Writing: Pushing The Boundaries Of The Romance Genre

0:00Haili Blassingame:This message comes from the podcast Pod Save America. Every week, John Lovett, Tommy Vitor, Jon Favreau, and Dan Pfeiffer dive deep into political news with guests from across the progressive spectrum. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube.

0:23Haili Blassingame:It's Juneteenth, and for the holiday, we're taking a pause from our usual news roundup. But don't worry, we'll be back with the latest headlines next week. Today, we wanted to talk about romance writing and love stories, because novels with love and sex at the center are among the best-selling books year after year. And two novels out this summer are pushing the boundaries of the genre as we know them. One of those novels, They All Fall in Love at the End, was written by 1A's own producer, Haley Blassingame, and we're so proud of her. In it, a young Black writer in D.C. explores non-monogamy while her city and the world deal with the fallout of the 2024 election.

0:59Haili Blassingame:And in The Missed Connection by Tia Williams, a casting agent tries to find the handsome stranger who sat next to her on a flight while navigating past trauma and a shaky work-life balance. I'm Jen White, and you're listening to the 1A Podcast. After a short break, we sit down with Haley and Tia and talk about challenging the conventions of romance as a genre and bringing us well beyond fairytale endings. Stay with us.

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3:45Haili Blassingame:exist. Now let's meet our authors. Tia Williams is the best-selling author of Seven Days in June and a love song for Ricky Wilde. Her latest is called The Missed Connection, and it's out now. Tia, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. And also with us is Haley Blassingame. Her debut novel is They All Fall in Love at the End. It's also available now, and you may recognize her name from the credits on this show. She's a producer here on 1A. Haley, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. So I want to start by talking about genre. Haley, your book is about this 24-year-old in D.C.

4:25Haili Blassingame:Her name is Kat St. Claire. She's a writer. She's dealing with a lot of family stuff and relationship stuff and stuff that we will get into. But the romance isn't really the main story throughout. So where do you see your book falling into the romance genre, if at all? Yeah, so I'll start by defining what romance is, at least how I define it. So the A plot, meaning the main storyline, must be the romantic story, the love story. And it must have a happily ever after, usually meaning the characters get together, or a happy for now. And so just like any genre, it's a contract between the writer and the reader that their expectations on some level are going to be met.

5:07Haili Blassingame:So no, mine is not a romance, but it is still a love story. And to me, love stories transcend genre. And I think even though this isn't a romance, I don't identify as a romance writer. I still very much see myself as writing in conversation with romance and alongside romance. But your book has often been cast as a romance. Yeah. How do you feel about that? This is honestly like a, so when it's difficult to categorize a book when, so it's really literary fiction, which is like not like horror or mystery. It's like a category of writing. It's more nebulous. Like you can have a literary mystery or literary horror.

5:50Haili Blassingame:And so I think that's some of the like murkiness is that because there's a major romance plot, it's just easier to sort of put it under the umbrella. But I would call it a literary fiction book with a major romance plot. Tia, what about for you? How do you define what makes a romance novel a romance novel?

6:09Tia Williams:Well, okay, so this is actually a hotly contested topic on social media because real, you know, diehard romance fans have very, you know, strict rules, genre rules about what constitutes a romance. So like Hayley was saying, a plot has to be the love story and there must be an HEA, which is a happily ever after. So anything within the confines of that is romance, can be classified as romance. And so, yeah, I mean, by definition, those are my novels. There's always a happy ending. And the love story is the central story.

6:56Haili Blassingame:Are you thinking, Tia, very much about genre when you sit down to write? I actually am not thinking at all about genre.

7:04Tia Williams:I'm not thinking at all. I don't have a thought in my head. No, I'm not thinking about genre. I'm not thinking about the audience. I'm not thinking about anything else but the story in front of me and fully inhabiting this world. You know, another big sort of tentpole of the genre is tropes, right? So, you know, what tropes are in your romance novel? Is it friends to lovers? Is it enemies to lovers? Is it second chance romance? Is it forced proximity? Is it fake dating? Is it marriage of convenience? Like all these different tropes. And a lot of younger authors come into romance with their list of tropes and they sort of, you know, pick which ones they think are popular these days or pick their favorites to read.

