Welcome (back) to the Scarlet Quill Society!

In 2023 YeahWrite’s free workshop is going back to the basics with a focus on tropes, the sometimes imperceptible and often underrated building blocks of writing. Check out the bottom of this post (and every post) for a roadmap to the year. We’ll be updating it with links each month as the posts go live, so that you can navigate through easily. And don’t forget to check out the Writing Resources tab up **gestures vaguely upwards** there to find our previous workshop series on prompts and editing (not at the same time).

The biggest bonus of the Scarlet Quill Society is that there are actual club meetings. That’s right! Once a month we’ll get together with you and talk about that month’s subject, answer questions, and record the chat for posterity. So if you have an easier time taking in information that way, or if you’re left with lingering questions after a monthly topical post, you’ve got a chance to get the full picture! Check out the full description at the main Scarlet Quill Society page.

War on Christmas (kidding, that phrase is there for the SEO)

The first thing that’s going to happen after this post goes live is going to be someone accusing us of hating Christmas. Which is funny because Christine is currently having a meltdown about a section of her lights being out and trying to find a replacement so that she doesn’t have mismatched lights all over the front of her house. And Rowan is trying to put together an order of candymaking supplies to do handmade candy canes. Also that thing where Rowan’s Christmas tree is up in literally every 2022 SQS video? Yeah. We sure do hate Christmas.

You know what we do hate about Christmas, though? The idea that the perfect expression of Christmas is the Hallmark Christmas Movie. That trope right there, that a (young but not THAT young) (almost always white) woman in charge of her own life, with a career of her choice that brings in a healthy paycheck and allows her to live independently, can only find fulfillment through returning to the dead-end town she left as soon as it was feasible to pursue the dream she is in the middle of actually realizing, and eventually give up everything she has worked for her entire life in favor of marrying a man who has never left that town and makes no money but who is well-liked. And along the way she discovers the magic of Christmas because why not.

But what if we could have the magic of the holiday season without the message that our personal goals and dreams don’t matter as much as appearing normal to a town of 1500 people? Let’s find out.

Why is this even a thing?

So what’s appealing about a Hallmark movie? On many levels, we get it – this is a movie about not having to be stressed out. It’s formulaic, which our brains find comforting, and it’s simple. It doesn’t make us work to understand it, we don’t have to analyze it, and everyone gets what they want. Actually, that’s what makes this dangerous: the feeling that everything about the movie is there to be seen and we don’t have to think about it or analyze it. So let’s do that, shall we?

Come with me as we examine… the Hallmark formula.

The movie opens with a woman. She’s got a career but she’s finding it exhausting and unfulfilling. She either can’t keep a boyfriend or her boyfriend is wealthy and wants her to do things that help her fit in with his wealthy friends. All of these things are things she would never do of her own volition.

Enter the inciting character. Whether it’s a Gay Best Friend, a Meddling Matchmaker, or a Magical Negro, this character is going to point out how unsatisfactory the MC’s life is and get her to accept some kind of invitation that she is currently planning to refuse. Maybe it’s going home to take care of an ailing parent. Maybe it’s a high school reunion. Whatever it is, the character is about to experience an abrupt setting change.

BOOM! Now we’re in the MC’s home town. She’s about to have either a meet-cute or a meet-ugly with a man she’s either known for years and forgotten about or who just moved to town and is super mysterious. She’s going to resist the attraction – either she’s resistant to love in general or she’s trying to be faithful to Chip or Chuck or whatever his name is. Just when she starts to fall for him, BOOM! A misunderstanding! This misunderstanding is going to be caused by the MC overhearing something out of context, or by a love rival telling her (or the guy!) something untrue. Hurt feelings ensue! Our heroine is packing up to move back to the city when THIRD BOOM! a huge romantic gesture occurs.

The heroine realizes that what she really wanted has been waiting for her all along. She quits her big city job and gets engaged to the Smalltown Guy. Her parents are thrilled.

Curtain.

And now… we ruin it.

