What is Clean Romance and Why I write It by Savannah Hendricks
The genre of clean romance is also known as wholesome or sweet romance. But what does
this genre actually mean?
For the sake of flow, I’ll refer to it as clean romance in this post. When you watch a movie or read a book without sex shown or mentioned, you are thus watching/reading clean romance. Or, as some like to call it, boring. Clean romance is not for everyone, just as books and movies with copious amounts of sex are not for everyone. Fifty Shades of Grey or You anyone? Not all of us will raise our hands. But why not meet in the middle at PG-13, because that’s a not clean romance and it’s not enough to make it an R rated romance.
Alas, clean romance doesn’t need to be boring. And if done correctly, it’s just as much a
romantic story as one with sex. Traditionally, clean romance shouldn’t hint that sex has or
will happen, but sometimes those lines are crossed by either the author or a publisher
wanting to spice it up a bit more and they end up stretching the genre.
I write clean romance because when it comes down to love, there are many components. I
don’t like to cloud those up by adding sex into the mix. While it’s a factor in a relationship, I
don’t care to read page after page of it or watch five minutes of it on TV or in a movie. Move
over Fabio book cover. It also doesn’t mean that I don’t read those types of books. I enjoy a
few Colleen Hoover novels, but I don’t make it my everyday read.
Telling a love story without sex is a challenge. I would have a much easier and quicker go of
writing a novel if I could easily follow the path: Boy meets girl, they date, they fall in love,
and they have sex. Or depending on the story, maybe it’s the opposite order. And that’s
what most romance novels have: sex. Now take a second and think about popular movies
like Sleepless in Seattle, or The Wedding Planner. You guessed it, no sex. So it can be done
and done well.
Often, okay, maybe a lot of the times, clean romance is categorized and clumped with
inspirational and Christian romance. This is incorrect. While clean romance can contain
religious elements, they are not the same. Just because the main characters don’t have sex
doesn’t mean they’re Christians.
Sadly, for those of us who write clean romance, and our group numbers are small, we are
often given a disapproving eye roll. Readers can think our stories aren’t genuine romance
without sex. Did you know you can have passion, love, romance, adventure, humor, heart-
pounding moments, and events without sex? It’s true! My first romance novel, Ground in
January, won for best romance novel in the 2019 Arizona/New Mexico Book awards.
So if you’ve never read a clean romance novel, be sure to give it a try. You might actually fall
in love.
Find out more about Savannah Hendricks at her website: http://www.savannahhendricks.com/
I love how you point out that clean romance isn't automatically boring and can sit in that PG-13 middle ground without needing to be either sex-free or R-rated. The way you say it can be just as romantic without sex really resonates, and I appreciate the honest take on different reader preferences. By the way, I keep a free fancy text generator and Unicode inspector that turns plain text into 23 stylish Unicode fonts (bold, script, fraktur) and cleans hidden or invisible characters I like to share: https://glyphsift.com/
What a great explanation of clean romance! It's so helpful to understand the genre, and on another note , sometimes you just need a good bulk image background remover for other projects.
I'm not a puzzle person, but this Meowdoku thing got me. The board is just colored regions, and you place one cat per row, one per column, one per color, and they can't touch at all. The deductions chain so nicely.
I really liked this post! It's true that clean romance isn't for everyone, but it's nice to know there are stories without all the explicit stuff. Thanks for explaining it so clearly. by Bus Traffic Fever
A friend said I should try marble sort because I like sorting things. She was right. The game is basically a 3D conveyor belt puzzle where you release marbles from above and try to get them into matching boxes. The belt moves constantly, so you have to think about when to drop each marble. I love the feeling of a clean run where everything chains together. It’s not frantic—it’s more like a satisfying flow state. I’ve been playing it every day for a month.