Navigating ‘romantasy’ as a person of faith

When Sariah Wilson’s health insurance provider refused to cover a substantial medical bill, she felt desperate. To pay the bill, Wilson and her husband took out a second mortgage on their home in Utah, accumulating what she describes as a “ridiculously sickening amount” of debt. She had one solution in mind: if she could write a best-selling book, perhaps she could pay off the debt. So with the support of her husband, Wilson, who was already the author of romance novels including “The Chemistry of Love” and “Roommaid,” got to work.

Thirty-nine days later, she had produced “A Tribute of Fire,” Wilson’s first foray into romance fantasy, or “romantasy,” a genre where the plot typically revolves around a romantic relationship, but is set within a fantastical world filled with magic, mythical creatures, or supernatural elements, and battles between good and evil.

At the center of the story, inspired by the Greek story of the Locrian maidens, is the princess of a dying nation, Locris, who competes in a life-and-death race to restore the glory of her homeland. Along the way she falls in love with an attractive sailor from the enemy nation. American writer Jodi Picoult “inhaled the story,” she wrote in the blurb for the book, which will be released Nov. 1. Picoult also said the book offers a “cocktail of stunning twists, fierce characters, sisterhood, magic, and enough heat to torch a small country.”

Although the romance genre is not new for Wilson, who is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, working on “A Tribute of Fire” brought into focus the questions she had been grappling with throughout her career: how should an author balance the expectations of the romantasy genre with her personal values and moral standards?

‘This book saved us’

Wilson turned to writing romantasy in part because of the profitability of the genre. The fantasy and romance blend has recently found huge commercial success with series like “A Court of Thorns and Roses” by Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros’s “Fourth Wing” series which swept the market, gaining a dedicated fan base.

Fantasy has long been a genre dominated by male writers like Brandon Sanderson. But as female writers have entered the scene in greater numbers, fantasy became infused with romantic elements and plots. Romantasy plots often feature strong, dynamic female protagonists who are not only caught up in a larger battle between good and evil, but are also navigating intense romantic relationships.

The social media platform TikTok, particularly through its “BookTok” community, has played a significant role in popularizing romantasy. This grassroots marketing has driven book sales and broadened the genre’s reach, especially among young women in their early 20s, who make up a significant portion of the readership.

Wilson, who grew up in a family of nine children in southern California, inherited her love for romance from her mother, and an affinity for fantasy from her father. Wilson is a graduate of Brigham Young University where she studied history. She started out writing Book of Mormon fiction, a genre of literature that draws inspiration from the people, events and themes found in the Book of Mormon, one of the sacred texts of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But the genre didn’t draw the national readership that Wilson had hoped for, so she shifted to romantic comedies and eventually landed a contract with Montlake, one of Amazon’s publishing houses, that promises “thousands of happily ever afters.”

Around the time of Wilson’s family emergency, a mythology-inspired story had already been swirling in Wilson’s head, and when she realized she needed a new project to pay the debt, romantasy felt like the right new direction. “It feels very much like what I’m supposed to be doing,” she told me.

Wilson is a fast writer, but completing 520 pages and 156,000 words in just 39 days is an impressive feat for even the most efficient writers. “This thing just poured out of me,” Wilson said, noting that she doesn’t create storyboards or timelines when writing her novels.

The book sold as a “preempt,” an offer made by a publisher to acquire the rights to a manuscript before it is widely shopped around to other publishers. “A Tribute of Fire” is the first book in a trilogy, and Wilson has also written the second book of the trilogy — in 31 days — even though the first advance she received was enough to pay the remaining balance on the loan.

“It kind of saved us,” Wilson told me. “It’s a special book to me.”

‘Where do you draw the line?’

As Wilson worked to infuse “A Tribute of Fire” with emotional intensity and to write scenes that convey physical intimacy, she came up against tough decisions about how to tell her character’s love story in a way that stayed true to the genre, but also to her own values. “This is something I have been wrestling with for a long time,” Wilson told me, noting that while she was growing up, even reading romance books was frowned upon. “What’s OK? What’s not OK? Where do you draw that line? What am I comfortable with?”

She’s struggled with these questions a lot over the years, she told me. She talked to church leaders, and also to other Latter-day Saint authors who wrote romance about how they navigated love scenes in their books.

“It’s very much been for me, exploring and praying about what I think is OK,” Wilson told me. Earlier in her career Wilson had wrestled with other questions related to her faith: for example, should her characters drink alcohol or coffee? Eventually she began to be comfortable separating her own beliefs from the characters she was portraying on the page.

Physicality is essential to a romantic relationship, and and she came to believe that she shouldn’t shy away from it in her writing. But she is deliberate and careful about references and descriptions when describing intimacy. To Wilson, her narrative is deeply human — and “sexuality and romance is part of that.”

Others have navigated the problem by letting the readers fill in the details in their mind.

Stephenie Meyer, the author of the bestselling “Twilight” series and also a Latter-day Saint, has publicly addressed some of the tension between the fantasy-romance genre and her faith. “When my editor wanted premarital sex in my story, I explained that I won’t write that, and she let it go,” Meyer said in a 2005 interview . While there is sexual tension between the two main characters, they don’t consummate their relationship until their honeymoon.

Meyer has defended her choices in the books, saying in a Q&A on her website , “If I could go back in time, knowing everything I know right now, and write the whole series again, I would write exactly the same story.”

Romance novelist RaeAnne Thayne, who has written dozens of books, told Deseret News in 2018, “My prose is a little bit sparse compared to a lot of writers. I think that’s one of the things that my journalism helped me to do, is give sparse details and let the reader’s imagination do the rest.”

Fantasy romance, as opposed to contemporary romance, also allowed Wilson to include more metaphorical or symbolic language to talk about romantic relationships. But regardless of her literary and language choices, readers are bound to find the books either too explicit or too tame, Wilson said. Some people told Wilson to just stop writing; others have encouraged her to keep writing.

But ultimately Wilson believes people can use their own judgment in the kinds of media they consume, including books.

“It may not be the answer for you — it doesn’t mean that’s not the answer for anybody else,” she said.