Sister Scribe - the Official Site of Chicki Brown

I always laugh when people ask why I write stories containing romantic elements, because in my early submission days I was repeatedly told most of my stories are NOT romances. The moment some people find out there is any hint of a male/female relationship included in a story, they look down their noses. Some have also asked why I don't write about "real," "important" subjects. This question has been answered by many before me, so I'll just present their wonderful answers here.

"Their hatred borders on the irrational.  They think they are too discriminating and literary for such drivel.  A brush of the lips, a longing glance, and BAM!  They slam the book shut.  They will eagerly devour pages and pages of spattered blood and glistening entrails, but a man and a woman falling in love?  Horrors!"

- Tess Gerritsen (speaking of certain mystery readers)

“But the trickiest relationships to write are the romantic ones because our society is so cynical about true love: true love is what evaporates in the morning, true love is a fairy tale, true love is a lie writers tell readers. But there are people who have stayed together for sixty years and are destroyed when their partners die, people who have fought for their relationships through the tough times because they couldn’t imagine life without each other, people who have truly, madly, deeply loved over long years. Unconditional love is not a fairy tale, it’s what you have to put on the page to convince your reader that the relationship is serious and lasting.”

–    Jennifer Crusie at http://www.crusiemayer.com/workshop/she-wrote-relationships/jenny/

"They say great themes make great novels ... but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women..."

- author John O'Hara

"Mind you, these are comments coming from people who actually admit that they haven’t read a romance since they tried Barbara Cartland as teenagers.  That’s like saying, 'Oh, I ate chop suey once, when I was ten.  I haven’t tried it since, because I know that Chinese food is awful.  And of course I’m an authority on the subject.'

Or: 'I read a Hardy Boys mystery when I was twelve, and it was awful.  So I’ll never read another mystery because I know what they’re like.'

As Tabitha King once said, 'That’s a really powerful position to argue from! Ignorance!' "

- Tess Gerritsen

"So...is romance really about fantasy, or is its true purpose to showcase an ideal? ... But I always have the ideal at the forefront of my thought when I write -- that everyone deserves to be loved, that the need to love and be loved is a huge part of who we are as human beings, that it's not 'magic,' but something very real, requiring constant, if joyous, nurturing in order to survive."

- Karen Templeton, author

"There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction." 

- Theodore Roosevelt

"The world I create in writing compensates for what the real world does not give me."

- Gloria Anzaldua, author

"Write what makes you happy ... You cannot control who buys or doesn't buy it, who loves or doesn't love it. You can control what you feel when you write, and that should be joy of knowing that you are doing exactly what you are meant to do at the moment you are meant to do it. Life's just too short to chase anything else."

- Lani Diane Rich, author

"Romance is genre fiction, and literary snobs will always malign genre fiction. We may succeed in changing a few minds, but there will always be a camp of narrow-minded people who will continue to sneer and demean no matter how eloquent our arguments or passionate our defense."

-   Wendy Crutcher, author

"I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries."

- Stephen King