#romancewriting

I share writing tips like this because storytelling is something I genuinely love. I’m also a neurodivergent writer trying to build a sustainable writing career while working full-time, which means writing time can be hard to come by.

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If we listen to the gatekeeping logic that you can only write what you are or know, then I think fiction collapses entirely. Stephen King would need to stop writing about women, psychic children, and possessed cars. Octavia Butler couldn't have written about sci-fi alien-human male breeding and pregnancy in Bloodchild. Kazuo Ishiguro shouldn't have written The Remains of the Day from the perspective of an English butler. And…Rachel Reid shouldn’t write about male gay hockey players. As King Mongkut says:

(OK, don’t get me started on Hollywood whitewashing and yellowface casting. I have a lot of feelings but not enough knowledge on this topic.)

I think there's a difference between writing across gender, class, or time periods, and writing across an axis of oppression. As a non-White straight cis woman, I benefit from heteronormativity. I'm not part of the LGBTQ+ community that has fought for decades for the right to exist, to marry, to simply love openly. I hope that I’m a good ally and I continue to learn and grow and show up with love. So when I write about gay men, am I colonizing their stories? Am I tourism-ing through their experience for my own creative fulfillment and, let's be honest, potential profit? I really struggle sometimes with this; it’s so easy to see other writers who probably started in MM romance fic fandoms make it in the mainstream and want to emulate that success. 

My gateway drug was The X-Files. Specifically Alex Krycek. I was a diehard Mulder/Scully shipper, devoted to their perfect slowburn romance with the fervor only a romantic teenager can muster. Then season two gave us Alex Krycek, in the episode "Sleepless," that lying, sleazy double (triple? quadruple?) agent with cheekbones that could cut glass, and suddenly I was confronted with something I didn't have language for. 

Krycek…you glorious, delicious, traitorous scumbag piece of shit…

(Sidebar: To actor Nicholas Lea, I was so fucking happy to see you back on the small screen in Netflix’s House of Usher).  

Okay, where was I? Right. The on-screen chemistry between these two alpha male characters, the push-pull of trust and betrayal, the way they circled each other like snarling wolves, the way Mulder was always shoving Krycek against walls, against tables, getting right in his face – I had never experienced anything like it. I didn't know I could want Mulder/Krycek. And in those early days of the internet, finding my people took serious archaeological work. Hours of hunting through webrings and Yahoo groups, following breadcrumb trails of broken links, finally stumbling into forums where other women were writing exactly the electric, dangerous dynamic I'd been craving. Finding my freak was possible, but it required a lot of dedication. Back in those days, we printed our fanfics and mailed them around the world. 

I remember trying to write Mulder/Scully fanfic, and I could never make it right. To be honest, I didn’t really like Mulder, he was a total asshole and he never really treated Scully as an equal. And what did she see in him; she was always cleaning up his mess and close to sinking her own career. 

(Sidebar: Gillian Anderson, I love you!)

I read a lot of heterosexual romance novels, even when I was too young to have actual sexual experiences. It was all fantasy and fun; to be kidnapped and swept off my feet by pirate Fabio or deflowered by the rakish scoundrel Fabio; to be the young and thin and beautiful heroine (and White with blonde hair or fiery red hair). The virgin part, that was universally true. But it was also a little off-putting, to feel the heroine’s desires and choices. Like I had no choice but to be her if I wanted to read the story. It never occurred to me that I could be the pirate! 

What drew me to Mulder/Krycek was that I could write about sexual desire without inserting myself into it. I could make Mulder/Krycek as power imbalanced, as dysfunctional, as sexual as I wanted, without being part of it. I mean, canonically, Mulder was always roughing up Krycek; and Krycek did kiss Mulder. 

I know, I know, context matters. But...look at Mulder's face.

