ROMANCE NOVELS….Jim Henley suspects that writing a cheap romance novel is harder than it looks:
I don’t like romance novels. Not my thing. But when non-writers baldly assert that “I could do better than that,” or muse that they should knock off a romance or two to make some easy money, I’m always skeptical. Firstly, the sheer endurance required to finish writing even a bad novel is rare and impressive. Anyone who actually gets that 50,000th or 100,000th word down on the page has my respect, even if every one of those words suck. Secondly, I suspect that, almost without exception, to produce a romance that romance fans will like, you have to have a certain affection for the genre yourself – to sustain your interest and theirs.
Why, I do believe he’s right. How do I know? Because I myself tried writing one a couple of decades ago. I finished it too, a fine 70,000 word tale of romance and intrigue on the Amazon.
And it sucked. The only good thing about it was that it didn’t take very long to write.
But even so, it sucked.
