To Read or Not to Read Romantasy

It's a phenomenon I will be forever outside of, but that doesn't mean I can't understand it.

I recently read in the New York Times that Rebecca Yaros’s Onyx Storm, the third novel in a series that started with Fourth Wing, is “the fastest selling adult novel in 20 years,” having moved 2.7 million copies in its first week of release.

Onyx Storm falls under the umbrella of the absolute hottest genre of the moment, “romantasy,” which as that portmanteau implies is a combination of romance and fantasy. Given that these are the two most popular genres of fiction independently, it shouldn’t surprise us that when joined together they have formed a book sales Voltron.

I see this news and I wonder if I should read one of the popular romantasy books. I am a books columnist for a major newspaper and primarily write about books and reading here. Out of a sense of professional obligation, shouldn’t I see what’s doing?

In hindsight I should’ve been able to predict the rise of romantasy because I first encountered it (without knowing that’s what it was) in the work of my college-level introductory fiction writing students circa 2012-2013.

When I had matriculated through creative writing courses (“workshops”) as an undergraduate outright genre works were somewhere between frowned upon and forbidden. We were expected to adhere to the general outlines of realist narrative as exemplified by the so-called minimalists (Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, et al.). This was fine with me. I loved that stuff and was happy to try to emulate it. One of the reasons we were encouraged to follow the example of these writers is that the tools of commentary and analysis with which we’d been armed - the language of the “craft” of fiction (point of view, setting, character, etc…) - was easily deployed to talk about these stories. The theory was that sifting through the component parts might help us understand the impact of the whole, and concurrently, if the impact of the whole was lacking, perhaps the source of that lack could be found in one of the flawed component parts.

Using this method we could have a nice, sensible discussion for 30 or 40 minutes.

This is a great way to become a more attentive and acute reader. I treasure my ability to get under the hood of a piece of writing and see how the component parts are interacting to create the whole. Over time, though, I came to see this method as very very limited when it came to helping writers improve their storytelling. As the receiver of feedback rooted in these craft elements, I never could understand how to translate what readers had said to something I could use to revise what was already on the page. In fact, all through college and graduate school I never once revised a piece that I’d workshopped in a class because I experienced the class discussion as a kind of autopsy or vivisection. If the the piece was once alive, it was now dead. If it was always lifeless, I had no idea how to put the table full of guts back together so the work could be reanimated.

For years, I thought the flaw was in me. The workshop was the dominant pedagogical mode for teaching creative writing, and I dutifully replicated the mostly unhelpful experiences I’d had for others. Eventually, though, once I started managing to write some successful stories that found publishing outlets and some audience, I clued in to the obvious. When we write, we are not deploying craft elements like a chef with a recipe, we are working from a less rational space and those craft elements we can identify in hindsight are purely subconscious at the time of creation. Trying to make the subconscious conscious through a workshop discussion might’ve been a good way to help me understand the underlying mechanics, but it wasn’t going to help me create something worth reading.

By the time this proto-romantasy work showed up in my class, I’d changed my teaching approach. While we would still cover craft elements as part of the course, when it came time to talk about student work in a collective setting, we were going to focus on different criteria like “energy,” “consistency,” and “intrigue.” I wanted to talk about the elements that get us invested in a story, where they were present in a submitted piece and where they were perhaps missing. The goal was to arm the writer with a strong sense of how readers had responded to their story without tipping over into the autopsy zone. Ideally students left the workshop energized, rather than defeated.

(In fact, I abandoned the term “workshop” - a place where broken things go to be fixed - for “laboratory” - a place for wild experimentation.)

I had no restrictions on genre under the theory that students would learn more about writing fiction if they could write in the genres they read and loved. This often left me insufficiently armed as an authority when it came to discussing some of what students would submit for full class laboratory discussions. I could not grasp the underlying tension of a romance between two different types of fairie. I would have to rein in my impulse to tell the student that the audience needed more context against the reality that this student’s audience would instantly understand what it meant.

Many of my students had been passionate participants in online fan fiction forums, a genre I’d held in low esteem until reading a student’s paper years earlier (circa 2009) which provided background and critical context that allowed me to see the sophistication and dynamism of the culture churning away in the form of literally millions of words. The fact that fan fiction derived from very specific subcultures and was expected to adhere to particular precepts didn’t make it any different from any other genre, really. Also, the fact that a lot of fan fiction wasn’t very good didn’t make it different from any other apprentice writing either.

And in the end, wasn’t my undergraduate writing a kind of Ray Carver fan fiction?

(It was.)

