Find The Middle Ground Please - Writing Women's Fiction

This last weekend, I was reading submissions and there was a ton of women's fiction coming in. People, you have to find a happy medium here when it comes to plot lines. I literally saw two styles of writing. 

1) Totally depressing stories that would lead anyone who reads it to heavy drinking.

2) Ridiculous and stereotypical "rom-con" plot lines masquerading as women's fiction. 

And guess what? I pretty much rejected both types and the reason was simple. readers, in no way, would be able to connect with either of the plot lines as they should with a true women's fiction novel. Both concepts are simply too extreme.

I have talked about this before, but the thing that makes a women's fiction novel unique is the way it SHOULD connect with the reader. These stories need to have "a take away." That unique idea or concept that the reader walks away with, after reading the book saying "Now I get it. Now I understand X going on in my life, or in the world." These are stories about people, how they see the world and how they navigate issues going on around them. 

However, when writers, in an attempt to "stand out" or "make the story interesting" pile on so much extra stuff, no reader is going to be able to relate to all of it. 

• We can relate to a single divorce, but we can't relate to a divorce, and then pile on a personal disease, a parent who is also sick, a loss of a job and then a kid with a drug problem and then another who is pregnant. 
• We can relate to a funny situation of meeting up with the person you had a crush on in college again, but when we add in that each of you have 3 kids, a housekeeper, and two of the kids want to start dating each other, and you are in competition for the same job in a company, and you both have to relocate, and there is the crazy lady at church trying to get the characters together... too much.

Along the same lines, when it comes to women's fiction, there were a lot of you out there just writing your personal stories and then "fictionalizing" the stories. Honestly, my recommendation is to just write your story and don't try to change it. When authors fictionalize their story, they often add on all of that other "stuff" because they feel "their story" is not that exciting, and then they run into these same issues.