Class in Writing Purple Prose a Hotbed of Romantics Seeking Happy Endings

Tangling her hands in his thick, dark waves, she whispered his name. He needed no further encouragement; his mouth covered hers, and when he kissed her all thoughts left her head like doves released from a dove cote.

----Sonja Massie “Dream Carver”

Lisa Gleason wants to write like this.

So she sketches out characters in her head. She hopes a lot. And she’s taking a class from Thousand Oaks’ Learning Tree University called “Passion on Paper: Writing and Selling the Romance Novel.”

Every Thursday evening through the end of August, five Harlequin aspirants--all women--and author Sonja Massie squeeze into a coat closet of a room to dissect the finer points of dime-store love stories.

“It’s so intimidating when you give us something like this,” Gleason complains, slamming a copy of Massie’s “Legend of the Wolf” down on her desk. “I read it and I think, ‘I’ll never do this.’ ”

By day, the blond, pony-tailed Gleason teaches sixth grade at White Oak Elementary School in Simi Valley. In her spare time, though, she devours piles of young-adult romances. Now she thinks maybe she’s ready to write one of her own.

Maybe.

“I just want to make sure I do this right,” she told Massie the first day of class, back in July. “I want to do this, but in the back of my mind I don’t want to spend time if I’m not going to get anywhere with it. . . . I want to make money.”

Money and hot, steamy love stories are the name of the game in the romance novel industry. In 1992, the Harlequin and Silhouette brands of romance novels sold 205 million copies worldwide, according to officials at Harlequin Enterprises, a Canadian company that publishes both imprints. Altogether, romance novels account for 44% of all mass-market paperbacks sold each year, according to a Harlequin brochure.

“The only people who giggle about romance novels are not in the publishing industry,” Massie says.

A former Southern belle whose voice retains the lilt if not the accent of the region, Massie writes at least one novel every nine months in her hillside Ventura home. Her hair is red and wavy and her lipstick matches her long, manicured nails.

“I’m going to close this door,” she tells her pupils before class begins, “because we talk about naughty things in here and (people in other classes) will hang around outside.”

Massie did not grow up pining to be the next Margaret Mitchell--author of “Gone With the Wind” and the spiritual mother of romance novelists.

For years, she says, she worked making stained glass, but eventually tired of cutting her hands and arms on the jagged glass. So she enrolled in Ventura College to get a degree in marriage and family counseling.

An encouraging professor and a writing class waylaid her. Soon she was scurrying to the bookstore for fiction how-to books. A thick, pink volume about writing romance novels caught her eye.

“I thought, ‘Romance novels--oh, those are those little books next to the broccoli at Vons,’ ” she says. “So I went and bought half a dozen. The first two were the worst I’ve ever read, so I figured, ‘Hey, I can do that,’ and I went home and wrote one of my own.”

The first book she wrote did not get published. After she sent her second novel to Silhouette Romances, however, she got a call. “They said: ‘Well, we’d like to make you an offer,’ ” she remembers. “I screamed.”

That was eight years ago. Since then, Massie--who, when asked her age, will only say she is old enough to have a 21-year-old child--has written 21 more books, including the novelization of the film “Far and Away.”

The women in the class rave about Massie, who believes that some people are born with a natural talent for writing and the rest should make lots of story outlines.

“Some part of your heart must be ready to do this or you wouldn’t have come,” she bucks up her self-doubting students.

The women hope so.

They all dream, they say, of one day supporting themselves with the income from writing. But for now, they do other things.

Marge Evans, 50-something, is an administrator for Northrop Corp. in Pico Rivera. Gail Ranstrom, 46, is an advertising account executive for Brown Realty in the Conejo Valley. Elaine Starr, in her mid-40s, is a real estate agent in Westlake Village. Debby Brown, 26, is a homemaker in Moorpark, and Gleason, 27, is a schoolteacher.

Most say they have kept their writing secret from colleagues and even friends, for fear of being teased or dismissed as a lightweight. Sometimes, they get defensive.

