Taste of Cyn

How Current Should A Contemporary Romance Be?

By Cynthia Sax on July 25, 2014

There are two schools of thought with writing contemporary romances.

Make Your Story Timeless

One school advises us to make contemporary romances as timeless as possible. Try to avoid references to clothing, to technology, to popular culture (TV shows, movies, music, etc). Avoid slang. Only use brand names that might exist fifty years from now.

The reasoning behind this advice is ten years from now, we want our stories to remain ‘contemporary.’ We want readers to continue reading our stories. We want our stories to remain relevant.

This can be a great policy to follow if you wish to write for print first publishers. Print first publishers often have long lead times. There could be years between writing a story and seeing the story on shelves. Slang or styles or culture will likely evolve in this time, making your contemporary romance dated.

Make Your Story A Snapshot In Time

The other school recommends writing a contemporary romance completely anchored in this moment of time. We use brand names, slang, cultural references when we speak and who isn’t attached to their phones or tablets? All of this is part of living in the modern world.

The thinking of this school is that any story, no matter how hard we try, will be dated. Will a phone be called a phone two years from now? I don’t know. Will we be eating the same food, cooking it the same way? Will jobs change with technology?

This is a great policy to follow if you’re targeting digital first publishers. Digital first publishers normally have short lead times. Trends will likely still be relevant in two or three months. EBooks can also be updated more easily than print books. Five years from now, we can change the dated references and make the story contemporary once more.

My Thoughts

In Sinful Rewards, Bee receives sexy challenges via text so you can likely guess which school I belong to. (grins) I’ll make a not-so-wild prediction and state that texting won’t exist ten years from now. The entire premise of the story will fall apart.

And I’m okay with that. I don’t mind that my stories will be seen as semi-historical in a decade. They’ll be a sizzling hot time capsule of 2014. My characters age with us. Twenty years from now, I hope to tell their kids’ stories.

Which school do you belong to (as a reader or a writer)?

Sinful Rewards 1

Belinda “Bee” Carter is a good girl; at least, that’s what she tells herself. And a good girl deserves a nice guy—just like the gorgeous and moody billionaire Nicolas Rainer. He is everything she wants in a man.

Or so she thinks, until she takes a look through her telescope and sees a naked, tattooed man on the balcony across the courtyard. Hawke is mysterious, the bad boy she knows will bring only heartbreak. He has been watching her, and that makes him all the more enticing.

But when a mysterious and anonymous text message dares her to do something bad, she must decide if she is really the good girl she has always claimed to be, or if she’s willing to risk everything for her secret fantasy of being watched.

Is her mystery man the reclusive billionaire with a wild side or the darkly dangerous bad boy?

Buy Links:
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Sinful-Rewards-1-Cynthia-Sax-ebook/dp/B00I7V89H0

ARe: https://www.allromanceebooks.com/product-sinfulrewards1-1560586-237.html

Barnes And Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/sinful-rewards-1-cynthia-sax/1119055390

Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Cynthia_Sax_Sinful_Rewards_1?id=g08ZAwAAQBAJ

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/sinful-rewards-1/id814148703?mt=11

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