All genre fiction is built using a set of specific tropes. Some of these tropes are used in every genre, including the genre of literary fiction, and some are essential only to a given genre like mystery or horror. These tropes or story elements have evolved over time, and readers expect and anticipate them. Label a new novel a romance, when it’s actually a western or a murder-mystery with a superficial romance on the side, and wait for the disappointed comments by reader-reviewers on Amazon or Goodreads, regardless of how well written the book may be.

Classic tropes of the romance genre include alpha males, witty heroines, kidnappings, arranged marriages, mistaken identities, feuding families and HEAs or happy-ever-afters. Modern romances also sometimes end in HFNs, or happy-for-nows, with an HEA implied, in keeping with modern life styles in which people don’t necessarily fall in love and then directly into marriage. There are hundreds of tropes occurring in romances. Only a few are essential, including the HEA.

When a book is classified as a romance, the reader buys the book anticipating a story about two characters who fall in lasting love. The author can add in a mystery as a secondary story line, or the Wild West as the setting, but if the foregrounded plot is not about how the two central characters fall in love and then decide to stay together forever, the author is going to end up with unhappy readers who’ve had their expectations thwarted in a most unpleasant way. The book is not, in fact, a romance, but probably a general fiction book, or something called women’s fiction. It’s been mis-categorized as romance. The problem is not with the story, but with the categorization of the story.

Recently, I came across posted comments on a social networking thread made by some aspiring and self-published authors. Some of these writers claim to be writing romances, and have indie-published their work under the umbrella of the romance genre. They were decrying the “problem” of romance novels needing to end with a happy-ever-after. They were dismissive of this trope. They wrote that the conventional HEA ending was a weakness of both the story and the writer’s choices, not a required component of the genre itself. I had to bite my reader-writer tongue. I am a teacher at heart and by profession, and it’s a bit of a compulsion for me to want to educate. Using superhero restraint, I logged off the Internet, and worked on my romance novel instead of leaping in to correct their misconceptions. But their criticisms of the romance HEA, and ultimately of the romance genre and its writers, nagged at me.

First and foremost, the individuals posting these comments appear to not understand genre and its purpose. They do not understand tropes or classic archetypes. They are neophytes in a storytelling business that spans centuries. And, what’s even more annoying for an avid romance reader like myself, who might pick up one of their mis-categorized romances by accident, they clearly don’t read romances while claiming to be writing them. (My cynical self suspects they’ve classified their work as romance because romance is the best-selling genre on the market. Perhaps, they are more interested in obtaining readers than obtaining satisfied readers?) How can writers claim their work is romance, if they don’t understand the role and purpose of tropes common to romance stories?

There are hundreds, thousands, of tropes in fiction. The HEA is only one. Naturally, in genre fiction, some tropes are less important than others. In romance, though, the story must focus on two characters who fall in love and who have a solid future together by the end of the story. Books can twist some tropes within a genre and still stay within reader expectations. Romance tropes like the competing lover or mistaken identity are secondary to the essential happy-ever-after ending. They may or may not be used or twisted in any given story, and the story still remains well within the guidelines of the genre. But a story that doesn’t focus on two people falling in love, and whose relationship ends in an HEA, is not a romance. It falls under another genre.

Let’s compare this complaint about the HEA ending in romances to the solving of a crime in mystery novels. Mystery novels have at their heart, a mystery that needs to be solved by the end of the book: an ending that parallels the HEA in romances. The progression of the story begins with the event of a crime, followed by the discovery of clues and evidence regarding that crime, which are collected and studied by the central characters, who, then, ultimately use those clues to identify and capture the culprit. Consider this reading scenario:

Someone loves mysteries, and picks up a book proclaiming itself to be a murder-mystery because it begins with a murder. The book boasts (the writer has a large circle of friends and family) thirty 5-star reviews claiming it’s a twist on the murder-mystery. Intrigued, the mystery-loving reader buys and reads the book, wondering which secondary trope(s) will get twisted and re-invented, and which ones will remain intact. There is a murder early in the story. Ah-ha! thinks the reader. Here is the start of the mystery. Then no one investigates it because no one cares about that dead character. Hmm…wonders the reader, this is a weird twist. I really hope this is not the twist. The central characters then take an unrelated trip to the Middle East where they encounter terrorists and bad indigestion, surviving to get back to the safety of the West and an airport McDonalds. The increasingly frustrated reader thinks: Where exactly is the mystery? Eventually the characters return home to discover the murderer was captured while they were gone and the reader is told, on the last line of the book, that the central characters are discovered dead of heart attacks brought on by poor diets. What the flipping hell? Screams the reader. I’ve been cheated out of a mystery, some hard-earned money and my precious time! The reader throws the book across the room in utter fury and disgust.

