I suppose it could be considered a romantic venue, ideal for a romance writers’ conference.

Not that I remember much about it. We were wine tasting nearly all day, about a dozen of us hard-baked bottlestore managers from all over South Africa, and it was enough if we could remember our room numbers at the end of the day.

I do remember that I had to share a room with a bottlestore manager from Durban, a tall, skinny, red-haired man with a beard like mutant fynbos and a complexion like the moon’s surface but redder, who had a clingy wife back in Durban with whom he had long telephone conversations late at night and very, very early in our babalaas-suffering mornings. Romantic it was not.

Anyway, I notice that the Romance Writers Organisation of South Africa, has adopted as its acronym ROSA, whereas it should obviously be RWOSA, but I presume that they figured that ROSA was closer to “rose”, you know, red roses, the flower of love, Valentine’s Day, roses are red, violets are blue, blah, blah, blah. So they made Romancewriters one word, thus demonstrating that as far as they are concerned sentimental expediency takes precedence over the basic rules of acronym construction.

But I know nothing about romance writing, and I’m not even sure what defines writing, or a story, or a book, as a romance. This is despite the fact that I grew up in a household with three sisters, and I do vaguely remember seeing Mills & Boon paperbacks lying around the house, but I was never tempted to pick one up and read it.

The impression I got was that it was basically a question of boy meets girl, some impediment delaying the ultimate exchange of body fluids (quite often an invalid father who Doris has to look after), and once that impediment was resolved the two would marry, have 27 kids and live happily ever after.

I got the impression that a lot of these romances took place in a hospital environment, where the hero was inevitably a brilliant but anguished surgeon (often with hands described as being like those of a concert pianist), and never an alcoholic quack who smoked while in theatre, dropping stompies into kidney dishes and ash among his sutures, who was prone to bouts of hideously pungent flatulence. In fact, I don’t imagine that in any of these romance novels anyone farts.

And if they didn’t take place in a hospital, then quite often the stories had an Australian background, but not an Australian city. No, it had to be somewhere in the Outback, a big ranch with a lonely (but stinking rich and devastatingly handsome) widower, and Doris would arrive on some pretext, I dunno, maybe she’s a brilliant vet who’s escaping a messy affair back in London, and they fall in love but there’s a snag in that Doris’s aging father back in England suddenly keels over and there’s a unseemly contesting of the will from an estranged son, Doris’s brother, who’s a dagga smoking, coke-sniffing pot head living in New York, so she has to sort him out before she can go back to the Australian Outback and marry Bruce and have 27 children.

That raises another point. The names of the characters in these romance novels. As I understand it, and I don’t, they are never normal names as we understand the word normal. I am advised that popular names for women in these romance novels are Alpin, Alwyn, Arian, Augusta, Autumn, Chanel, Emmaline, Maxima, Regan, Shiloh or Thalia, and Abby, Abigail, Ella, Elle, Grace, Lexi, Mackenzie, Leila or Savannah. No “Doris” I notice, and in Savannah’s case, I cannot understand why you’d name your child after vegetation. I mean, you wouldn’t call your child Bosveld, would you?

Men in these novels are not called Koos, Frikkie or something like Mathew, Mark, Luke or John. Nope popular names for these heroes are Baron, Blake, Cruz, Devin, Finn, Leif, Miles, Murphy, Nigel, Quinn, Rafe, Rogan, Saber, Trace, Treadwell, Tristan, Tucker and Ty.

But let me not mock the genre entirely. ROSA’s invitation mentions that romance writing was worth $1.08 billion, that’s US dollars, in 2013. It would be quite nice to get a slice of that pie, simply by writing a romance novel. It can’t be that hard, surely? OK, here goes…

“Once upon a time there was a girl called Doris…”