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Excerpt from “Writing Bestselling Fiction: Conveying Emotion by Jane Porter and Megan Crane”

“Jennifer Crusie writes in an essay called “Emotionally Speaking: Romance Fiction in the Twenty-First Century,” which you can read on her website: “All you have to do is convince the modern, jaded, ironic reader that your heroine and hero have not only fallen in love and surmounted all the barriers in their path, but that their love is unconditional and will last throughout time. You must, in short, give your reader not only good narrative, but also great emotional satisfaction.”

But we live in a culture that’s very uneasy with emotion.

We don’t like displays or scenes. We don’t like the screaming child in the grocery aisle—especially if he’s ours. We certainly don’t like the dramatic teenager, wailing out her pain into her cell phone for all the world to hear—we’re certain we never acted that way. We don’t like those weird, too-mushy couples on Facebook who treat their status updates like foreplay. We don’t like that group one table over who are laughing way too loud. We don’t like it when our leaders show emotion—we find it suspicious, we think they’re faking for attention, or we thereafter think they’re weak. We get snarky on the internet and tear each other down, and some of us, when we were younger, hid our romance novels in the closet while featuring our Great Literary Tomes on the bookshelf in the living room, lest anyone suspect us of being schmaltzy and silly. We’re embarrassed to cry in public, no matter the provocation. We’re told to lock it up, to tamp it down, to keep our dirty laundry private. Emotion isn’t safe. It’s dangerous and unwieldy and no one knows quite what to do with it.

Except in romance novels. In romance novels, emotion is everything.

End of excerpt