How Writing A Romcom Made Me Feel Less Dumb

Or, in defense of the Romance genre

Hey there folks, how’s it going? Long time, no one-way conversation into your inbox. Hope you can forgive me, I’ve been a tad busy. The truth is, when I’m in drafting and revision-mode, I…have a hard time dedicating brain energy to other words (like this).

That’s a long-winded way of telling you, surprise! I finished my book. Forreal this time. It’s like…95% of the way to where I want it to be before querying literary agents. Heaven and Earth have moved. The Red Sea? Parted. My manuscript is now in the hands of a few trusted readers who will hopefully sign-off on it. Barring the final pass of my own eyes and a good line edit, it’s done.

I can’t believe it. I feel a little empty without it today, which is guess why I’m here, writing this instead.

Honestly, it’s kind of funny. I’m, like, forcing myself to write it in MY voice from MY brain, and not through the eyes of my protagonist, Greta (who feels like a dear friend at this point).

Anyway, that’s the big update.

Me, on my month off from my manuscript

The other thing I wanted to talk about (the click-bait-y title, lol) has been cookin’ in my brain for a few days now. I was telling my husband earlier (over our Saturday morning pancakes) that writing a novel is truly the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

My senior year of college, I wrote a 15-page paper about an ancient French city that literally does not exist anymore and is largely ungoogleable¹ using research from a print book that was written entirely in French. Despite my many years of public school French, my abilities at the time were rudimentary at best. (Irrelevant but funny: a hand-marked copy was mailed to my parents’ house two weeks after I graduated in a thick manila envelope. I was pleased that I got a 94.)

Not long after penning that paper, I spent two years getting a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning. To quote Nathan Fielder, “I got really good grades,” despite that the entire time, I felt like a big dumb baby compared to my classmates. In my defense, I kind of was a big dumb baby because my prefrontal cortex wouldn’t harden up for another year or so after I finished.

Presently I have anxiety that one of my former classmates will read this² and think, "Hayley, our program wasn’t even that hard.” And they’re technically right. It wasn’t that hard if you did your homework, which I did. But it doesn’t change the fact that I still felt like I’d missed my real bus meant to take me to clown school every time I raised my hand. Everyone was so seasoned! So smart! And it would be another two years of actual work experience before I had an epiphany like, Oh so that’s what they were talking about.

I was also really into Twitter at the time (yeah…I know, RIP). It did nothing for my intellectual self-esteem. I saw the way my peers posted their 140-character takes in (what I call) “journalism speak” and just sound so. smart. They understood politics. They understood how to use the word “paradigm” without having to google it first. They could compress their high brow opinions into neat little bites that sometimes got retweeted by local NPR stations or others with blue checkmarks. Later, the same people wrote essays with the same sort of theses, using the same kind of incomprehensible journalism speak. I remember reading them, feeling my eyes glaze over, thinking to myself, Am I actually just hopelessly dumb?

Before all of that, before the hot-takeification of online spaces, there was a brief spell in college where I was a writing tutor. It was one of the last times I felt “smart” (particularly related to writing), because I was helping other kids, and the results were tangible. I’ll never forget the time I was in a major depressive state and got an email from a kid I tutored thanking me for helping them finally get an A.

But I mean, it wasn’t, like, impressive, by any means. I did get rejected from our college literary magazine the same year, after all. (In all fairness, the piece that got rejected was about how miserable I was there, lol. Don’t worry, I transferred.)

I always kind of knew I was decent at writing, because I was good in English classes. I loved writing papers for other classes. I wrote bad fanfiction in middle school for fun (IYKYK).³ I compulsively journaled through elementary and middle school in a black and white composition book that I hid under my mattress. I blogged off and on for years about songs I was obsessed with on my iPod and concerts at the NorVa and vacationing with my family in Cocoa Beach.

But that’s kind of what I’m getting at. I was good at writing about feelings. At setting a scene. At telling jokes. Crafting anecdotes. Soft stuff. When I wasn’t regurgitating information I learned in class in a five-paragraph essay, I floundered. I couldn’t write a think piece. Something like that would simply never occur to me, or I’d let the fear of being wrong stop me. I could put together sentences with correct grammar and relatively decent syntax, but it was almost always about something I felt. And no one wanted to read that. That wasn’t…you know, smart.

I certainly never thought I would write a book. Especially during those years of consuming tweets like Miss Pac-Man.

But during the pandemic, I started reading for fun.

Specifically, I started reading a LOT of romance.

It was a gateway drug to reading as an adult that I’ll value forever. Books with guaranteed happy ending and a soft, tender core? That were smart, too? I learned how royal families work. About baseball. The difference between theoretical and experimental physics, for crying out loud! And who could say no to those colorful, illustrated covers? (Never mind that I was reading on an iPad.)

I think previously I’d thought that adult books were kind of like medicine: good for you, but not necessarily fun going down. (Though I did enjoy reading Life of Pi in college.) Once you’d aged out of, like, The Magic Treehouse or Twilight, books were supposed to be…I don’t know, serious?

When I discovered romance, I realized that reading as an adult didn’t have to be torture. That it could be fun and indulgent and pleasurable? That it could still have value, even if it had less of a hard argument, and more of a soft heart like mine.

Reading romance gave me an actual eureka moment that there was an entire world out there of books that were not torturous, or high brow for the sake of being high brow, or like, something you’re supposed to have visible in the background of all your zoom calls. It showed me that books that are fun are still valuable—they make readers feel seen, or understood, or even give you those butterflies that remind you of what falling in love feels like. (Frankly, capital-R Romance is like, the most human genre of book, in my opinion. Hopefully I’ll never have to solve a murder, but I sure do love being in love.)

Anyway, after a year of gorging on books like I was cosplaying the Very Hungry Caterpillar, one day I was like…You know? I want to do this. Because I knew I could write okay, and I knew I had a voice. Add in the dash of anxiety I’ve carried with me all my life, and I knew what I wanted to say. Suddenly it didn’t matter to me anymore that I hate arguing, that I suck at brevity and writing essays, and that I still don’t entirely know the correct application of the words PROLETARIAT or PARADIGM.

It didn’t matter that the only thing I had to offer was a painfully earnest perspective from the depths of my heart. Because anyone can prepare a delicious word salad tweet of proper nouns and cynical adverbs, but I can tell you for certain, NOT EVERYONE CAN WRITE A BOOK. Not even a romcom. It’s hard as hell! It was my three-year-long, unpaid internship. The hardest endeavor I’ve ever undertaken.

My point is, thanks to reading Romance, I now know that I have something of value to say, even if it is delivered on a vulnerable and tender and quirky little platter. There is value in the time I’ve spent on it. I’ve worked my brain for HUNDREDS of hours combing out plot tangles and braiding them back together. I’ve written close to half a million words⁴ about two people who are complex and funny and ambitious and hopeful to the point that they feel real (and sometimes I forget they’re not my actual friends). I’ve made myself laugh. I’ve made myself cry. I’ve written about anxiety in a way that is real and authentic to me, that will hopefully make someone else feel seen, too.

Between you and me, that makes me feel…not so dumb anymore.

-ht

1. OR WAS UNGOOGLEABLE, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2015

2. (Risk level: low.)

3. NO I WON’T TALK ABOUT IT, I AM TAKING IT TO MY GRAVE

4. NOT HYPERBOLE