Adventure with romance or romance with adventure?

I was asked the other day whether I considered my upcoming series of time travel books as romantic fiction or historical adventure fiction, all with a bit of fantasy thrown in - time travel, after all, is not part of mainstream science at the moment....but - well thats another blog topic.

This got me thinking.

My immediate response would be that the series is romance, against a backdrop of the medieval borderlands between Scotland and England. However, the more I pondered, I recognised that the stories are not a romance set against a time period. The plots are adventure stories but with the core being the romantic story of the two main characters.

Recognising this has pushed me back to the original plotting of the Border Lords Honour. I am not the greatest plotter to be honest, more of a 'pantster', developing the story as I go. But for the Border Lords Honour I did plot out the romantic story to make sure I had the right beat and pace.

With this in place the characters could develop the inner arc or the, conflicts - fall in love - can't be together - united and HEA. It was when I put this against the backdrop, which can be very two dimentional, a strange this happened. The backdrop became far more than a stage set.

Talking to my narrator for the audio version, he made the observation that some romance novels he has narrated have not had much 'depth'. What he found was while the main protaganists are wonderful to portray, the external plot was light and so the story lacked the 'depth'. This 'depth' is what enables a listener (or reader) to enter the world of the romantic leads.

He capsulated this by making the observation - "a light two dimensional backdrop is like watching a minamalist play on stage. The acting might be great but you cannot become immersed in the play. However when you watch a good movie on a big screen with multiple characters and viewpoints, you become part of that world, not just an observer."

Back to the book. As I mentioned earlier, I did not start off consciously creating a fully fleshed out other world. This came about organically, it just grew.

I found that, as new characters came into the story, they became fully rounded stand alone people, complete with flaws and blemishes. They where not set in stone. Their actions, as the plot progresses, are driven my the complexities of their characters. While this was fun to watch how these people became real people, there was another startling effect.

I found that with a three dimentional 'supporting cast' that the main charcters really came to life through their interaction with the rest of the 'cast'.

So back to the original question - romantic adventure or adventurous romance?

Well, both I think. Also, it probably does not matter, and is there any point trying to pigeonhole a story book?

Ill settle for a romantic medieval adventure story - with a bit of timetravel, and.......