7:57Tia Williams:And then they write about that. For me, it's a lot easier to not even think about tropes and sort of genre pillars. And it comes to me in the end. Once I read over the book and edit it three million times, it becomes clear to me which tropes I've used. But yeah, I really don't go into writing really thinking that much about the industry at all.

8:30Haili Blassingame:Well, Hayley, I want to talk a bit about the plot line of your book, your protagonist, Kat, of They All Fall in Love at the End. She's a young woman. She's exploring romance with multiple partners. And the book was inspired by an essay you wrote for the New York Times Modern Love column, and it was about non-monogamy. And the essay was titled, My Choice Isn't Marriage or Loneliness. And it garnered a lot of feedback. What kind of response did you get to that piece? LOL. So let's start with the good. Let's start with the good. I did get a lot of positive responses from women of all ages, and that surprised me.

9:09Haili Blassingame:Like a lot of my mom's older married friends, my mom is 65, identified with the piece. I think the piece is about autonomy and the boundary between yourself and your partner and sort of following the thread of your own desires. I think that spoke to them. I got a lot of positive feedback from people in the queer community. I got one woman who emailed me saying thank you so much I used this essay to break up with my boyfriend I gave it to him I was like I hope my name wasn't on that and then I got a lot of pushback mostly from men in in general on the internet and and offline I think they they saw the piece as an affront as you know I was this woman who broke up with my boyfriend over email in a callous way.

9:59Haili Blassingame:I was called evil. I was like, maybe, I don't know. So yeah, it had a very mixed response. And that was when I realized, oh, I pressed a button. I didn't even know I was pressing. Yeah. Tia, in your book, The Misconnection, this is your sixth book. It's about a woman named Sasha. She's a casting agent. She sits next to this man on a flight while on one of her many work trips, and she falls for him, but she also forgets to get his contact information. And this sparks a series of events where Sasha hires a private investigator from her past to find him. Where did the idea for this story come from?

10:38Tia Williams:This idea actually came from a friend of mine who had something similar happen at his job. A co-worker, exactly the same, sat down next to a man on first class on her way to a work trip. fell madly in love, forgot to get his contact information, and she's emailing her work friend about him and doesn't realize that she accidentally cc's the entire company.

11:08Haili Blassingame:Wait, so this happened to someone?

11:09Tia Williams:It happened, yeah.

11:10Haili Blassingame:Oh my gosh.

11:12Tia Williams:And he told me this and he was like, I don't know, I feel like you could do something with this. And so that was sort of the jumping off point for the misconnection, yeah.

11:22Haili Blassingame:Sasha is in this book learning how to trust again and how to love again after going through a really traumatic period in her life. And I don't want to spoil too much, but she had a stalker. It really shook her sense of safety. It shook her sense of self. How were you thinking about that balance between the romantic part of the story and the really heavy part of the story? Because you deal with what it means to live and deal with trauma. Right.

11:53Tia Williams:Yeah, it's interesting. I get that question a lot because all of my novels straddle that line of frothy, sexy, funny, fun, love, and then darker themes in the background. And I do that because that's what life is. That's what real life is. Even while you're falling in love, the horrors persist outside the door. You know what I mean? You know, you take yourself and all of your trauma with you wherever you go. So even if you're looking at, you know, a bright, fizzy rom-com, these are still two people living in the world. And to me, the bright pieces feel even brighter when, you know, when you know the darkness from which these people come from.

12:47Tia Williams:Or, you know, if I include what's really happening in the world or in the news or, you know, and not in a downer way, but just in a this is real life way. These are two real people falling in love in our world. It isn't a fantasy. It isn't, you know, taking place on, you know, in an alternate dimension. It's here and now.

13:12Haili Blassingame:And it's hard and it's messy sometimes. And I think that's one of the interesting things that connects your book, Tia, and your book, Haley. Kat is very messy. Capital M. With a capital M-E-S-S-Y. And I'm curious why and how you approached creating a character who isn't always—she's not always lovable. She's kind of confusing at times. What questions did you want her to be grappling with in this book? Oh, well, this part is very connected to my own struggles and grasping. I mean, I started this book when I was 25, so very close to Kat's age. And I just felt very lost in my love life. And I felt like I was a very grasping girl.

