On Writing Romance (12 page)

Answer the following questions about your main characters. It's usually most productive to address one character at a time, but if you run into difficulty answering the questions about one, try switching over to the other main character for a while.

As you're answering the questions, look for points of agreement and disagreement between the characters. If he's from a big family and she's from a small one, how might that create problems for them in developing a relationship?

• What is this person's name?
  

• Why was he named that?
  

• Age?
  

• Birthday?
  

• What astrological sign was he born under? Does it matter to him?
  

• Where does he live? (Urban? Small town? Rural?)
  

• Why did he choose to live there? Was this geographical location his choice or someone else's?
  

• Does he live in an apartment? A house? What type or style? Did he choose the residence, and why?
  

• Does he live by himself? With others?
  

• What kind of vehicle does he drive?
  

• What are his important material possessions?
  

• Give a brief physical description.
  

• What are his hobbies?
  

• What kind of music does he enjoy?
  

• Does he have pets? If not, why not? Would he like to have pets?
  

• What are his favorite foods and drinks?
  

• If he has an unexpected free half-day, how does he spend it?
  

• How would a friend describe him?
  

• What is his education?
  

• What is his job? (For historical heroes and heroines, describe their place in family life or society. How do they occupy themselves?)
  

• Is this a long-term career or just a job?
  

• Why did he choose that type of work?
  

• How does he feel about his work?
  

• What does he want to be doing in twenty years?
  

• How does he feel about the opposite sex?
  

• Why does he feel that way?
  

• Is he married? Single? Divorced?
  

• Does he have children?
  

• Does he have former lovers?
  

• How would a former date or lover describe him?
  

• Who are his parents?
  

• Does he have brothers and sisters?
  

• Where was he born and raised?
  

• How important is the family relationship to him?
  

• Who is his best friend? Why?
  

• Who is his worst enemy? Why?
  

• Which one event in his life has made this person what he is today?
  

• How does that turning point in the character's life relate to the other main character in the story?
  

• How does he feel about himself?
  

• What trait does he want to keep secret from the world?
  

• What does he like most about his life?
  

• What does he dislike most about his life?
  

• What one thing would he like to change about the world?
  

• What would this person die to defend?
  

• What is his most likeable character trait?
  

• What is his most unlikeable or troublesome character defect?
  

• As the story begins, what is his problem?
  

• What does he do that makes this problem worse?
  

• Who is this person's love interest?
  

• What qualities in the other main character are most attractive to this person?
  

• What is this person's ideal happy ending?
  

• What reaction do you want the readers to have to this person?
  

• Why should the readers care about this person?
  

Did your discoveries about your characters surprise you? Do you feel more prepared to write about these people? Do you have more insight into how they might act or how they'll behave under stress or pressure?

You may feel tempted, now that you have all this information, to find places to plug it into the story. But just because you know something about a character doesn't mean your readers need to know it. What your heroine does on an unexpected afternoon off might have relevance to the plot, but usually it doesn't. Select those facts that best illustrate the person — the ones that have a strong impact upon the story — to share with the readers, and leave the rest out.

Because your book is a romance novel, readers will know from the moment they pick it up that the hero and heroine will get together at the end — simply watching them get acquainted and fall in love isn't intriguing enough to keep them reading. What will make your readers turn pages is the difficulty this couple faces in getting together. It's the conflict between them, threatening to keep them from reaching the happy ending you've promised, that keeps the readers interested.

Simply giving your characters a problem doesn't automatically create conflict. Only when the problem involves both of them and creates tension between them do you have conflict.

Perhaps the problem that brings your hero and heroine together is a project they're both assigned to. But if they're getting along great, splitting the work evenly, and each one is complimenting the other's achievement, that's not very interesting. They have a problem, all right — a big project to finish — but no conflict.

However, if each is convinced that he or she has the one right approach that will make the project successful, or each thinks the other is trying to avoid the hardest part of the work, or if the person who gets credit for the results will also win a big promotion that both of them want, then you have a situation that causes tension and keeps the readers turning pages to find out what happens.