It was creatively freeing to explore power dynamics without worrying about reinforcing gender stereotypes; writing aggressive sexuality, vulnerability, and emotional mess and repression, without it being read as commentary on what women should want or how women should behave. There was a clean separation between me and the page. I wasn’t writing as a woman in those moments, I was a storyteller, imagining what it might be like to want someone when you're both navigating the same gendered expectations, the same socialization, the same cultural scripts about masculinity.

Is that fetishization or is it empathy? I’ve read and heard a lot of commentary about both. 

The “defense” or “justification” many straight women writers offer is that fiction is an act of empathy. We're trying to understand experiences different from our own. We're expanding our imaginative capacity. We're building bridges of understanding.

I believe that's true. I also believe that's maybe not enough.

Because empathy without accountability is just voyeurism. And I am, in some fundamental way, a voyeur to the gay male experience. I can research, I can listen to queer voices, I can have gay male friends read my writing. But I will never know what it's like to come out to disapproving parents, to navigate a relationship when the world tells you it's wrong, to be scared to hold your partner's hand in public.

I try to write it honestly. I try to write about men and male characters who have full, complex inner lives, who exist in communities, who have histories and futures beyond the romance plot. And I also just like to write about sex, because sex can also be the story. I know I’m writing fantasy. I get that I’m not writing a documentary, that it’s not a representation in the capital-R sense. MM romance is, overwhelmingly, written by women for women. The readership is primarily female. And, yeah, the stories are fucking hot.

Some critics call this fetishization, and I don't entirely argue with that. But I also think there's something else happening, something about women's sexuality that we're still not entirely comfortable discussing. I think women's desire is policed in very particular ways. We're supposed to be the desired, not the pursuers. We're supposed to be the objects, not the subjects. And when we do express desire, it's supposed to be romantic, relational, soft. Not raw or selfish or purely physical. And no one wants to talk about women’s orgasms. 

MM romance, for many women readers and writers, is a space where we can explore desire without those constraints. Where sexuality can be urgent, messy, selfish, complicated. Where two people can want each other desperately without one of them having to perform femininity or navigate the unequal power dynamics that still exist in most heterosexual relationships.

Is that using gay men as props in our own sexual liberation? Maybe. But I also think it's more generous to say that we're creating art that reflects something true about desire itself, that it's transformative, transgressive, and sometimes most clearly visible when we look at it from a different lens.

I’ve never believed that I need “permission” to write anything. Fiction isn't a zero-sum game where my story takes the place of a gay author's story.  

I do believe that I have a responsibility to write with care, to avoid harmful tropes, to not speak for gay men but to imagine with them. I have a responsibility to support and amplify queer voices, to buy and promote stories, arts, media by LGBTQ+ authors, to make sure I'm not the voice in this space that readers are hearing. I have a responsibility to stay humble about what I don't know, to listen when gay readers tell me I've gotten something wrong, to keep learning and growing. And I have a responsibility to be honest about why I write what I write, to acknowledge that this is also about my own creative fulfillment, my own exploration of desire and identity, my own need to tell stories that feel urgent and true.

I don't have a neat conclusion here. I'm still figuring this out, probably the same as you. I’m still negotiating the ethics of imagination, still wondering if what I'm doing is bridge-building or appropriation or some unstable mix of both.

Fiction has always been an act of transgression. We write what we're not supposed to say. We explore what we're afraid to experience. We try on lives that aren't our own to understand something essential about what it means to be human. As a straight woman writing MM romance, I'm aware I'm walking a line. But I think that line is worth walking, with full awareness that I might stumble. Because the alternative, staying safely within the boundaries of my own experience, feels like a betrayal of what fiction is supposed to do.

I'll keep writing. And I'll keep questioning. And I'll keep listening to the voices that tell me when I've gone too far, or not far enough, or just slightly to the left of where I should be. I hope that you will, too! Because these conversations, which are messy and uncomfortable, it’s the only way any of us learn to write across differences with integrity. 

So for all the MM pairings that I write about: Hannibal and Will, Hotch and Spencer, Peter and Chris, Bond and Q, Shane and Ilya…

They're still waiting for me to finish their stories. Keep on writing!