So why isn’t this an adorable and innocent form of entertainment? Sure, it’s unrealistic, but everyone is happy, right?

Let’s examine it again through a lens of what we actually SEE, not what we’re being TOLD we see.

First of all, MC has a job. A career. She has worked hard on this. Sure, it’s not perfect and she has a ways to go, but honestly she’s like thirty tops, she has plenty of time to add on to what is already pretty substantial success. And is she really going to be happier if she abandons her dreams? Hallmark would sure like you to believe that. Also, clearly, wealthy men can only be jerks. And women only do things like golf or play polo or make small talk at parties if they’re being basically abused into it. This is now an incel Nice Guy wish fulfillment Reddit post, right? Women are only after guys with money and that can’t make them happy, but also they want careers, and they’re just not made to do real work, they’re too emotional. Also let’s consider her relationship with her parents. If they don’t support her career and dreams, why are they treated so sympathetically in the movie? And if they do, why do they turn around so fast and give their real approval once she resumes normative homemaking behavior?

Now that best friend. Look. Whoever they are, they’re the diversity hire for this movie. They don’t have a backstory. They exist to support an already successful thin white woman (who is for no apparent reason incredibly insecure despite her obvious successes and striking good looks) and are made out of a collection of tropes. Are they a Jolly Fat? A Sassy Black Woman? The Token Gay? Whoever they are, this character is hugely problematic. And their existence trains viewers to think of people with those characteristics as “supporting characters only.” Viewers are never supposed to aspire to be these characters – and if you see yourself in one of them, it is in fact designed to show you that your only value is adjacency to people who fit a very particular set of characteristics.

The love plot. Or really, the love subplot, because despite the starring role it plays in descriptions of the movie, this plot is only there to explain why someone who, again, is doing just fine, will stop doing everything that’s not Kinder, Küche, Kirche. [Note: no shade to women (or parents of any gender) who genuinely want to be at home raising kids rather than in a formal workplace. That’s a wonderful thing to do and to be able to do and to find fulfilling. The reason I’m hammering on it is that this character explicitly does not want that as of the opening of the movie, and is usually portrayed as never having wanted that. /rbg] The love plot is usually incredibly thin, hinging on a couple commonalities that are unlikely to be adequate to sustain a relationship in real life, and falling apart at the first misunderstanding. These characters never model any behaviors that are necessary for actual partnerships like having adult discussions, meeting each other halfway, or committing to making a change when they hurt each other. Instead, there will be some kind of Grand Gesture (looking at you love actually) that leads to, well, you know where this is going. Not to treating-each-other-like-people town.

So your takeaways here are:

If you’re a woman, you cannot be happy unless you give up everything you ever wanted in favor of enjoying a heteronormative relationship with someone you barely know. Your dreams are less important than literally everyone else’s, but you will be so happy if you give them up that it won’t matter.

If you’re a man, you shouldn’t be required to bring anything to a relationship beyond maybe some good looks and a reputation for honesty. Not actual honesty, as we can see in the movie, just the reputation. Men with more (looks, money, personality) than you don’t deserve the partners they have and it is fair and appropriate for you to resent them and try to take their partners away.

If you’re marginalized in any way, you kind of deserve that, it’s a perfect place for you, and you will find true happiness ensuring that people who look like main characters get to be main characters.

In short, it’s fascist propaganda. Sorry. 

So what could we be doing instead?

Y’all we are so excited for our panel discussion this month, so no spoilers for that, but here are some things we’d love to see in a holiday movie:

• More holidays (and not in a tokenizing way where Hannukah or Diwali are just used as convenient standins without any real understanding of what those holidays are and aren’t about)
• People doing the actual work to make love work for them
• People whose partners support their dreams – mutually. No more giving up your career or plans just because Joe Pinetree has nice shoulders and a plaid shirt.
• Communities that aren’t homogenous. And especially we’re tired of the thing where the heroine lives in the city and has a diverse cast of friends but the all-white hometown is the only place where “real” community happens. You know, speaking of white supremacist propaganda.
• Not hooking up with someone while their parent is dying. And not fulfilling a dying parent’s wish at the expense of the child’s humanity. If you don’t want kids, main character, you’re still not going to want them after your mother dies of cancer with her hand on your pregnant belly. (Please tell us that this absolutely plausible example of a Hallmark plot isn’t real, we didn’t look it up)
• Lasting solutions instead of big gestures
• Restorative solutions instead of vindictive comeuppances. Yes, we know it’s satisfying when a bird poops on the mean Homecoming Queen, but what does that really do for anyone as a person in the story?

