A Teaching Author Puts In Good Word for Romance

Her petticoat peeking out from under her long skirt, author Margaret Brownley clutched one of her own romance novels in her hand and began reeling off the basics of the business to a roomful of aspiring writers in Thousand Oaks.

With Brownley spouting sales figures--Harlequin sold $167 million worth of romance books in the United States in 1992, she said--the event started off feeling more like a business class than one in romance writing.

But as the sun set over the Santa Monica Mountains, Brownley warmed to her subject.

“I like to write not just about the hero and the heroine, but about the third person they become when they are together,” said the author, a grandmother who lives in Simi Valley and has been married to the same man for 34 years.

“It’s not lust, it’s love.”

Thursday night’s class was the first meeting of a new course taught by local romance authors and offered by Learning Tree University. The school’s Thousand Oaks campus serves 7,500 students a year with continuing education classes in subjects from art to yoga.

Sitting beside a stack of paperbacks, with enlarged copies of the racy covers of her books leaning against the wall, Brownley shared with her students what she had learned by publishing a dozen of the books, including such titles as “Rawhide and Lace” and “Petticoats and Pistols.”

They come in several varieties, she told the class.

“Inspirational romances” are sold in religious-themed bookstores. In “sweet” books, “there’s probably no consummation until the marriage.” As for the “spicy” ones . . . well, you can imagine.

But Brownley bristles at the suggestion that the books are trashy.

Her own books go beyond the sweet and inspirational, but she makes no apologies.

“I never had a publisher tell me to put more sex in,” she said. “These books have a lot of integrity. It’s one man and one woman, and if they do go to bed--and they don’t always do--it’s pretty much because they know they love each other.”

Writing romance in the 1990s brings special challenges, Brownley said. One is realism.

“We have to put more safe sex in,” she said. “And you’re not going to get an 18- or 19-year old virgin through anymore.”

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Another obstacle, she said, is writing romantic dialogue that does not stray into sexual harassment.

Although publishers are apparently aware of sexual harassment, sexually active teen-agers and the risk of AIDS, Brownley said, they have been slow to change the books to acknowledge other social developments, such as the increasing frequency of interracial romance.

“I tried to do one about an Oriental and a Caucasian and they wouldn’t let me do it,” she told the class, adding that her publishers also balked at her plans to write about a bearded hero.

In an interview, she criticized the men she said control the industry. She said they force writers to accept book-cover photographs of men with bare chests and women with heaving breasts.

“The writers have been working very hard for two or three years to get the covers changed,” Brownley said. “Men are marketing sex, and that’s not what I write. I write romance.”

She warned the students--most of whom were women--that their first novels would be far from lucrative, and that covers, titles and much of the books’ content are dictated by the publishing houses’ marketing departments.

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The students, in love with the idea of writing romance novels, were not discouraged. They flocked up after class to buy signed books and glean extra advice.

“I had a wonderful time,” said Sherry Price, a Westlake woman 100 pages into her first novel, whose affectionate companion was the one male enrolled in the class.

In the end, Brownley encouraged them.

After all, since she published her first book in 1987 and quit her job as a teacher’s aide in a Simi Valley elementary school, Brownley’s books have been translated into 11 languages.

One book, “The Kissing Bandit,” has been optioned for a movie, and Brownley expects her romantic writing to earn her a six-figure income this year.

Closer to home, her romance novels have even won praise from the pulpit. She said her pastor at the Simi Valley Presbyterian Church promoted one of her books during church services, his hand strategically placed over the book’s cover.

“Keep writing,” the romance writer shouted after her students as they walked out of the classroom.