The Everyman Hero: Merging Romance with Reality

I used to be a closet romance writer, worried about what people would say or think if they knew what I was writing. Now that I’ve gotten a little older (but no more mature), I’ve discovered the nerve to tell people that I write romance. I still get negative responses every so often, but I’ve learned something from almost all of them. One of the most educational responses I’ve gotten was from a man who had read several romance novels. He told me that “all the men look the same.”

I had never heard that one before. Of course, I mounted an energetic defense of our genre’s heroes and the wonderful increase in ethnic and cultural diversity that’s sweeping through modern romance novels. And then I went home, a little paranoid, and I looked over my stories and works in progress to verify that my heroes did not, in fact, look the same.

And they don’t look exactly alike. But several of them could be brothers.

The problem was twofold. The men who weren’t supposed to look alike sounded like they did because I wasn’t describing them very well. And they all had just about the same incredible, professional-athlete build, making them look like they came off the world’s most magnificent assembly line. I really didn’t want them to be perfect, cookie-cutter supermen; I had been aiming for heroes who were good-looking, but in an accessible, authentic way. I decided to handle both problems with good, old-fashioned field research. I went out into the real world to observe real men — people-watching at its finest.

The real world offers us amazing diversity, a huge palette of shades and colors that don’t really come through in the airbrushed, manufactured world of movies and magazines. I worked hard to pinpoint the exact hair colors I was looking at, to distinguish ash blond and wheat blond from each other and from their more golden counterparts. I contemplated whether sea green and slate green were actually the same color, and then I tried to decide which colors I wanted for my heroes’ eyes. I explored the skin tones between café au lait, caramel, chocolate and mahogany, and then I carefully filled in the spaces with new descriptors.

Reality also offers us something more important: imperfection. Those little things that models and movie stars try to cover up and get rid of are the things that make heroes distinctive and whole. Real. Consider the wrinkle, and the multi-billion-dollar campaign to eliminate it. On the right man, crows’ feet might tell a heroine that he has a good sense of humor, that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, or just that he has a nice, genuine smile that lights up his whole face. Those parenthesis wrinkles can act more like a frame, designed to draw your heroine’s eye to the fine work of art that is the hero’s mouth. If he’s gone gray gracefully, maybe your hero carries a certain measure of confidence and authority, a gravitas that only comes from experience. Your heroine might face the challenge of making gravitas laugh — or making it blush.

There’s also a certain appeal to a hero who’s been roughed up a little bit. A scar from a burn or a cut or even surgery marks your hero as a survivor. A black eye might say he doesn’t shy away from a fight. Your story will benefit from finding the origin of that mark — the exciting way he earned that broken nose, or the insecurity that grew from a single scar into a shell that only the heroine can melt.
A wise person somewhere once told me that there’s something attractive about every man in the world, and that there are rewards for a woman patient enough to look for that special something. That sounded like a platitude to me until I started looking at real guys, out here in the real world, to see what I could bring over into my fictional universe. There really is something attractive about every man, and there really are rewards for the writer patient enough to look.

Alexa Day has worked as a newspaper reporter, a copy editor, a legal writer, an English teacher and a belly dance instructor. She now divides her time between plotting her escape from the legal industry and writing interracial erotic romances. She’s a proud member of Virginia Romance Writers and author of the blog, Romance Writer by Night (http://romancewriterbynight.wordpress.com).