 Romance/Love: January 11, 2023 Issue [#11746] |
This week: Writing Your First Romance Edited by: Lilli 🧿 ☕  
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“You can't write any form of fiction unless you enjoy reading it. You must be sincere in your approach. It's no good despising the form. So many people think they could earn some money from writing something for which they have no affection. It won't work. The first thing you have to have is belief.”
~ Charlotte Bingham
“Honestly...this is why I write. I write to get the happy ending I sometimes feel is eluding me. I write for my sanity.”
~ Debora Dennis |
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Have you ever thought about writing a romance story? While romance may seem like the easiest genre to write, it really isn't. The average romance reader is smart, discerning, and not easily impressed. Creating a successful romance takes a thoughtful strategy. It won’t just happen magically - much like real love!
Just as with all story-writing, in whichever genre, there is a formula to follow - or at least use as a guideline.
 The Recipe:
To create a satisfying romance novel, you need to follow a tried and true formula. And here it is; plain and simple:
Boy meets girl  Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl
There’s no use in trying to break this mold because most romance readers expect this formula. The good news is that there are countless ways that you can write this story!
Familiar and Easy plots:
 Friends become lovers
Soulmates, fate
A second chance to love again
While there are different devices you can use in your story, you can’t go wrong with the above tropes. Readers want to see themselves as the heroine. They want to believe that this love interest can exist, and they want the story to be in some way relatable to their own lives.
The heroine:
Create a heroine that reflects your average reader or target audience. Your heroine and the reader should share some sympathetic characteristics. Here are some ideas you can use to reflect the reader in your romance novel:
Age and physical attributes (hair color, eye color, ethnicity) of your protagonist
The mentality of your protagonist
Where your protagonist lives / story setting
The protagonist's job
The love interest:
To create the perfect love interest, be sure to give him some imperfections! The protagonist shouldn’t immediately love him or, even if she does, there should be something that gives her pause (age, a mysterious scar, job, etc.).
Engage your readers by making them fall in love with him, too. It’s not enough for the heroine to love him, the reader needs to 'get it'. Make the reader care about both main characters. In other words, don’t just objectify the hero. He should have faults but a true admiration for the heroine. And he should have a growth arc through the story as well.
The Motivation:
What is driving these two characters into a romance with one another? To help you with this, make sure you develop a background for each of these characters. This is especially true when writing romance stories.
Romance characters can sometimes fall flat so it's important to pay attention to motivation. Motivation is the reason behind the actions of a character. It can be something they believe about themselves, something they believe about the other person, or something they want to happen (or not happen). Motivations are often born out of the backstory of the characters. For example, perhaps the heroine doesn’t trust men because her father left her mother.
Where are we?
As you know, you use setting to create the mood and atmosphere of your story. But the setting can also become a main character in your romance novel. You can do historical, you can do contemporary. You can do bucolic, you can do metropolitan. Whichever setting you choose, use it to add tension to the characters in some way.
All's well that ends well!
Create a satisfying ending to your story. If you don’t, there is the risk of disappointing your readers. That’s not good. The best plot is the one where the boy gets the girl at the end. Period. So, no matter what it takes to get your characters to this ending, make it happen. |
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A summer fling, long ago. (Rhythms & Writing, July 2022)
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