Houston Writer Katherine Center on What Makes a Good Romantic Comedy – Houston Public Media

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Houston writer Katherine Center knows a lot about the romantic comedy genre. She has built a career around this subject, having written numerous novels in the genre, including a few bestsellers and a few that have been made into films, such as Happiness for beginners And The lost husband.

Her latest novel enters the world she knows best: it’s a romantic comedy about… people who write a romantic comedy.

The Rom-Commers tells the story of Emma, ​​an aspiring writer, who tries to help Charlie, an accomplished screenwriter of everything but romantic comedies, correct the poor attempt he made to craft a romantic comedy storyline.

In an interview with Houston matters Producer Michael Hagerty, Center tells her more about the story, what makes a romantic comedy successful, how the genre has changed over the years and how she tries to move it forward in her books.

Michael Hagerty/Houston Public Media

Center says what drives her to focus on stories like this is simple.

“They rely on a very specific type of anticipation,” Center said. “…it’s kind of what keeps us all turning the pages.”

But while there is anticipation in most stories, many of them rely on more negative anticipation.

“It’s more of a feeling of terror,” she says. “You piece together the clues the writer has left for you and you think, ‘Oh, this man is going to jail.’ RIGHT? Or ‘Ugh, this kid is going to get arrested.’

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Romantic comedies, however, center on what Center calls “positively valued anticipation.”

“Romantic comedies don’t give you things to fear in the same way,” she said. “They give you things to look forward to.”

And part of that is the guaranteed happy ending. That’s a promise like that. But this happy ending is there for a very specific reason.

“And it’s about allowing the writer to create a very particular kind of emotional happiness that you can only get by having something important to look forward to,” she said.

In the case of a romantic comedy, what we have to hope for is of course the meeting of two people. The question is not if, but how.

“So the question is never, in a romantic comedy, ‘Will they do it or not?’ Because they will. They certainly will. They absolutely will,” Center said.

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She adds that there is another word to describe this anticipation: hope. And, with all the stress of our modern lives and the upheavals of the world, sometimes we need to feel happiness, which Center believes the romantic comedy genre – whether in the form of a book, a movie or TV show – can deliver better. than anything.

“You get this kind of extended, dance-remixed version of experiencing hope in real time — waiting for something good — and I love it,” she said.

Of course, there still needs to be conflict to move the story forward.

“You can’t just have happy people walking around eating ice cream in a story,” she said. “There have to be struggles.”

But she puts a lot of thought into carefully balancing the relationship between this conflict and the degree of positive anticipation.

Barbara Nitke/NETFLIX

For example, his novel Happiness for beginners, which was recently made into a movie on Netflix, was about a woman going on a long hike. An early online review from a reader complained that there was too much kissing and not enough hiking. Center still thinks about it today, taking care to balance the different elements of his stories.

“I want there to be conflict, but I don’t want the conflict to be the main emotional experience of the story,” she said. “I want the conflict to be there to make the good things happen, to intensify them, and to make the fun even more fun.”

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Although Center has extensive experience of the genre, in The Rom-Commers, one of the main characters is an accomplished screenwriter who doesn’t. Charlie has written almost every other type of film, but did a poor job of coming up with a script for a romantic comedy. That’s where Emma comes in. Her writing dreams have been derailed by a family tragedy, but she gets the chance to work with Charlie to try to fix her script.

Cue conflict and some of that anticipation positively valued.