I was in a taxi this week with a fellow romance writer, on the way to the annual Romance Writers Conference in Glenelg, Adelaide. The taxi driver realised we were both writers, so he kindly offered some tips on writing love stories.

The wisdom of crowds

On the journey to the hotel, the taxi driver badgered me for my best romantic line. He was clearly disappointed by my weak response, so he stepped in and provided his own:

When a lady asks if she looks good in a particular dress, say ‘yes, but you would look better naked.’

He generously said that we were welcome to use the line in any of our novels, past, present or future.

I told him that ‘indeed I would be using it’, then immediately told him that, of course, I was lying, and I would never write those words, in that order, in any work of fiction that I ever produced.

Leaving aside the issue of whether the taxi driver expressed a line of rare romantic glory (I really don’t think he did – surely it can be universally acknowledged that the line is terrible), it did make me reflect on the difference between romance and romantic.

Romance isn’t always romantic

Because I write romance novels (well I’ve written one) taxi-guy immediately assumed that I was romantic, and would be able to conjure up stellar romantic lines. That’s a misunderstanding – I’m not very romantic at all, but I do love romance. What gives?

For me, romance is about relationships. It’s about two people giving it a go. It’s about emotional engagement and emotional failure. It’s about making a terrible mess of things, but not giving up, and trying as many times as necessary to win the heart of that one unique person. It’s about coming together, failing apart and coming back together again. It’s about human beings in all their amazing fallible glory.

My characters don’t have typically romantic dinners, and when they try, they mess up and go to a dodgy pub full of criminals. My characters don’t give the perfect box of chocolates and sophisticated bottles of wine, when they try, the chocolates are too cheap and the wine is non-alcoholic and vile. My characters don’t issue forth with elegant romantic declarations, and when they try, they are completely misunderstood and everything falls apart.

But they keep going, and in the end the they come together – as they should, and as they must. They are made for each other, and it just took them 300 pages to realise that.

But the taxi driver might be right, and ‘take that dress off and get naked for me’ could be the most romantic line in English literature thus far. I’m not very romantic so I wouldn’t know.

Photo by Lexi Anderson on Unsplash