This past weekend held a lot of drama in Romancelandia. People came out of the woodwork in support and in opposition of Lucia Franco’s book Balance, which was released back in 2016. While this post isn’t about that mess, it is about something that piqued my interest while I was reading through the onslaught of tweets.
One person tweeted, and I am paraphrasing here, that writers should know and follow the rules of writing romance. Any book that doesn’t end in HEA or HFN isn’t a romance.
This tweet left me totally confused. One, I didn’t know we had set rules for writing romance, outside of it’s a story about two or more people falling in love. Two if HEA or HFN is a requirement of the ending, then every Nicholas Sparks book ever written should be categorized differently. *Spoiler alert, the man kills off main characters like crazy.
What’s my personal opinion? Love comes in a lot of different forms, and while I prefer a HEA or HFN ending, I don’t think it should be a deciding factor if the book genre is romance.
Do you believe for a book to be romance, it must have a HEA or HFN ending. Are there other requirements you feel are necessary for a book to be considered romance?
