Growing up, after buying coney dogs and flurries from the independent ice cream shop up the road from where we lived and across the street from where we went to middle school, my sister and I would bike over to Kay’s Books, a small, dingy little place filled with love for words, and we would spend the rest of our allowance on comics, Archie for her and Spiderman for myself. The comics were located right up front, and just off to the side was the Romance section. I liked to laugh at the cheesy covers featuring illustrations of that guy from the butter commercials and the equally cheesy titles. Who read this stuff? As I began to write myself, I thought, who wrote this stuff? Don’t people want to write about big ideas, about great philosophical conflict?
This is where The Sexorcist comes in. When PandaRobots told me all she had were trashy romance novels, I told her to submit it anyways because I wanted the Crasstalk Book Club to be more than Ibsen and O’Neill and Murakami and Vonnegut. I wanted it to be a place where we could over-think everything we read and apply meaning to where there was none because I felt that that’s the kind of community we are: intellectual, open and adventurous. I don’t mean to open old wounds, but the reaction I was hoping for was not the reaction I got and so Panda and I decided to take charge and create an intellectual discussion for what was deemed as a non-intellectual book. Everyone loves a love story (which is why everyone loves Annie Hall), but toss in some sex scenes and suddenly everyone thinks that the work has lost all intellectual value. Why is that?
Vivi Andrews lives in Alaska and agreed to a phone interview, but due to the extreme time difference, my complete confusion over whether that would be considered long distance by Verizon Wireless and the type of questions we wanted to ask, we thought it best to interview her by email. She has published four novels in the Karmic Consultants series (The Sexorcist is book three) with a fifth due out in July and an additional four in the Serengeti Shifters series. Ms. Andrews was the recipient of the 2009 Romance Writers of America® Golden Heart Award for Best Single Contemporary Romance for her novel Easy Money and has lived in nine cities across two continents (and one tropical island).
I’d like to take a moment to thank PandaRobots for helping me craft the questions for this interview.
Crasstalk: The Popular Romance genre is less about big ideas (no one waits for Godot or expects salvation from Hickey) and more about storytelling and making sure the reader becomes emotionally invested in the characters, something in which you excel. Could you tell us a bit about your process? Do you storyboard, create character sketches etc? Or are you a writer who likes to just see where the story takes them?
Vivi Andrews: I like to have a plan but still leave room for exploration. Generally, I work with two files open on my laptop – the manuscript and an outline where I keep track of goals and turning points for each character, what needs to be revealed in each scene to sustain the plot, and the basic arc of the book. With that structure to refer to, I’m able to let each scene evolve naturally, focusing on flow and fun without worrying that I’ll write myself into a corner.
CT: Your use of humor throughout the novel is delightful! How important is a sense of humor when writing in this genre?
VA: Thank you! In the romance genre as a whole, there is quite a variety in the tone of the novels and some can be very dark. I tend to prefer reading romance with a lighter feel (books by Jennifer Crusie, Stephanie Rowe and Julia Quinn are excellent examples) and I think my natural tendency to approach life with tongue in cheek comes through in my writing style.
Also, writing in what is possibly the most vilified fiction genre, it is helpful to keep your sense of humor close at hand when people can be eager to condemn your books for their naked-manflesh covers.
CT: Do you ever feel pressured to create “the perfect happy ending” because of the genre you write in? I feel that it was obvious that Brittany and Luis were probably going to get married before she caught the bridal bouquet, but I wonder if you ended it the way you did because that’s what’s expected of a romance novel. On a similar note, can a successful romance novel end in tragedy? Is it acceptable for the girl not to get her dream guy?
VA: A book in which the girl doesn’t get the guy isn’t a romance novel. It’s as simple as that. You can call it a love story or romantic fiction, but as far as the current definitions of the popular romance genre – and what is expected by its readers – you absolutely must have an emotionally satisfying ending with either a happily-ever-after or happy-for-now resolution. Nicholas Sparks doesn’t write romance.
I don’t feel pressured to write the perfect happy ending (and not all my books end in the promise of matrimony), but I do begin each book with the understanding that I have an unwritten contract with my reader to provide them with an emotionally satisfying read. I want to leave my reader with warm fuzzies. A sense of optimism and hope about the future for those two characters. It’s part of what I signed up for when I decided I wanted to write romance.
The fact that romance novels will always have a happy ending makes them inherently comforting to many readers. They are the hospital waiting room books. No matter how screwed up, unfair and beyond our control real life may be, for those three hundred pages everything is going to work out.
I don’t think the necessity of a happy ending is limiting in romance any more than the necessity of finding the killer is limiting in a whodunit. It’s just part of the book.
CT: The Sexorcist features an interracial couple, as does The Naked Detective. While one in seven marriages in the U.S. are interracial or inter-ethnic, there seems to be relatively few interracial couples in romance novels. Do you see this becoming more common in novels as a new generation of writers emerges? What kind of response have you gotten (from publishers and fans) to your interracial romances.
VA: I definitely think interracial couples are becoming more common in romance (and I’m glad to see it), but it is a slow process. The historical romance subgenre is trapped by the strictures of their time periods (so we’re unlikely to see a sudden surge of Regency-era Latina heroines marrying those Anglo-Saxon earls), but in a paranormal romance we have more freedom and many authors are taking advantage of that. (Nalini Singh, Marjorie M. Liu, and Marta Acosta, to name a few.) In many paranormal novels, racial tension is represented symbolically in the way various supernatural species (vampires, shapeshifters, etc.) are marginalized or discriminated against for their otherness, while an acceptance of interracial couples is simultaneously encouraged through the ethnicity of the protagonists.