“You know, people joke about this,” Ranstrom said, “but I would rather write a romance story than write a story about a serial killer.”

Massie will have none of this talk about how romance novels are trash, even if they sell for $3 at drugstores and supermarkets.

They do sell, don’t they? she asks her pupils. Anyway, she concludes, they must be art because they fulfill a need.

“You will be surprised what your novels will mean to a woman,” she says. “And to a man, too.”

Brown agrees. Her husband has agreed to read her incipient novel when she gets to the “good parts,” she says, referring to the more steamy passages.

But most of these students are a long way from the good parts. A couple have already begun their novels, but for the other three, fiction is still something they read at the library. Massie tells them all that there is a way, and she will lead them through it.

The homework after the first lesson is filling out a thin blue booklet entitled “Passion on Paper, Lesson 1.” Some writers speak of how characters come to them in dreams or of basing characters on someone they know well. Failing such inspirations, Massie has a Heroine Checklist.

It starts easily enough. First, the students are asked for a physical description. What color hair and eyes will the protagonist have? (“Don’t just think about hair color,” Massie exhorts. “Think about hair texture, hair style. How they wear their hair characterizes who they are.”) Any particular mannerisms? What is her clothing choice, for both casual and formal wear?

The questions get heavier on the questionnaire’s second page. Is this woman an introvert or an extrovert? Massie wants to know her astrological sign. What is her occupation? (This is the ‘90s, Massie says. “Women want more active heroines.”) Her hobbies, phobias, favorite colors?

Massie reels off a short list of qualities all sympathetic protagonists share. They must be active, because “passive people don’t inspire us, and they certainly don’t entertain us.”

They must be smart and logical. If you allow your hero or heroine to do something really stupid or nonsensical, she says, your readers will no longer identify with that person and quickly lose interest.

And, of course, the character must be moral. “Scruples are a big deal right now,” Massie warns her neophyte writers.

Once a writer creates her characters, she must dream up exciting situations to put them in, Massie says. The settings may be contemporary or historical, mystical or mundane, but the situations must feature conflict building upon conflict until a cataclysmic--but ultimately happy--ending.

“In a romance novel, it’s got to be a happy ending, always, always,” Massie says. “It can’t be like ‘Wuthering Heights,’ where they kill each other. That starry-eyed moment of being in love--that’s what these books are all about.”

Well, Evans, at least, is ready. “I’ve wanted to write ever since I was a little girl,” she says. Today, as she drives from her home in Thousand Oaks to her job at Northrop, Evans maps out the twists and turns of her historical novel, set in 19th-Century New England. It’s about “a shipyard and a promise,” she says enigmatically.

“The hardest part of this is that I want to finish it,” says Evans, who began working on her novel last winter, long before the class started. “You know when you can’t put a book down? Well, I can’t put this down. I want to finish it and read it!”

Ranstrom spends most of her spare time daydreaming of Oliver Cromwell’s England and writing of a Royalist and an apolitical Irishwoman who fall in love under crossed stars in 1658. “Oh, how do you explain a whole novel in a couple sentences?” Ranstrom says when asked to describe her story. “They meet under difficult circumstances and become allies with different goals in mind.”

Brown says she is writing about a symphony conductor and his next-door neighbor, a paralegal, who fall in love while trying to determine who killed his ex-wife.

Starr’s novel will be set in the Southwest, she says. “The heroine’s motivation is misguided revenge, and he has to prove his innocence to her, and all the while they are falling in love but trying not to fall in love,” she says. “Since it’s a romance novel, it has to have a happy ending, so you know what will happen in the end.”

Gleason, who’s working on a young-adult romance, will say only that her story deals with boys, drug and alcohol problems, and mountain biking.

Of course, for all the efforts of students and teacher, it’s a tough market out there. Massie’s students speak with hope in their voices but admit that in the end, they may be the only ones to enjoy their work.

That’s OK, though, they add in the next breath. Writing a novel is not only fun, it’s a great escape from the cares of everyday life.

“It’s something I do for me,” Starr says. “It’s probably about the only thing I do for me.”