| Interviews |
| Interviews with Linda Howard herself collected from Harlequin.com, All About Romance and Cresent Blues |
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| LLB: You've written a tremendous variety of sub-genres in romance - at least one historical, many series titles (both suspenseful and otherwise), the time travel Son of the Morning, and the several single title romantic suspense titles. I know your series books' bio it says that you love romance and can never see yourself moving away from that. Is that still true? As you become more of a best-seller to mainstream |
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| audiences, will we see you move into more mainstream writing? Will you ever write a non-suspense romance again? Linda: I will always have a strong romantic relationship in my books because otherwise, I'm not really interested in writing the book. That's what I like to read as well. This is going to sound totally schizoid, but I don't create these stories so much as I stumble across a story and then tell them the way the characters tell me. I don't have that much control over it. I just tell the story that is fascinating me at the time. LLB: How did you get the idea for Mr. Perfect? Linda: I was just walking around in my kitchen, which I'm doing now, and this conversation just started playing in my head. A group of friends talking about what would make the perfect man. The one-liners were just zinging and I wasn't making up the lines. It was like the characters were talking and I was overhearing them. Sometimes it's like watching a movie. |
| It's like when you first meet someone new. At first you know nothing about them other than their name and their physical description. As you know them, you get to know them better, and characters are like that for me. I don't really know anything about them until they tell or show me. I don't try to force the characters into something that's out of character to them just to fit the plot because then they're just puppets. LLB: What happens when they stop talking to you? |
| Linda: Who can explain the process? It's just like meeting something. They'll let a little something slip, maybe you'll find out a little something about their family or a particular like or dislike. I have to tell you, a lot of what ended up in Mr. Perfect I had no idea was going to be in that book. I had absolutely no idea that Jaine was a car fanatic, that she loved any type of red vehicle. I had no idea! That just popped out. We writers sometimes hear voices and if the voices didn't tell us to write stories, they'd probably tell us to kill people. LLB: Many of your series titles fit into the sub-category I like to call the Cabin/Road Romance. To me, Duncan's Bride is a great Cabin Romance, as is White Lies. Others of your series titles are Road Romances, such as Midnight Rainbow. What is the draw of these types of romances? Linda: I think it's the pressure-cooker atmosphere. You're thrown into intimacy with what is basically a stranger. You have to rely on each other. You have nothing to distract you from this person other than risks to your life. You are totally focused on this person. It could be that to tell a forceful romance, I instinctively chose these scenarios because they are pressure-cooker situations. For them to be real grabbers, it couldn't be that they went to school together, were high school sweethearts, planned their June wedding, and it went off without a hitch. LLB: In one of our recent columns, we had a discussion about love scenes, and your name came up subsequently on one of our message boards. I mentioned that I thought the love scenes in your romances were particularly effective because they are often so raw, with a kind of desperation for connection that I think is appealing. I also think the |
| sexuality presented in your books seems to come from the hero's end and is overpowering and physical and male, which makes your books different. And, consider this reader's comment: "The hero's intense, almost primitive (or maybe atavistic) sexuality is directed with unswerving, laser-like focus on the heroine. A Linda Howard hero is very masculine, experienced, and even jaded. He is a throwback to his hunter-gatherer forbearers whose biological duty was to impregnate as many females as possible to ensure the continuation of his gene pool. |
| He is also the end product of Darwin's natural selection - he is smarter, stronger, faster, better than his fellow males. Yet despite thousands of years of genetic imprinting, his sexual appetite locks onto one woman. He cannot explain it intellectually, nor does he even understand it. This often results initially in the hero being angry about this attraction." Can you comment on these observations? And, will you always give readers the high level of sensuality they've come to expect? Do you think you've ever gone over the top? I think maybe you did in Loving Evangeline when he tells her at the end that she'd better be ready, basically, to be on her back all the time. Linda: To me, the ancestral hunter is part of the best part of men. Can you imagine being the focus of that type of intensity? Every book is different. Not every book, to me, has the same level of sensuality now. When I'm writing a love scene, I'm, again, watching a movie and reporting what they do. I think that the stronger the characters, the more intense the love scenes are going to be. Robert in Loving Evangeline was not happy about loving her as much as he did. He didn't like that at all - he was used to being in control and he couldn't control this. She had power over him that nobody else had ever had and he didn't like it. Nobody would. As far as always including a high level of sensuality, I've never made a conscious decision to include it, and I've certainly never made a conscious decision to lower the flame. I just do whatever the story dictates. LLB: On the one hand, we love many of your heroes, but on the other, sometimes they seem to go too far - the hero in All that Glitters, for instance. If you were writing that book today, would you write it differently? Linda: All that Glitters was written in 1980. It was a book of the times. I wouldn't write it today; the story wouldn't occur to me today. At that time, when you read romance, it was always the billionaire and the innocent younger woman. LLB: How do you feel about the re-issuing of some of your earlier stories? When you see somebody pick up ATG, do you want to tell them to put it down and pick up one of your newer books instead? Linda: Sure, that's exactly what I want to do. I look at it now and it's a bad book. It was my first book. I made a lot of beginner's mistakes in it. The story content has not aged well. It was a good book for the times. LLB: Do you have any other books that you feel the same way about? What specifically about your writing has changed since you first started? Linda: As you progress, I hope each one is a little better than ones before. The second book, An Independent Wife, was not as regressive, but when you read it now, it's very dated. I actually have a plot now. The earlier ones were totally character-driven, there was no action. I didn't have any action or adventure in my books that I can remember until probably Midnight Rainbow. It's like anything else - the more you do it, the more proficient at it you become. I think my sentence structure is better now. I think I'm better at plotting. I'm certainly better at working out the action. When I first started doing adventure, the action scenes were the absolute hardest to do. So I did what any thinking woman would do and I started reading man writers because it's more natural to them. I read John Maxim, Stephen Hunter. . . I would go to the men's Westerns, the men's Adventure series to get into |