Words matter. These are the best Lauren Willig Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I couldn’t make myself write serious; I was surrounded by serious: in monographs, in articles, in my own dissertation prospectus, in the very earnest e-mails of students telling me just why that paper couldn’t be in on time, cross their hearts and hope to get an A-minus.
One of our fundamental human needs is finding our partner that we hope we will stay with for the rest of our lives. You often find the same search in other genres. The mystery novel has a romance subplot. Literary novels often focus on that relationship but do not often end well.
I hadn’t realized quite how intense the first few years of grad school would be. When you’re being assigned 40 books a week… there’s not much room for novels.
I’ve had mainstream readers complain that the book is really a romance, and romance readers complain that the book isn’t a romance – with the same book! It really depends on the individual reader’s expectations going into the story, and that’s very hard to predict person to person.
Ever since reading Jean Plaidy’s ‘Queen in Waiting,’ I’ve felt deep admiration for Caroline of Ansbach.
I’ve been typed as historical fiction, historical women’s fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance – all for the same book.
Say what you will about Queen Eleanor, she was a savvy, quick-witted woman who made her mark on history. And as the founder of the Courts of Love, what better patron monarch could there be for a romantic novelist?
Like everyone else, I grew up loving the Anne books, but L.M. Montgomery is so much more. Like Jane Austen, she has an eye for the absurd and a gift for the ‘mot juste.’
My books fall in the wobbly middle between historical fiction and historical romance.
As a friend once pointed out, the crotchety dowagers do tend to get all the best lines. That may be why I have so many of them in my books.
Romance tends to be the whipping boy of genre fiction.
I never sat down and said, ‘I’m going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.’ It was just the way the stories went.
I went to grad school with the grand plan of getting my Ph.D. and writing weighty, Tudor-Stuart-set historical fiction – from which I emerged with a law degree and a series of light-hearted historical romances about flower-named spies during the Napoleonic wars.
I tend to navigate by indirection, meaning that most of the major things in my life have happened when I’ve been thinking about something else.
If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random.
‘Purple Plumeria’ I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.
My own inclination is to skew towards humor. They say that some people view life as a comedy, others as a tragedy. Me? Comedy all the way.
