Southern Fried Chicas

Ahhh… l’amour, l’amour.  The language of love.  I’m not talking about French.  I mean the  particular words and phrases that  are used in romance. They’re familiar to every regular romance reading and work as short hand, signs or signals.  Some times they achieve the needed affect.. But sometimes they cause derision.  For every person that finds the terminology emotional, hot and poetic. Someone else finds it ridiculous overwrought purple prose.  

I’m not even going to get into defining the differences. To be honest, as long as it doesn’t get too ridiculous, I  like reading that one protagonist stared at the other and felt like they “could drown in the depth of their eyes.”  Or that the mere shape  and fullness of heroine’s mouth just “begged for a kiss” as far as the hero was concerned, or (how about this old chestnut) the hero “stalked across the floor with panther-like grace.” Hey, works for me! 

Except when it doesn’t.  The  romance lexicon can be too confining, too familiar and clichéd. You begin skimming over the very terms that should be drawing into a scene or a characters emotions.  As a writer, you can try to tweak these phrases to make them fresh bearing in mind that nothing beats ‘clichéd’ except ‘awkward and stilted.’) 

But if you’re a reader—and we all are—there’s nothing for it except to switch up genres.  As a rule I think all writers should switch up genres. Sure, read in the genre you write. It helps you  to absorb, on a subconscious level, the tropes and language that is expected by readers/editors, so that when you sit down and write, it comes out naturally, and furthermore refined by your author voice.  Sometimes, though, all the refining in the world won’t help, if the original material has gone a stale.  Again, time to switch gears.   

For me, I’ve been reading a lot of non-romance lately.  Just yesterday I read a description of a kiss (from the hero’s pov) that I don’t think I would have ever read in romance. The power of the description wasn’t in the description itself, but that the male protagonist had been avoiding the female lead since that kiss, to the point of leaving the city for a few days.  From Steve Amick’s Nothing But A Smile: 

“He even wondered if Sal had confessed to her about the night she got drunk and weepy…and kissed him—or rather, to be more accurate, jammed her mouth against his and breathed until she sobbed.”  If this had been a romance hero, there’d have been the usual stuff about the feel of her full curves, and the trembling sweetness of her lips (sounding a bit familiar?) 

I think the author’s original description says a lot more about the characters and their emotions, than the usual all-senses-loaded, lust-thought you’d find in yer garden variety romance.   This is why it’s imperative to read outside your genre. It makes you think outside of the box, gives you other tools and language to use, or reminds you of stuff you already know, but forgotten.. I’m not saying to ‘copy’ what you read, but for me, with the above example, it underscored that not that every kiss and touch has to be fraught with frisson and passion, and that you can say a lot more with what you don’t state.