If your divorced spouses have remained good friends through the years, their child's wedding probably isn't going to make a very exciting story. But if they haven't spoken to each other since the decree, and one of them is coming to the wedding with a new significant other — or if one of them is in favor of the wedding and the other opposed — then there are likely to be fireworks surrounding the nuptials.

Conflict is the difficulty between the hero and heroine that threatens to keep them from getting together. What causes the hero and heroine to be at odds with each other? What prevents them from being too comfortable? What do they disagree about? What do the hero and heroine have at stake? Why is this difficulty so important to each of them? Why is it important to the readers?

Conflict is not:

• Fighting, arguing, or disagreeing.
  Sometimes conflict is expressed in heated discussions or shouting matches, but two people can be locked in conflict without ever raising their voices, and they can also bicker incessantly without ever addressing an important issue.
  

• A delay.
  An event that simply delays a hero's or heroine's progress toward a goal is only an incident. If another character sidetracks the heroine to talk about an unrelated problem, and this discussion keeps her from confronting the hero, that's not conflict.
  

• Failure to communicate.
  Misunderstanding each other, making wrong assumptions, jumping to conclusions, or wrongly judging one another are not illustrations of conflict, but of the hero and heroine's inability to make themselves clear.
  

• The trouble-causing interference of another person.
  If the meddling of another person causes problems, the main characters can appear too passive to take charge of their own lives or stand up for themselves.
  

• A main character's unwillingness to admit that the other person is attractive.
  Though romance characters attempt to fight off their attraction, conflict lies in the underlying reasons why it seems inappropriate or unwise to fall in love with this person.
  

What kind of problems your characters should face depends on a number of factors, including what sort of people they are. Not everybody will be bothered by the same events or issues. A difficulty one person would shrug off might paralyze someone else. The difficulty faced by your characters is particularly important and involving to them because of their past experiences or their personalities.

The severity and intensity of the problems you give your characters also depends on the size of the book you're writing. The longer the story — the more pages you need to fill — the bigger the problem you need to create for your characters. A story involving the hunt for a serial killer will take more space and time than one in which the hero and heroine are figuring out who vandalized the local school.

Whatever the problem is, it must strike readers as important. A problem that makes the readers roll their eyes and say “Get over it” isn't likely to drive an emotionally compelling story.

The central difficulty your characters face must be one that can grow more complex and involved as the book continues. If all they do through the whole story is talk about the problem introduced in chapter one, the ending — when they finally settle on an answer that should have been apparent from the beginning — will be unsatisfying. If the supposed conflict arises because the characters misunderstand each other and they don't find out until the last chapter that there's no real problem after all, the story will bog down.

In order to make conflict even more compelling, you need two problems — not just one.

First, you need an initial situation that brings the couple together and keeps them together so they can get to know each other. This problem is known as the short-term problem, or the external conflict. It might be a job or a family situation — a difficulty outside themselves that they have to resolve.

But you also need a deeper difficulty for each character. This deeper problem — called the long-term problem, or the internal conflict — is likely to be a past experience or a character flaw that makes it seem impossible for these two people to ever find happiness together.

The short-term problem is the difficulty or event that puts the couple in contact and causes their initial disagreements. It's often called the external conflict because it is usually caused by something or someone outside of the characters' control.

Since the action of the story doesn't really get started until the hero and heroine are both present and the conflict is under way, this initial problem appears early in the book — often starting in the first few pages. At the latest, the rough outlines of the short-term problem are in place by the end of the first chapter.

The short-term problem is often the event described in the back cover blurb. It is usually connected to the hook, the attention-getter that will cause readers to pick up the book.

You can also think of the short-term problem as the difficulty or obstacle that makes the main characters interesting enough to be the subject of a story. What change does the heroine face that threatens her way of life, that will change her forever? What challenge must she confront? This difficulty is the character's short-term problem — the change, challenge, or threat she faces at or near the start of the story.

