Fictional Vision

When I first started writing romance, I read many books by popular romance authors, trying to understand what made them popular. What was it about their books that appealed to readers? There were some whose success I simply didn’t understand. To me, their writing seemed average, their characters trite and boring, their plots predictable. It was only years later, after I’d written several books myself, that I finally understood what these authors had going for them.

It was their vision of the world. Not the real one, but the one they created in their books.

The key to their success was creating a fictional reality that appealed to their readers. The things about their books that I found clichéd and boring, their readers found safe and reassuring. Their fans wanted to read stories where the good characters were almost perfect, with only tiny flaws to provide a minimum of internal conflict, where the bad guys or villains were irredeemably evil and ended up being defeated and punished by the good characters at the end of the book. Some people call such stereotyped books junk food for the brain, but really what they are is comfort food. Romance readers seek out happily-ever-afters in books exactly because they don’t happen that often in real life.

Romance readers tend to be on the high end of desiring an idealized world. But in all genre fiction there is an element of idealization, of a world that is better—more satisfying, more meaningful—than the real one. In real life, the police don’t always solve the crime, but in mystery novels they almost always do. In thrillers, the main characters prevail against the bad guys. If it’s a high-stakes thriller, they may even manage to save the world as well. In real life, the fate of the world is still up for debate.

Sci-fi and fantasy novels often have much darker visions of reality, but they still give us a vision of a world that is coherent and logical. The writer creates rules for their imaginary world and then plays within those rules. In real life, we often don’t know what the rules are.

Rules are a big part of genre fiction. That’s because these books are written to a formula—and that’s okay. That’s what makes them satisfying. A story is a narrative told to make sense of events and of the world. It imposes order on chaos and makes us feel there is some logic and reason to what’s happening.

Of course, I still believe the best writers push the envelope and inject some realism into their stories to make them more interesting and exciting. It is no surprise Game of Thrones is the hottest genre fiction story around right now. Obviously, George R.R. Martin is a brilliant storyteller. But much of his appeal is that he breaks rules and doesn’t always follow the standard epic fantasy formula. His fictional vision has enough edginess and darkness to seem relevant to our current reality.

That is the fine line all genre fiction writers must tread. To make our stories and our characters seem real, and yet not too real. We can’t write what is, or it’s too depressing and unsettling. But we can write what might be. If we do it well, readers will buy into our vision—and buy our books.