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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25931
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25931
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Are you sure that that criticism came from someone who actually likes romance novels? I ask because "flat, uninteresting and no one would care if they lived or died, death would be better because they wouldn't bore me so much" seems to describe every character in a genre romance novel to anyone who is not a reader of romance novels.

The whole definition of genre, it seems to me, is that is accepts without question or establishment, a set of propositions about character, setting, and plot. In essence that it guarantees the reader certain things and in exchange asks the reader to take certain things as read so that it can get on with delivering the goods with messing about. The result is that it provides a very quick and easy fix to those addicted to its particular formula, and that it bores the rest of the reading public to tears.

So if you were showing formula romance to someone who is not an addict of formula romance, "flat, uninteresting and no one would care if they lived or died, death would be better because they wouldn't bore me so much" is pretty much exactly the response you should expect, just as it would be with formula fantasy, for instance, to someone who is not an addict of the genre.

For a mainstream character, on the other hand, the rule seems pretty simple. This is a real person who falls in love. We fall in love because we are incomplete, lonely, afraid, and desperately in need of physical and emotional support. Lovers are not (as the erotic fantasy would have us) two strong brilliant independent people coming together for mutual erotic satisfaction. We need someone because we are desperately lonely and sad when we are alone. Love is loneliness responding to loneliness. It is the particular quality of a character's loneliness that evokes our sympathy and our hope, and which engage us in their matrimonial prospects.

Original score: 5