staci_stallings@hotmail.com

Have you ever noticed how people in a discussion tend to polarize,
entrench, and defend to the death a stance they have taken even when their real
beliefs fall somewhere in the middle? That’s what I found myself doing
recently when I read through some discussion comments regarding an
article I wrote about traditional versus inspirational romance.

The poles set up this way: Inspirational is good/traditional is
bad—replacing “bad” with “too much sex,” “no values,” “morally devoid.”
And, traditional is good/inspirational is bad—substituting words like
“boring,” “preachy,” and “unrealistic” for “bad.”

Polarizing and defending a belief is normal. It is in our basic human
nature. When someone attacks our belief, it feels like they are
attacking us, and naturally we want to fight back. However, I think that in
polarizing, we get so caught up in defending ourselves that we fail to
really hear what the other side is saying. A good example of this is a
writer friend of mine who recently had a manuscript working its way up
the ranks of a publisher. In the manuscript there was a reference to the
hero’s faith getting him through a crisis.

One of the editors made the comment that it was likely that if the
manuscript was accepted, the writer would either have to cut that
reference out, or she would have to beef up the “faith” element of the whole
story and market it as an inspirational romance. The problem with this is that it
seems to again be polarizing. Either you can have no references to
faith, God, and religion, or it has to be all about faith, God, and religion.

Thus, we have writers who from their own experience interject
references to faith naturally and who then must choose between being in the
inspirational pole of the argument or in the traditional pole. Anywhere in between is
not acceptable, which to me is unfortunate.

I chose to fall on the inspirational side of the fence. That was my
choice because I could see that truncating all references to God and faith in
my writing would make my characters less believable and less interesting
to me. To me, the interesting part of the romance is when two people get to
know each other deeper, and at the deepest part of myself is my faith and my
beliefs about how the world works. That is where I think a character’s
true value lies, and that is the part that I wanted to write toward so I
could learn more about the characters.

Nonetheless, my choice does not mean that I like the polarization. I,
too, think many inspirational romances become preachy and unrealistic, but
possibly that has more to do with what editors and publishers expect
them to be rather than with the original intent of the writer. That is why I
was so fortunate to find a publisher who didn’t force my first novel to be one
or the other and an editor who worked to fashion it into something in
between.

It is an inspirational, but it’s not so much about judging the
characters about whether they go to church or not or whether they have sex before
marriage or not. Instead, it focuses more along the lines of really
getting to watch two characters learn to understand each other. And that, I
think, should be the ultimate goal of any romance.

The funny thing is, that was the exact echo of many of the discussion
participants—no matter which side of the discussion they were on.

Copyright 2003 by Staci Stallings

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