How visiting another country helps me write historical romance

I’ve been back from America for two weeks now.

Every year I go across the pond for a month. This time I went via Dublin, and I was away from home for six weeks. Coming home is always nice (tea!) but it does help me to get out of my rut, to experience a different way of life.

So how does that help me write my historical romances?

It’s the getting-out-of-the-mindset thing. Living in the States, especially when I visit friends, watching American TV (like ours, some good, some bad), forces me to look again at the way I live and the things I take for granted. My expectations, in short.

So what would it be like to live in a time when transport was so much more difficult, relatively expensive and time-consuming? When it could take a week to travel from London to your home in Yorkshire? And how about no light at the flick of a switch? Not being able to switch on the TV and find out what is going on in the world?

True, these things were available to me in the US, but other things weren’t. Even something as simple as a meat pie (they have something called a pot pie, but meat pies and pasties are nowhere to be found).

The shift I have to make helps me to understand the practicalities of living in the past. The way my assumptions are shaken encourages me to think again.

When I sit down to write, there are too many things I take for granted. I try to learn the way people acted and thought every day, and sometimes I’ll write an ordinary diary entry for my main characters, before they get caught up in the story. I do my best to make my heroes and heroines people of their time, and not 21^st century people, with the same attitudes and thoughts. And yet, we still have a lot in common. Emotions haven’t changed, although the causes might have done. People still feel love, hate, jealousy and anger. I can contact my characters through that, and try to connect them to the readers.

The people of the past didn’t think of themselves as “quaint,” they just lived their lives the best they could. They were different, only because they had different assumptions and expectations, but underneath, they were just the same as us.

Covers and Cover Models

You’ll have to excuse me, but I’m going to “lower the tone” a bit now and talk about male cover models.  The topic is fresh in my mind, as I’ve just attended my first ever RT Booklovers Convention in Kansas City, Missouri – a very interesting experience!

In the 1980s when I first started buying historical romantic fiction, most of the ones I liked came from the US – Johanna Lindsey, Kathleen Woodiwiss, Shirlee Busbee, Catherine Coulter to name but a few.  They all had covers with a couple in a clinch, the woman usually looking adoringly up at a bare-chested man (more often than not various versions of the model Fabio or his clones) and I became used to that.  It didn’t bother me as I would have bought the books no matter what was on the outside, but I thought it was a trend which would quickly die out and be replaced with something else.

Not so – the half-naked men covers are still alive and well, particularly in the US where they seem to be the norm for a lot of romance genres.  They just seem to be a bit edgier these days.

This was made clear to me at the RT Convention.  The first things I saw upon arrival were lift doors with such book covers on them and key cards with a picture of a man’s naked torso.  And a lot of the covers of books for sale during the convention (and in the goody bags) still featured men in various states of undress.  Whether they were Regency rakes, cowboys or shapeshifters, none of them seemed to own a jacket, let alone a shirt!

Key Cards

In the UK, I hear a lot of disparaging remarks about these types of cover, but are they really so bad?  Ok, they’re a bit clichéd, but then so are the “headless” Tudor women of the historical novels over here.  They fulfil a function, which is to tell the reader what kind of book is inside the covers and I, for one, don’t mind having a bit of “eye candy” as a bonus.  Granted, most of them are not my type and I prefer to use my own imagination to picture what the hero looks like.  But very occasionally you come across one who really makes you sit up and take notice – that can be nice :-)

The RT Convention is known for its cover model pageants and for always having such men present.  This year was no exception (apart from the fact that they didn’t have a pageant and most of them were a lot older than I had thought!) and they seemed like a nice bunch.  Friendly, smiling, always willing to chat or have their photo taken, and happy to take part in anything the organisers asked of them.  They took their duties seriously and were trying their best to make everyone enjoy the convention.  They even dressed up for the Freaky Friday party and danced the night away with everyone else.  And these days they seem to be very savvy – a couple of them had tables at a romance fair, offering their photos for sale to authors who are self-publishing.  So not just the male equivalent of bimbos but businessmen as well!

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So – love them or loathe them?  I’d love your take on these covers, because it seems to me they are here to stay. 

Christina x

www.christinacourtenay.com