I’m fortunate that my publisher would never try to “whitewash” my books and I haven’t heard from readers, pro or con, about the interethnic couples in my books. I think that lack of reaction can be attributed to how accepted diversity is in paranormal romance. A trend I hope to see spreading over the coming years.
CT: A recurring theme involves a young woman achieving personal autonomy through a sexual relationship with a much more experienced man. What are your thoughts on the inexperienced female/playboy male trope? Is its popularity surprising in the post-sexual revolution world?
VA: It is a very popular trope, but I don’t find that popularity surprising in the slightest. Romance readers are predominantly women and the books are meant to appeal to female tastes – and female fantasies. Whether they are attorneys reading Kindles on the subway or soccer moms reading romance in the carpool lane, modern women juggle a variety of responsibilities and all have stresses attached to keeping their lives running smoothly. The inexperienced female/playboy male trope gives those competent, hard-working women the chance to explore the fantasy that someone else is responsible for her sexual satisfaction – and that person is extremely sexually capable. The man takes control and the woman gets to relax and enjoy. For a woman who is always striving to maintain control in her professional or personal life, that idea can be particularly seductive even if it isn’t terribly PC in a post-feminist world. I don’t see the trope losing popularity any time soon.
CT: Romance heroes are usually described as an “alpha male.” A lot of care is taken to establish Rodriguez as “masculine” and “primal.” Would you describe all your male leads as alphas? Do you think the definition of an alpha male is changing as gender roles become more ambiguous? Do today’s alpha males need to know how to cook dinner and clean a house and can a beta male ever be a valid hero?
VA: My focus is all on making the hero attractive to the heroine and through that appealing to the reader. I always work to portray my heroes as confident, capable and strong-willed – all descriptors that could apply to an alpha, but I certainly don’t set out to write all my heroes as alphas. (Though my books with the most overtly alpha heroes are far and away the best sellers, so it is clearly a popular trait to romance readers.)
Beta males can make excellent heroes, but they are a rarity. As far as cooking and cleaning, I don’t think the modern alpha males are required to possess any particular domestic skills. There isn’t a single right or wrong way to approach gender roles in romance. The genre is broad and filled with variety.
CT: Jane Austen’s romance novels often poked fun at class tension. Two hundred years later, socioeconomic divides are still often used as a device to create conflict in modern day romance novels, including The Sexorcist. Why do you think the theme is still prevalent today? Are writers continuing in the Victorian romance tradition or is it because dating outside your class is still generally taboo, whereas interracial and homosexual relationships have slowly gained acceptance?
VA: I think the theme is still prevalent today because it is a source of conflict that can stem from the characters’ viewpoints themselves, in addition to the viewpoints of the outside world. A social-hierarchy conflict can be a kind of awakening, an internal conflict that resolves as the developing relationship erodes preconceived notions about who should be dating whom.
In an interracial or homosexual relationship, a large portion of the conflict may be about gaining acceptance from external sources, but class tension conflicts often center around how the individual characters view one another in addition to the larger social view.
I also think that these conflicts are safe to a certain degree. In America where we’ve been taught we are what we make of ourselves, the class structure is less rigid and readers are more likely to embrace characters who flaunt socioeconomic divisions. It will cause a comfortable level of conflict, which the characters overcome and we all live happily ever after in the end.
CT: Is romance dead? Have we as a society grown disillusioned with the inability to gain in real life the perfection achieved in literature and film?
VA: I’m an optimist, so I have to say that romance is alive and well. (It helps that I am surrounded by examples of excellent relationships in my personal life.) I don’t think we can blame the too-perfect-to-be-real relationships of film and literature for divorce rates any more than we can blame rock music and video games for violence. I prefer to give people credit for knowing the difference between fiction and reality. Also, most romance relationships aren’t perfect. If they were, there would be no conflict in the books.
CT: Last question. Are we going to learn more about Prometheus in the next book? Some would argue that romance novels are devoid of intellectual content, but it was great that you named the man who (I would like to think) stole the power to summon demons and gave it to bored housewives after the Titan who stole fire from Zeus, allowing Man to become self-sufficient.
VA: Yes, Prometheus will be making appearances in future Karmic Consultants books. In fact, he’s slated to be the hero of the last book in the series. I’ve always been a bit of a mythology nerd and the name seemed fitting for such a catalyst character. He plays a similar role in the previous book, The Ghost Exterminator, indirectly causing the haunting with his bring-magic-to-the-masses approach to the occult. Always fun to have a troublemaker in the cast of characters.
I’d like to thank all the Crasstalk readers who stepped outside their comfort zones to read The Sexorcist. I hope it sparks a lively discussion.
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For anyone who still has not read The Sexorcist, it is available on Amazon
for $4.24 for Kindle. You can also find it in the Popular Romance section of your local bookstore. It’s sexy, funny and a pretty quick read. I highly recommend it.
The Sexorcist will be discussed on Sunday May 29 and will be hosted by badhatharry. Again, a special thank you to PandaRobots for helping me craft the interview and to Vivi Andrews for being a total gem.
