Am I the Asshole For Calling Out Romance Novelists Who Don’t Actually Care About Romance?

Hello, hello! Welcome back to another thrilling installment of everyone’s favorite advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole?, a place where you can have a beer along with a tasty side of literary gossip. I’m your host, Kristen Arnett, and it’s my birthday this week! That’s right, it’s called aging, and it’s incredible. Every day I wake up feeling more and more like a mummy come to screaming life against its will! Regardless, I’m happy to be here with all of you. There’s no other place I’d like to spend my time celebrating than right here at this lovely column.

If it’s a celebration, we should have some champagne, right? So let’s toast to me, and also to you, my gentle readers. You’re what makes life worth living!

Let’s jump right into it, shall we?

[note to readers: this first question appears as though it was sent via voice-to-text through the anonymous feature, which would account for some of the confusion and the missing first line—I think the question is valid, however, so I decided to include it in its entirety, preserving it here as it was originally sent to me] 

1) Dear Kristen. In the past I have provided feedback every so often to them. Recently, they asked me to do this in prep for a contest. I said yes, thinking that it wouldn’t be so many pages (they did not say how many they would submit). Once they sent it to me it was 17 pages long of some of the worst first-draft writing I’ve ever read. It had not been properly written or edited to a standard I would generally expect from a writer seeking feedback. I was annoyed but provided my critique that the piece was confusing but left out my true thoughts that it was really bad. I still spent more an hour reading and making my critique.

They then responded by saying thanks, I’ll just rewrite the whole thing. I felt like they used me to offload their critical and editing skills on. Am I right to think this? From pages I’ve seen years ago to now that I haven’t seen any improvement in their writing and I’m not sure how they are improving their writing skills on their own. I feel like I’m trying to be a good literary citizen but also that they may not be a good one either and at this point, I will probably not give any more feedback to them. Would love to hear your thoughts on writers and boundaries for feedback.

Thanks for writing in with this, friend.

Though the first part cut out during transmission, I’m going to read between the (missing) lines and assume that you are referring here to a writer of long-time acquaintance with whom you share work. Providing feedback to another writer is one of the greatest gifts we can give (aside from maybe providing a blurb), because it’s something that we do out of the goodness of our hearts. We receive no compensation for this act aside from putting more literary goodwill out into the world. It’s kind of you to do this for this person (and it’s incredibly nice that you’ve continued to do it for them on a regular basis).

However, it doesn’t appear that they are asking you to perform this task in good faith. If they’re sending over work that’s barely coherent—and possibly expecting you to do all the cleanup and editing work for them—that’s a misuse of your time and a wild breach of trust. You’re right to consider not performing this valuable task for them in the future.

I think you’re entirely within your rights to simply say no the next time they ask you for this kind of favor. You could tell them your reasoning behind this, but I also think you can feel free to opt out of that, too. As nice as it is that you provided all of this free labor for them in the form of editing and critical skills, you don’t owe them anything, and also you are not required to provide free emotional labor. It’s possible that telling this person that you think their writing has not improved in the years that you’ve known them will do nothing but hurt their feelings and/or turn into a larger fight.

If they are the kind of person who takes advantage of another friends’ time in this particular way, you’re perfectly within your rights to sever ties (at least when it comes to doing a bunch of free work for them). Besides, it seems very likely that they’ll try this trick with someone else and get a lot of negative feedback for their efforts. Spend some time on your own work and editing; pump the brakes on this particular asshole.

Let’s pour a few more glasses of champagne and toast to our second question of the day:

2) Hi Kristen! I am a romance novelist with two books published by a “big five” publisher. My books did fine, but I’m no household name or anything. The thing that has delighted me the most about being involved in publishing has been meeting other writers and forming real friendships with them because we’ve read and loved each others’ books. Recently I’ve been approached several times by literary fiction writers who I have not previously connected with in any way, asking me to offer opinions about and/or blurbs for romance novels that they’ve written under pseudonyms. In most cases, these are writers who have not engaged with the romance community publicly.

One author in particular just posted her year-end tally of all the books she’d read and there were no romance titles on the list. Another author was frank about writing romance because they think it will earn them more money than their literary titles (bad news there, most of us aren’t making the big bucks regardless of our genre). I read broadly across genres, but I chose to write romance because I love it and take it seriously. Am I the literary asshole for not helping these writers out when it feels like they don’t have the same respect for the genre?

This is a terrific question! Thanks for writing in with it.

The short answer is no, I don’t think you’re an asshole for prioritizing people who take romance writing seriously over people who just seem to want it as a paycheck boost. Frankly, I find it incredibly rude that someone inside the literary community would have the gumption to tell you (a romance writer yourself) that the only reason that they’re doing it is because they feel it will “earn them more money.” That’s someone you wouldn’t want to spend any time with, anyway, because they’re not taking your work seriously. And romance writing is hard work!

There has long been the notion inside the literary world that genre fiction isn’t doing the same kind of tough work as “literary” fiction, and I think we can agree that’s simply not true. In order to write good romance, you need to be able to write specific scenes very, very well. And not everyone is good at that! Every type of writing requires specific attention to detail. For people not to take that seriously (and to ask for your help in promoting their work when they don’t do anything to help boost other people’s work) is pretty shitty behavior.

Devote your time to helping those people that you feel like espouse the kind of good stewardship you want to see in the world. That’s my advice to you. Good luck!

I think we’ve got just enough champagne left in this bottle to have another glass. Let’s see what we’ve got waiting for us at the close of our questions today:

3) Would love this column if it weren’t overflowing with exclamation marks. No one is that excited.

Sure, this isn’t technically a question, but since it’s my birthday, I thought I’d go ahead and include this one (since this person is absolutely being an asshole). It’s clear to me that we’ve never met in real life, because anyone who knows me will absolutely tell you that I spend most of my time as the living embodiment of an exclamation mark. I genuinely am excited about life, about people, about books, and about beer. I love being excited about things! I love smiling and laughing and shouting! I’m excited, so goddamn excited! Every day of my life!

I’m not going to apologize for using exclamation points in a comedy column. But I am going to wish happiness in your life, stranger, because it surely feels like you could use it. What a drag that you used some of the minutes you have in this wild and precious life to type something so dull. Life’s too short to only use periods. Exclamation point! [Ed. note: I actually cut some of Kristen’s exclamation points.]

And sadly that’s all the time we have for today! Join me next time when I answer more of your burning questions (and I very likely include five hundred more exclamation points)! Please send me your questions!!!

An excitable boy,
Dad