Besides the fact that the story is failing the reader in many other ways, the book is not a mystery novel at all. In fact, only the murder at the start is a common trope of the mystery novel. The rest of the story is something totally different. There’s no twist on the mystery genre. There’s hardly even a mystery. The only mystery is why the author or publisher made the choice to classify the book in the mystery genre. Claiming a book is a mystery simply because there are murders in it, produces the same reader frustration as claiming a book is a romance simply because there are characters in it who love each other.

Tropes exist for readers, not necessarily for writers. To dismiss or decry a specific genres’ essential tropes is to dismiss or decry the genres’ readers.

Tropes exist because part of the pleasure of reading is anticipation. Avid readers are active readers. They engage with the text intellectually and emotionally from the first word. Whether the book is a mystery, a romance or a horror story, the reader begins the first sentence in the role of investigator. He or she is curious, intrigued. He makes guesses about the characters, about the possible connections and disconnections, about the plot turns, about the outcomes. She analyzes the subtlest clues and elements. The writer has to reveal these narrative clues at just the right moments—too early and the information spoils the ending, too late and the story destroys the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Framing these big or subtle reveals are the tropes themselves. They are a containment field of the familiar, holding together and connecting the intimate, specific and original delights of the story.

The general literary fiction reader has a different set of expectations than the genre fiction reader. Literary fiction often reflects dark sides of the world in which criminals get away with their crimes, businesses fail, people commit suicide, marriages collapse in divorce. But that darker side is no more authentic, or worthy of praise, than the lighter side of most genre fiction in which resolutions happen the way we wish they would—and sometimes actually do—in the real world. Expecting a story to end unhappily isn’t a superior reader position than expecting a story to end happily. They are simply different.

When I read literary fiction, I have expectations and I get disappointed if the author doesn’t deliver on them. I expect fine language. I expect realistic characterization. I expect, regardless of the plot, a meaningful ending that makes a moral statement about the world and humanity. I want to finish that book knowing something I didn’t know or understand before about what it means to be human. When I read a romance novel, I expect to care about two characters who make the heroic struggle to change themselves for the better in order to be good partners to each other. I expect them to be rewarded for their efforts by an HEA.

Novels are either well-written or they are not. Beyond that, they either satisfy a reader’s expectations or they don’t. They get classified into genres for the reader’s benefit, to guide the reader’s expectations, to improve the reader’s experience. As a reader, some days I want comedies, or stories that end happily, and some days I want tragedies. Macbeth is not superior to Romeo and Juliet because one is a story of how power corrupts and other is a story of how love can be destroyed by hate. Neither is King Lear superior to A Midsummer Night’s Dream because it ends tragically while AMND doesn’t. We shouldn’t confuse the quality of stories by the way they end no more than we should rank them by the stories they tell.

It seems like a lot of people argue that tropes, especially those found in the romance genre, are tired and predictable, and therefore worthy of disdain. In truth, all stories use familiar tropes and readers expect them. Even literary fiction depends upon and uses tropes. In genre fiction, some tropes are more heavily used by writers than others, but that doesn’t make them less appealing to potential readers, especially if the writing is well-crafted.

Readers crave tropes that exhibit psychological archetypes which manifest human experience. Reading stories with HEA endings in them satisfies a deep need on the part of the reader for order and truth. In a world in which reality rarely follows the golden rules, happy fiction is a soothing reminder of how we aspire things to be. By the time we reach the genre fiction’s HEA, justice prevails. The authorities catch and punish the criminal. Detectives solve the mystery. Heroes and heroines destroy the monsters. Everyday people survive the apocalypse. Humanity trumps cold science and technology. Love lasts.

Frankly, the archetype of the lovers and their story is a deep and enduring one that deserves respect and appreciation, not ignorant bashing. There are lots of reasons to be critical of bad fiction, but no credible reasons for being contemptuous about a specific genre and its expected tropes. Bad writing is bad writing. We know it when we see it. I’ve read bad genre fiction and I’ve read bad literary fiction. Smart readers are capable of distinguishing between bad writing and genre fiction. They understand these are different things.

The fact that romance, in particular, and its HEA ending, are snickered at and treated like the dirty laundry of the literary world, while literary fiction and other genres are seen as more creative and worthy of reader respect, says more about the person belittling romance than it does about the quality of the writing in a given genre favored by female readers. It may even point to the deep and abiding misogyny that troubles a world in which the female half of the population is allowed to feel their emotions, while the male half is expected to strangle any appearance of personal feelings; but that’s for another post. Both male and female readers are subject to developing snobbish attitudes about romance fiction and its tropes.

Classifying and promoting one’s novel as a romance when it denies the reader an HEA is to exploit commercially the popularity of the romance genre itself and its readers. Misunderstanding and snubbing the tropes of romance, while claiming to be writing the genre, is arrogant and misguided. Yes, the romance novel requires an HEA, but that doesn’t make it bad fiction.