14:05Haili Blassingame:And I think I turned to stories, and I always have to understand myself. And in this time, I turned and could not find a story. And so, you know, some of the big questions she's asking is, and this is a question that comes up, I think, in any long relationship is when what you owe yourself and when that debt is in direct conflict with what you owe the people you care about. And that's a bind. And she's trying to figure out how to get out of it alive and spiritually alive. And she's also asking these questions within the context of gender and race because she's in a heterosexual relationship. She's a black woman living in a specific political context.

14:53Haili Blassingame:And so those bump against the typical relational questions as well. You know, what do I owe a man? And, you know, what does freedom look like to me? And so, yeah, it had to be messy. I don't know that she could have been really digging her heels into these questions without, you know, getting into the dirt. We got this from Chris, who emails, It seems most novels I listen to seem to have a sex scene at one point or another. I'm a writer of short stories, but I always find these scenes to be cringeworthy. Do you separate yourself from the story to write these scenes, or do you put yourself fully into the scene?

15:33Haili Blassingame:Any recommendation for writing these scenes? Yes, I'm blushing right now. Tia, we'll come to you first.

15:39Tia Williams:Um, yeah. Uh, okay. So the, the sex scene conversation. So what, for me, I feel like it's, um, it's a function of the, for the plot, like anything else. It has to be propulsive. You have to learn something. Uh, it has to be revealing, um, about the characters. You have to learn something about them. You know, I don't just write a sex scene and drop it into a book. it's it's the function is to move the plot forward just like any other scene and so it's just that this happens to have you know be steamy um so you know sometimes if and you do have to be like in a place to write one right like so sometimes if i'm writing in a cafe or something and i get to a sex scene, I have to just put in parentheses, sexy stuff happens here and come back to it.

16:35Tia Williams:Because it's, you know, it's embarrassing to get all worked up like in a cafe, like in front of people. It's just weird. I have to do it at home.

16:46Haili Blassingame:Haley, what about you?

16:47Tia Williams:Oh my God.

16:47Haili Blassingame:I love a sex scene, which is weird to say this at my place of work. Yeah, I think they play an important function in literature, just like an argument scene or a fight scene. And I typically think of it as like, what is the scene trying to accomplish? Like not all sex scenes are doing the same thing. Sometimes it's trying to show connection. Sometimes it's trying to show disconnection. Sometimes it's trying to show, you learn a lot about the characters and their dynamics in these scenes. because it's just like a scene in a cafe where you're having a long conversation. It's just, there's a physicality to it.

17:25And so I typically do a sex scene

17:28Haili Blassingame:when there's a turning point in the relationship where something is going to be different between these people at the end and we can't go back. And that can be good, that can be bad. But, you know, I don't think we need to blush about it because it's a part of life and it's definitely a part of romance and love stories. Well, we got this from Marvin who emails My latest favorite romance novel is Isabel Lin's series, A Tyranny of Angels. It explores several kinds of relationships in terms of gender and race, and I think of it as a gateway romance for fantasy readers because the heat level gradually increases.

18:02Haili Blassingame:Again, as we said, Tia, this is your sixth book, The Misconnection. How have you seen romance, the way it's being written about or explored, changed over the time you've been publishing?

18:14Tia Williams:Oh, my gosh. It has changed so much. My first novel was published in 2004. And since then, there's just been such a romance explosion. So many subgenres that were previously sort of relegated to fanfic, honestly. Like Archive of One's Own or Wattpad. And, you know, you're reading these stories sort of under your covers, you know, at home. Now you can go to any bookstore. You can go to several romance-only bookstores and find any genre, anything you're into, any kink, any, you know, it's all there. And it's kind of, it is so liberating to see because a lot of these subgenres were sort of hidden before.

19:07Haili Blassingame:Well, we have to take a quick break, but still to come, what did our guests discover about themselves while writing their novels? More in just a moment.

19:18Haili Blassingame:Support for NPR comes from IBM. On Smart Talks with IBM, host Malcolm Gladwell speaks with leaders who are pushing the boundaries of AI and technology in partnership with IBM. Hello, hello. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, host of Smart Talks with IBM.