#is the absolute fucking DEATH of sincerity or vulnerability or honesty about sex or relationships

[ballsballsbowls]

Slate recently published a relatively short interview with Holly Black and I just...

I cannot stress enough, here where you can see it, that I don't have strong feelings about Holly Black specifically. I've read just enough of one of her books to be pretty confident that it's not for me and I doubt I will read anything else. Holly Black just happens to be the person they interviewed and the person who said these things specifically. I have no quarrel with her.

What really drew my attention was this, which unfortunately I suspect is hardly unique to her.

Q: In The Prisoner’s Throne, there’s a scene early on that I thought was going to go in the way many romantasy books would go these days, but it didn’t. A lot of readers are here for the smut, but some authors, like yourself, will go the “behind closed doors” route, where the sex isn’t explicit or it’s assumed to have happened off the page. Are you at all interested in exploring the smuttier aspect of fantasy? 

A: I think that I certainly could push myself a bit more out of my comfort zone, but I don’t know how much I would want to explore it. Mostly because, as a reader, I find long sex scenes to be paced strangely—you’re moving through everything else at a certain pace, and then the pace just drops off, like, OK, now we’re spending, like, two chapters like this. I know there are people who enjoy it, obviously. I recognize that readers wish I could make the scenes a little longer. I had a reader ask me, with the Folk of the Air series, if my editor had made me cut down the scenes, and I said, “No, actually, my editor told me to expand the scene.” And she said, “Well, why didn’t you?” Friend, I did.

I also had somebody talk to me recently about how, in a certain kind of book, what you have is levels of physical intimacy being symbolic of the characters achieving a greater amount of emotional intimacy. That’s just not something I’ve ever thought of as being equivalent. I’ve been like, Oh, I have to get them closer here, but I never really thought that people often are using physical intimacy as a stand-in or as a way to communicate emotional intimacy. Building up into a greater and greater level of physical intimacy is doing work that I’m just not thinking about doing in that way.

~

Paragraph 1 of her answer is interesting in its own way. I'd always wondered why people feel compelled to write 2-paragraph sex scenes because they are my least favorite way to convey that information. I'd much rather a fully closed door OR a 2-page treatment with no in between, but you can't generalize her answer to authors generally.

But Paragraph 2 was actually kind of illuminating and, I think, is actually a notion that can be spun out and applied to other authors rather than being specific to her. I like category romance a lot (among other genres, the difference is that I never shut up about romance because nobody is spending a lot of energy being dismissive and shitty about fantasy or sci-fi as a genre anymore), but I have struggled with basically every new romance-esque genre out there that should be appealing! It's romance AND something else! But I didn't vibe with any of the rom-coms I read, which I forgave because 'rom-com' isn't a real genre, it's basically just a marketing thing.

But I also didn't like any why chooses/RH; I didn't like any 'romantasy' (despite liking both romance AND fantasy!) —even Paladin's Grace was pretty much a spite finish for me and that's the work of an immensely skilled tradpub author—not to mention, I have no idea whether she considers that series 'romantasy' or not (I doubt it). Hell, I'd dump shifter romance/urban fantasy romance in here too and it's been around longer than any of these upstart new romance-adjacent sub-genres.

But I think Paragraph 2 of Holly's answer maybe gets to some of it. She's either saying that she doesn't understand a correlation between sex and emotional intimacy in general (which is all well and good but maybe romance-adjacent author is not the career for you?)

Or she's saying that she doesn't understand a correlation between sex and emotional intimacy in romance writing, which was a lightbulb moment for me. At the risk of perhaps overgeneralizing:

A lot of these authors are writing romance-adjacent books because they think romance is a cool thing to have in a book but they don't understand why category romance does what it does, and what it signifies, and why it works, so they just...throw everything out because they are Too Cool For Category Romance because it's Grandma Porn or whatever, so they write something that's marketed as a romance that doesn't comprehend how to write or discuss emotional intimacy at all, and typically can't juggle it under the weight of the rest of the plot even if they do.

So you end up with between 2 and 7 leads with the emotional depth and chemistry of smooshing two barbies together to kiss because they don't have a clue what chemistry between leads should look like because they're Too Cool For Category Romance. And a lot of them that I have read have had sex scenes, so they're not afraid of smut, but they can't integrate emotional vulnerability or chemistry into it at all.

I think this is where her complaint about the 'pacing' of sex scenes comes in. This newer, ultra-lean writing style where everything is first person present and paced oddly and every dialogue is sparse and lacking dialogue tags and every two-page spread is mostly white space is here to stay, unfortunately, and in a world where you're trying to reduce word count and have an additional entire plot besides the romance, who has space for intimacy or whimsy or anything but maybe 2 crude indicators that they trust each other?