The heroine's short-term problem is not simply the entrance of the hero into her life. He may appear because of the change or threat the short-term problem represents, but simply meeting him is not the problem.

Each of the main characters will have a short-term problem — though sometimes there's just one short-term problem that affects both the hero and heroine:

• They're assigned to work on a project together.
  

• They're a divorced couple whose grown child is getting married and who insists they sit together at the wedding.
  

• He's just bought her family's ancestral estate.
  

• There's only one apartment available and they both need a place to live.
  

If the short-term problem isn't actually shared, then the two individual troubles will be closely related. Perhaps they can help each other to solve their difficulties:

• He needs a house and she's a real estate agent desperate for a commission.
  

• She's trying to establish a new business; he needs special services from that business.
  

• She's inherited a business but can't run it herself; he has the expertise to run it but not the money to buy it.
  

• He needs a fiancé to help him close a business deal, and she needs money to finish school.
  

The more solid and down-to-earth the short-term problem is, the easier it will be to construct a plot. Though the character can have more than one problem going on at a time, it's most useful for story development if the short-term problem is confined to one clearly stated problem per character — either a single problem that involves them both or two related problems.

New writers often come up with very amorphous initial conflicts, such as:

• Neither of the characters wants to take the chance of trusting again.
  

• He has to make her accept a truth she doesn't want to face.
  

• They've each been deceived in the past and won't tolerate being lied to again.
  

While those concepts can be developed into interesting problems, they're hard to grasp, hard to illustrate, and hard to write about.

And they're actually long-term problems — character flaws or painful past experiences — rather than short-term ones. Lack of trust, unwillingness to commit, and bad past relationships often play a big part in the characters' eventual development and growth, but they're hard to get a grip on when they're set up as the initial problem.

If the characters' mutual problem is lack of trust, what do they talk about throughout the story? If they could actually discuss their difficulty in trusting, they'd be two-thirds of the way to solving the problem — but they can't trust each other enough to talk about it. Worse, without a certain amount of trust, there's not much else to talk about — and characters who have nothing to talk about are very hard to write about.

If, on the other hand, your two characters are at odds about who gets custody of the kid, or how to handle the business they've inherited, or what they're going to do about their marriage of convenience after it's not convenient to be married anymore, then they have lots of stuff that they must talk about — and they have many opportunities to test, explore, and discover that the other is a person who can be trusted after all.

Remember that a short-term problem is not a single event, so it can't be solved in a single step. “While rock climbing, Julie falls off a cliff” isn't a true short-term problem; she'll either be rescued or she'll die, and in either case the story is over.

The real short-term problem is what got her onto the cliff in the first place. Is she trying to protect the precious papers she's carrying from the bad guy who's pursuing her? Is she learning to climb because the man she thinks she loves insists he won't marry her unless she shares his hobby of rock climbing? In either of these cases (or a hundred others), when she's rescued she still faces the problem that got her onto the cliff, plus she has the complications of a broken leg and a black eye and the hero — who rescued her — hanging around.

Some additional examples of complex short-term problems include:

• A hero who is offered a job in a different city, but a heroine who doesn't want to leave her challenging career to follow him.
  

• A heroine who wants to have a baby, but a hero who thinks he'd be a terrible dad.
  

• A heroine and hero who must work together despite a painful past relationship.
  

The key to all of these problems is that they create conflict and tension between the two characters, and they all offer potential for increasing complexity and involvement.

If your short-term problem isn't the sort that grows more complicated, you may be tempted to toss in unrelated obstacles in an attempt to create extra trouble for the characters. Your heroine might fall out of a tree, get hit by a car, and encounter a rattlesnake all in the first three chapters. But adding obstacles is not the same as developing a conflict, because one obstacle doesn't lead into or cause the next; they're just random happenings. Unless each event contributes to the advancement of the story and relates to all the other events in a meaningful sequence, the story is contrived.