Get to know Kathleen Shoop
My first love in writing was women’s fiction. Then I added
historical fiction to the list of genres I was interested in authoring. I adore
non-fiction and the factual, antiqued stories that have faded into obscurity if
anyone ever knew them in the first place were absorbing to me. So connecting
facts with fiction was a perfect fit. But as my journey on this writing path
has continued, the trail has widened again. I’ve begun to write romance.
I used to read romance in fits and bouts. One summer in
college I met my literary soul mate—my roommate, April’s, mother, Mrs. English.
She and April kindly invited me and another roommate to visit. They had a
library that was outfitted from top to bottom with every romance novel you
could imagine. In between staying at their home in sunny St. Helena, we roomies
traveled up and down the California coast, sitting three across the front seat
of a barely drivable Chevy Nova with wide brimmed hats and sunglasses repeatedly
blaring a cassette tape of the Fine Young Cannibals.
In between the endless laughter and mild trouble with
interlopers, cars, and housing, I read incessantly. While laying on Laguna
Beach, sitting by Lake Tahoe, stuck in traffic in L.A. on I-5, hanging out at
April’s home, I devoured a romance book a day. Mrs. English’s love for these
novels said it all, “They are happy,” she would say. And I agreed as we hovered
over the next find, reading the back and deciding who would get it next. Other than
recalling Jude Deveraux’s name I can’t pinpoint a single other author’s name,
but Mrs. English fed my literary habit in way that has not been duplicated
since.
These romance novels were the perfect compliment to my fairy
tale summer where my roommates and I went shoeless, had zero responsibilities,
worked only to earn enough money to eat (we slept on the beach in Carmel and
borrowed an apartment in San Francisco), borrowed a car, were gifted with my
friend’s father’s gas card back when all you could get at a gas station was gas
and come potato chips, and used credit cards when necessary. We lived on Mrs.
Field’s samples, bread, two-liter bottles of diet coke and for some reason,
yogurt covered pretzels from the bulk section in Safeway. This sounds like hell
in some ways, but it was pure adventure at the time—it was when my real goal to
be a writer was born.
The entire summer was a fantasy of sorts. We drove for days,
basking in a friendship filled with so much laughter I still giggle when I
think about being lost in an area outside of Candlestick Park in Oakland, California
where the police yelled at us for being lost…as if we did it on purpose. Idiocy
can be funny when you’re young and stupid. What does this have to do with my
writing journey, my romance tales? Well,
it’s the lure of happy, happily ever after, romance in every sense of the
word—even as it applies to friendship—that turned me to writing, that made me
want to capture moments that meant something even if in writing I would be capturing
them in the context of fictional characters’ lives.
To me, writing historical fiction is like building an
exquisite mansion. But in addition to that “job,” I have to tend the grounds of
the property, plowing a field and sowing the seeds that will produce gorgeous
layers of plants—an explosion of color and form and scent. The mansion is
sublime, each element communicating something more than the obvious. This is
wonderful and lovely and rewarding in a way that compels me to do it again and
again. But, I’ve learned in life that sometimes simplicity can be exponentially
more satisfying than things that are extravagant and bold.
For me, romance writing is the quaint cottage on the beach (and
the setting for Return to Love). Romance writing strips away the awe-inspiring
markers of something bigger than the story itself. When one editor read my
first draft of Home Again she told me
to get rid of everyone and everything in the story besides the couple. I
couldn’t breath at the thought. What the hell would my characters do without
all of the other stuff?
But as I dug back into the story and relegated ex-lovers,
extended family, and all the “extras” to backstory I found the simple task (not
to be confused with an easy task) of distilling a story down to bringing two
people together to be every bit as satisfying as a larger, atmospheric novel.
I still do a ton of research in writing romance. I study the
setting in which my stories occur. I make sure my characters have work to do
and that it feeds into their development and growth. I feel like these sweet
stories have taught me so much about writing. They take me back to that time in
college when everything was “happy,” as Mrs. English put it. I can still feel
the freedom I felt that summer when I close my eyes and remember it. And, over
the years while responsibilities have grown, and there is sometimes less
laughter and problems are big, I have found that “happily ever after” does not
have to mean pure fantasy. Romance, in every form is important to any story.
Romance is what makes life exciting. Romance is what makes a person look back
on their life and smile.
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