My students’ fan fiction experiences were what induced them to want to take a college fiction writing course in the first place, so I was happy to use that energy to stoke their engagement in the work of the class. But my ignorance of the origins of their narratives often left me almost entirely unarmed in terms of providing helpful feedback. Classes occasionally took the form of students educating me on what was at work in a particular story, and what kind of criteria and standards might be appropriate to a piece. I was seasoned enough to be secure in my teaching to not be bothered by trailing behind my students in the discussion - I knew what learning looked like and this was it.

There were aspects of these stories that would drive me absolutely bonkers, total violations of the “rules” of narrative that I’d absorbed over the years, but students would explain to me why sudden leaps of point of view or magical solutions to thorny plot points you couldn’t have predicted no matter how closely you were paying attention were a-ok. I recognized that for the type of fiction some of these students wanted to write, I could not adopt a supervisor/apprentice model, but instead had to fulfill the role of facilitator.

I imagine that my freshman students of 2012-2013 are among the core audience for Rebecca Yarros and Sarah Maas, the titans of romantasy. They would well-understand what these authors are up to, and could articulate why these novels are “good.” I’m hoping also that because they’d had my class they could also articulate the ways these novels would not pass muster against the criteria we apply to “literary” fiction. One of the most important skills I think any reader can have is to deeply understand what genre they’re reading and to cut bait when they realize they’re inside one that’s not for them. My piece on why upmarket fiction doesn't work for me is one of my most-read post ever because I think there’s a lot of readers like me who are happy with outright commercial or literary fiction, but are put off by books that straddle that divide.

In bookstores, I have picked up and started reading books by both Sara Maas and Rebecca Yarros to know that they are not for me, and given that romantasy novels lean towards the doorstop in terms of size, the investment of time to just to understand why something is popular doesn’t seem like a good use of my time.

I don’t want to listen to Benson Boone’s music, either, but if people want to shout along to it in their cars or bedrooms because they feel some kind of connection or catharsis, I will not judge. Not too much, anyway.

Still, I look at these sales and the size of the fandom and can’t help but wonder what I’m missing out on. The enthusiasm my proto-romantasy writing students had for their own work was very winning. It’s a spirit I could’ve used more of when I was a graduate student bound up in worries about whether or not I was making “art.” Quite a few students had written book length manuscripts of fan fiction by the time they were in my class. There might have been a time where I thought it was my duty to introduce them to the “real” stuff, but why meddle with people pursuing lives of meaning to themselves?

Onyx Storm is not for me, and that’s okay.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I shared my two-cents on the announcement that the flagship Simon & Schuster imprint would stop requiring blurbs on their books.

Your hero has been yakking his head off about his new book and related matters on a variety of podcasts. I recorded this one with

Jeff O'Neal

of Book Riot a couple of weeks ago so it could come out this week. Listen to a couple of old writing teachers talk shop in the age of AI.

At Inside Higher Ed I wrote about how my books about writing (More Than Words), and my role as a fellow with the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom (CDAF) may seem different, but are really part of the same desire, to give people the freedom to be themselves in community with others.

Speaking of CDAF, we published our first of what should become a regular feature a news round-up, this one focused on the unfortunate example of higher ed institutions “obeying in advance.”

News Round-Up: Obeying in Advance Edition

At the

The New Dork Review of Books

,

Greg Zimmerman

recently wrote about “8 Really Great Recent Debut Novels You Should Read Now.”

At his newsletter,

Lincoln Michel

lays out his sensible plan for reining in the blurbing economy.

From the laugh so you don’t cry files via

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

and Evan Allgood, “Spines for Senators Is Now Pitchforks for the People.”

Recommendations

1. The Castle of Argol by Julien Gracq
2. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf
3. The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading by Edmund White
4. A Temple of Texts by William Gass
5. The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello

Ben S. - San Mateo, CA

I think there’s a good chance Ben has read Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but if not, this absence must be remedied.

Well, it was an exciting and gratifying release week for More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI. Some folks have been snapping photos of their copies and posting them at BlueSky and every time I see one I’m surprised again to realize people are reading it.

ICYMI, I published two additional newsletters on the books on the books of my blurters that inspired me, and the books that directly inspired some of the ideas in my book. I’d intended to write a third newsletter about other books that are truly the DNA of my thinking about writing and education, but TBH, I ran out of steam, so that will come some other day.

There’s been some very gratifying responses to what I have to say in the book, and I’ll close by sharing this one from

Phil Christman

which is in and of itself a call-to-arms around remembering our own humanity.

Against the Bullshit Machines

Thanks to all of you who read and support this work. I consider myself enormously lucky to be able to spend my Saturday mornings writing these newsletters, and to be able to write books that make their way into the world.

See you next week,

John
The Biblioracle