Barbara Samuel’s article on characterization in this month’s newsletter prompted some questions for discussion:

What tricks and tips do you have for creating depth of character?

Who are some characters in fiction you have loved reading, and can you pinpoint why you love them so much?

Take a crack at these questions, or ask your own!

More links this week. A few from agents should interest all writers.  First up, Jessica Faust at the Bookends blog talks about Fixing a Stalled Career.

Kristin Nelson at Pub Rants has many great blogs on the writing business, but I restrained myself and linked to only two. One on e-book percentages. Another is An Argument For The Midlist.

Bravo! to NY Times bestselling writer Lynn Viehl. Lynn posted the link to her royalty statement for Twilight Fall, and shared “some thoughts on how the book performed in the eleven months since the initial release.”

No Bravo for this announcement about the closing of approximately 200 Waldenbooks stores. According to CEO Ron Marshall, Borders Group is “right-sizing.”

Another “non-Bravo” link is a blog about the omission of women writers on the Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book List. All the more important to have a group like RWA-WF.

That leads me to a Romance University blog by our group’s founder, Therese Walsh, on Romance University. She answers the question: Is it Romance or Romantic Women’s Fiction?

For WF writers looking for agents, there is hope! At AgentQuery, 328 agents list Women’s Fiction as one of their genres of interest. QueryTracker lists 295.

Harlequin launched Carina Press, a digital-only pub. You can read more here. This is lifted from their submission guidelines: “We expect to publish a majority of romance and erotic romance but are also very interested in women’s fiction, science fiction, fantasy, futuristic, mystery, thrillers, horror, and niches. If you have something new and fresh we would be happy to read your story!”

I’m ending with a link to the video of a 2007 interview of Wise Woman Barbara Samuel at the Women’s Fiction Festival. Enjoy!

Women’s Fiction is in the news — and the blogs. First up, a link to an article from our Wise Woman, Barbara Samuel, that was posted on Likes Books in 2000. Nine years later, everything she says still holds true.

More recently, agent Jim McCarthy from Dystel & Goderich Literary Management blogged about the importance of voice for romance and women’s fiction.

Halfway down this Oxygen blog, which summarizes the panel on genre fiction from The Surrey International Writers’ Conference, is a question from an audience member about women’s fiction, with a great answer by Donald Maass.

Pimp My Novel has a great blog about Women’s Fiction, with links to blogs on the subject by agent Jessica Faust and author Jennifer Weiner.

If you want to go straight to Jessica Faust’s blog on The Future of Women’s Fiction, here’s the link.

Of interest to all writers is JA Konrath’s blog where he shows and tells his e-royalty figures.

I thought it would be fun to throw in this job position description posted on MediaBistro:

Finally, Penguin Group seeks a Senior Editor/Executive Editor for the New American Library. Here’s more about the job: “This position will work primarily with best-selling womens fiction and non-fiction authors. Offering a wide selection of commercial fiction and non-fiction, NAL aims at reaching the largest number of possible readers, the true mass market.”

Last, enjoy this video from Barbara Vey’s Beyond Her Book PW’s blog on Women’s Fiction last June.

If you have news about women’s fiction, please email me at edieramer.

Welcome to the Women’s Fiction Chapter of Romance Writers of America! We are so pleased to finally be creating this networking and support group for writers who are fascinated by the various ways a romantic novel can explore the issues, challenges, and stages of a woman’s life. We are all romantics at heart, and as such, many of us are or have long been romance readers and writers. It’s safe to say that without RWA and the explosion in popularity of romance novels that gave so many, many, many women a chance to write commercial novels about the things we care about, women’s fiction as a genre would not exist.

Admittedly, there is confusion about where the line is between the two genres–in the press and review community, among publishers and editors, and among ourselves. It took quite a lot of discussion for us to agree on a definition that would be inclusive, but also allow us a chance to clearly define the kind of books we love to read and write.

As a romance writer who began writing women’s fiction nine years ago, I’m often pressed to define the difference for reporters or bloggers or book clubs. It is not as complicated as you might imagine. Romance novels are always, always, always about a woman finding and forming a bond with her mate. Women’s fiction is often also partially about forming a bond, but there is a larger question she must solve, too. It is the resolution of that question that will bring about her happy ending. In younger women’s fiction, that quest might be to find her place in the world, or to find a balance between work and family. In midlife books, there is often a loss–children growing up, a marriage breaking down, or the death of a friend–that forces a reckoning with redefining identity. In books about older women, there might be issues of reconciliation. There are usually relationship issues with children, siblings, parents, even animals, and those need to be resolved for the protagonist to take the next healthy steps in her life.

Roughly. The truth is, women’s fiction is often more easily defined by what it isn’t. These are not easily books–which, for most of us, is a huge part of the appeal. There is freedom to play more with styles or themes or voice. We might tackle social issues or character history or any number of other things that would overwhelm the basic promise of a romance novel, which is that it will be a safe place to escape, even if the world around you is falling apart. Women’s fiction doesn’t make that promise. Sometimes, we know, children do not survive an illness. Sometimes, a marriage cannot be healed. Sometimes, people make terrible decisions and then have to live with the consequences.

After writing 27 contemporary and historical romances, I migrated to women’s fiction for several reasons. I needed a bigger canvas for the cultural and social questions that fascinate me. I wanted to write more about how work matters to women’s lives. And frankly, I needed to write about people with a little more wear and tear than a classic romance structure would allow–to write about women who didn’t skate through their youths without having an encounter with tequila shots or a really bad relationship or too many lovers.

But I also knew what I didn’t want. I didn’t want to give up the exploration of love and sex and the power of finding a partner, a witness to make our lives better. It’s big stuff–and it’s fun to write about. I also had no desire to false tragedy, ala Nicholas Sparks. As a spiritual person, I believe an uplifting ending has the power to offer a person a chance to keep going for another day.

In women’s fiction, I can have my cake and eat it, too. And although we come to women’s fiction from many directions, we share this vision. The promise we offer in romantic women’s fiction, as opposed to mainstream women’s fiction, is the possibility of healing. Hope. The promise that people can triumph over even very challenging odds. We promise an upbeat ending, a chance (or a second chance, or even a third chance) at love with a true partner. Sarah Addison Allen’s work is magic realism with happy endings (she is the happy version of Alice Hoffman). That makes her one of us. Kristin Hannah, on the other hand, wrote many titles of women’s fiction (and in fact won a RITA for Best Novel With Romantic Elements), but crossed into mainstream fiction with her more recent books, beginning with Firefly Lane. Jodi Picoult is mainsteam women’s fiction all the way, and there are never any happy endings guaranteed there.

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. Ours is an exciting arena, one that is expanding and changing in form as we each bring out own particular voices and talents to it. One thing our chapter will do is give us a chance to talk among ourselves, offer insights and experiences and a helping hand, and help find and recruit every single reader who is looking for what we write. We can define for ourselves what we’re doing here.

Welcome!
Barbara Samuel O’Neal