Clean Romances discussion

Greetings, everyone!

My name is Lisa Shea, and I adore clean romance. I've been reading through many of the threads here before posting and I'm fascinated by all the various definitions of "clean". It's intriguing how one word can mean so many different things to different people. It shows how complex our language is :).

To me, clean is about not describing intimate encounters in detail. It's OK to me if the couple *is* intimate (in a respectful, loving manner) but I don't want to read the details in the story. It can fade to black for that.

I adore Jane Austen, for example, and you "know" that Kitty engages in sex but you don't read the details.

I see from many other posts that it's OK for authors to discuss their own books, so hopefully I am within the group's rules by mentioning my own.

I have twelve medieval romance novels which are "clean" in the sense that the characters never engage in explicitly described sex.

In A Sense of Duty they don't even kiss until the very last scene. In Finding Peace, Knowing Yourself, and Creating Memories they don't sleep together until they marry.

In the remaining ones, the characters do sleep together before marriage - but I'll caveat that in medieval times this was fairly normal. Proving the couple was fertile was critical to the village's survival. Often it would be when the woman became pregnant that the wedding would take place. There were enough other problems with vast numbers of infants dying before they reached adulthood, plague, and so on - they wanted to ensure a couple could create children before "locking them in forever".

Still, I understand that many people want their novels to convey a specific message, and I understand where people might want to read some of the storylines and not others.

I do want to say that in all cases the woman is respected, the man is honorable and caring, and they are together because they intend to be together forever. Still, we all have different lines we draw between what we want to read about and what we don't.

I'd love to hear any feedback or suggestions :) All proceeds of all my books support battered women's shelters, so this is a cause near and dear to my heart.

Lisa

Hi Lisa thank you for defining clean in this context I agree with you whole heartedly. My characters are far from innocent but they don't do it in public or on the page for that matter. I did once try to write a more descriptive book and I was reasonably satisfied with it but I doubt if most people would call it explicit and it did have a moral purpose.

Dear Sybil -

It's great to chat with you!

I decided to try a more explicit romance, and I'm doing that project for National Novel Writing Month. I'm writing a chapter a day, so today I'll be writing chapter 2. I'm doing this with a pen name so my established fan base doesn't get upset by it.

I'm doing this for the same reason I decided to write clean romance - to help provide a healthy alternative to the "rapists are cool" books that exist. Those books upset me greatly. I'm hoping to provide an alternate style of hero for people who like to read those style of novels.

Lisa