And so much more, right? (Come tell us your wishlist on Discord.)

In conclusion…

It’s fine to love the holiday season. To love the idea of family and lights in windows and meals taken together. Even to have a little wish fulfillment fantasy about maybe this time Uncle Bob actually listens and learns an important lesson about his nibling’s fundamental humanity. What we don’t want is to absorb a side of white supremacist propaganda that someone slipped in there like surprise mushrooms in your gravy. Our present to you this year might have been a ruined childhood, but yours to us could be the stories we want to hear, the ones that don’t pick and choose which hearts to warm or who is “wholesome” and who is othered.

THIS MONTH’S SPECIAL GUESTS

Racheline Maltese

With Erin McRae (she/her), Racheline Maltese (they/them) writes romance novels about difficult people with complicated lives. Their novels have won or finaled for Library Journal’s Best Indie Ebook, Publishers Weekly’s BookLife Prize, the Indie Author Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award, among others. Their most recent book is That Special Something. You can find them on: The platform formerly known as Twitter (@racheline_m), bluesky (@rachelinem), Instagram/Threads (@rachelinem), and jointly with Erin McRae on Instagram: @erin.and.racheline

Genevra Hsu

Genevra Hsu learned to read at three years old, and has had loud opinions about writing ever since. She’s a queer martial artist, gardener and baker who lives in a 140-year-old house in Southwestern Virginia with her husband and two peaceable housecats, and when she’s not reading, writing, cussing at bindweed or coming up with weird cupcakes, she can reliably be found watching Chinese dramas. She keeps an Instagram full of garden photos at www.instagram.com/foxwatchful.

KTO

Your turn!

Got questions? Let’s continue this conversation in the Coffeehouse on Facebook or Discord. And keep an eye out for the next face-to-face (face-to-Zoom?) meeting of the Scarlet Quill Society. 

Join the Scarlet Quill Society!

Live Scarlet Quill Society meetings take place once a month. This month’s meeting is scheduled for December 13 at 5pm US Eastern Time. (Not on our mailing list? Sign up here!) Future dates and times TBD based on member and guest availability, but we’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible. (Yeah. We know. It’s best to have a fixed time. But we think it’s even better than best to be able to accommodate a diverse slate of exciting and qualified panelists, and we hope you’ll agree.)

You can also sign up for a monthly membership! Each month, paid Society members will receive an email with a link to the Zoom meeting. If not every topic interests you, you can also purchase one-time access passes to each month’s meeting via Ko-Fi. If you can’t make it to the meeting, or you don’t like to speak on camera, you are welcome to submit questions before the meeting that our editors will answer in the meeting.

• $5 one-time access to this month’s Zoom session. (The January meeting is free, but please use this link to RSVP!)
• $5 monthly subscription (Pen level): Access to all the live meetings and recordings as soon as they’re uploaded, as well as a private Discord channel where we can discuss tropes in more detail, and your topical questions will be answered by YeahWrite editors! Pen level members can also suggest tropes for future live discussions – our goal is to give you what you want and need!
• $3 monthly subscription (Pencil level): Access to the meeting recordings as soon as they’re uploaded and to the private Discord channel!

A week after the meeting, recordings will become available to all at no cost, but if you find them useful we encourage you to leave a tip in our tip jar—it helps keep the lights on over here and allows us to keep bringing you the high-quality workshop content you’ve come to expect from us, as well as acquire some exciting guest panelists. You can also sign up for a $1/month Paper level membership just to show us you love us.