Monday, October 17, 2005
AAR is having a great discussion concerning the segregation of romances.
This is some awesome news! Not just Blair writing, but his remake of The Great Gatsby(which I love) and his roles in Tyler Perry's upcoming movie and the film adaption of Tananarive Due’s novel, My Soul to Keep.
What's so funny to me is how Ashlee Simpson's forthcoming album has helped me with my writing. After a few days of experiencing a deluge of ideas for plotting, I froze up today and everytime I looked at a sheet of paper I experienced some fatigue. But I couldn't allow this particular plot sketch to be deserted because it's been haunting me for some time. So anyways, my job was playing Ashlee's new album over the radio and since it was thankfully slow, I was able to listen to the entire thing. I loved her debut album Autobiography and have been eagerly anticipating this one, but after the first couple songs, the remainder of the album began to feel a bit trite--instead of being as great and varied as Autobiography, I.Am.Me. began to fall into the trap of "rockish ballad about a guy". And I realized that it wasn't Ashlee's fault, it was her producer. The producer and co-producer helped make Ashlee's first album really good, but based on I.Am.Me. it appears that they can only take Ashlee so far in terms of her sound and staying on top by keeping her music fresh because they have only experienced one type of sound throughout their entire producing career--which is why I really liked Gwen Stefani's album; it kept her quirky and personal lyrics, but by using producers No Doubt wouldn't have used, it made her sound new.
This surprisingly made me see that my plotting wasn't working because the romance genre can only take me so far in terms of creating characters and plotting. It's not that I'm turning my back upon the genre, but that I need to look at all my sources of influence to help me plot a romance. For the past three years or so I've only read romances(with semi-frequent forays into paranormal fiction and historical fiction) so in terms of my writing, I'd cut myself off by restricting my circle of influence--my writing began to seem trite and hackneyed because I had made myself only familiar with what I'd been reading instead of seeing how authors in other genres plotted or made a character more 3-D or how they dug themselves out of bad plotholes and then applying it to my romances to see what worked and what didn't work. What a place for a revalation huh? I can now understand why some romance authors have discontinued to read romances. Not only did I find myself plotting myself into a hole b/c of the bare bones formula to romance, I also found it difficult to create 3-D characters because there is a strong strain of character archtypes found within the genre that are assumed to be set in stone rules for creating acceptable romanceland characters instead of being the skeleton to fleshing out your own characters.
In concern to this plot bone, I started looking at it from a different angle: squinting, stepping back, moving forward and circling around it and I realized that my characters and their situations were wrong, which was why they couldn't seem to meet to even have the romance they were supposed to be having!
i can be. anything.
17.10.05
