Writing is so much fun. If you’re thinking of writing a novel, one of the first things you’ll need to do is pick a genre. I picked romance. Out of all the genres out there, why did I pick romance? Lots of people write romance.
Well, I picked it for several reasons. I think that first, most folks are fighting some kind of battle in their lives. Maybe they’re in a relationship that went bad, and they’ve lost the one they love. Whether it was by divorce, death, or just walking away, it tears a huge hole in someone’s heart. Maybe the problem is health related. Someone has to accept that there are now limitations placed on them. Have you ever dealt with unemployment? How do you feed your children with no paycheck? My romances always have a happy ending which gives us hope that tomorrow things will be better. We can believe that ‘this too shall pass.’
Remember what happened at the end of Gone With the Wind? Scarlett lost Rhett and collapsed in tears, but then she decided to go home to Tara where she can think of a way to get Rhett back. Human beings are designed to hope.
I also think that romances possibly satisfy our craving for justice. In the real world, things don’t always end happily. Children are abused, the missing teen is never found, or our possessions are stolen. In the vast majority of romances you know the bad guys are going to get what’s coming to them. My heroes and heroines sometimes face determined villains, but you can rest easy in the knowledge that the bad guys will never win.
Last, I write romance because I’m a romantic at heart. I just adore a good love story.
Readers, what about you? If you read romance, why did you pick that genre? Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Angela Schroeder
Patricia Kiyono
Elaine Cantrell
Jeff Salter
Joselyn
Tonette Joyce
Four Foxes, One Hound 
A dynamic and popular genre, Elaine! Although I don’t write romance as a primary genre, I include it as a subgenre in my mystery tales. I love the interaction between essential characters and admire authors who use multi-POV to emphasize the inner stories and theme.
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Lots of books and movies do the same thing. The romance as a subgenre adds depth to most books or movies.
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I NEVER expected to write a romance,but one popped into my head when I saw a photo, a romance with a bit of a mystery, but don’t they all have one? The mystery is far secondary to the personal relationships in the story. No one was more surprised than I that it came to me! It took a long time to convince The Husband that romance novels are not all ‘Bodice-rippers’!
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My husband thought the same thing, but after a while I think he got it.
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Excellent points about the popularity of novels within the ever-expanding “romance” category.
For myself, as a career librarian, I saw that females checked out approx. 75% of our public library books. Or, to put it differently: over 75% of the people checking our books were female.
And from book industry studies, it was clear that the broader grouping of “romance” titles comprised approx. 75% of all book sales.
So the math was pretty convincing. When the market expanded and the formerly “stable” groupings (within Romance genre) exploded into sub-genres and blended genres and hybrid genres… I realized there was a much higher probability that my writing interests could find a place within this broadening market.
Fortunately, I stumbled into a publisher who accepted my stories even though they were not very exact fits for the existing sub-genres at that point.
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You can’t argue with those statistics. I like the blending of genres very much. I think it gives depth to the work. I blend genres all the time.
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I started reading romance because it was a way for me to unwind at the end of the day. I started borrowing them by the bagful from my local library. No matter how hectic things were for me, my problems were never as big as the ones in the books. I could commiserate with them and cheer them on as I read, and by the end of the book all their problems were solved. And then I could go to sleep.
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That’s certainly a good reason to read them.
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