On Writing Romance

by Leigh Michaels

  Keep the emotional level high. Even if the story doesn't involve physical danger for the characters, their lifelong happiness is at stake. Keeping emotions at the core of the story reminds the readers how important the situation is.

  Limit the story's time frame. Putting restrictions on how long your story can last increases suspense. A two-week vacation, a school semester, a train journey, a wedding date, a project deadline — all can function as time clocks, pushing the hero and heroine into action. Because the ending point of the story is inflexible, the characters will act more quickly and somewhat differently than they would if they had all the time in the world.

  Repeat an action, phrase, or event. The first use of the action or line of dialogue may be almost casual, doing little more than getting the readers' attention. The second use makes it clear that this bit of information is important (though the readers may not quite see why) and foreshadows the important action to come. The third use is the most emphatic: The stakes have grown enormous and the readers, having been properly prepared, are on the edge of their seats waiting to see what will happen.

  Don't show what everyone's thinking. If the heroine assesses the hero's clenched jaw and assumes he's mad at her, and then you show him thinking about his aching molar, the heroine doesn't know she's wrong, but the readers do — and all the suspense is gone from the scene. In this example from Claire Cross's chick-lit novel Double Trouble, we see the heroine drawing conclusions about the hero, but we have no idea whether she's correct:

  I never could figure out why he married my sister. Unless a wife and kids were necessary accessories for the lawyer-destined-for-Great-Things — and she was as good a choice as any. They never seemed to have much in common, but maybe it was something basic between them. Like lust. Marcia used to be quite a looker, and I say that with the undue modesty of an identical twin.

  Tonight, James looked surprisingly haggard and annoyed for a man made of granite, and as I mentioned, that expression didn't improve when he saw me.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Oooh, a vulgarity. Of course, the strumpet sister had invaded the last bastion of propriety in the Free World. That, at least, conformed to our usual script. His job was to make sure I didn't feel welcome enough to hang around too long and taint the precious boys. I knew my lines by heart.

  Too bad I hadn't worn something really skimpy, just to tick him off. I slouched harder, knowing that perfect posture was a household holy grail. “You should be more gracious to the one doing your dirty work.”

  The man glowered at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your kids called me from the pool when no one picked them up.”

  James flicked a glance up the stairs, some parental part of him clearly reassured by the ruckus coming from the bathroom. “Where's Marcia?”

  “Where were you? Takes two for the fun part. Why should one be left with all the work after that?”

  What's going on with James? We don't know why he's haggard and annoyed. We know what conclusions the heroine has drawn — but is she correct? Why does the heroine have a reputation as the strumpet sister? Why are these two in so much conflict that they have a “usual script” for their interactions?

  We will have to turn the page and go on if we want to find out.

  Tension

  Maintaining tension means maintaining pressure on the characters. Over the course of the story, the characters' troubles should grow larger, harder to handle, seemingly more insoluble. The characters' emotional involvement (and hence the readers' attachment to the characters) grows right along with the difficulties the characters face.

  Many beginning writers raise a problem and immediately solve it, let the characters take a break, and then move on to the next problem. But if the characters are hunting for a hidden diamond necklace and they find it in the first place they look, all the excitement is gone. Dangle the problems, let them get worse step-by-step — let the readers enjoy watching the characters deal with pressure.

  You don't have to keep the pressure on every single moment — but if you create believable tension, the readers will always know that the troubles are there in the background. Even when you're allowing your characters a short break, problems are ready to pop up again at any moment, and they'll probably be even worse than before.

  When your characters solve a problem, the readers can relax — and perhaps put the book down. Even if you know there's another difficulty waiting in the wings, if you haven't told the readers it's coming, then the readers can't be worried over what will happen. So before you solve one problem or let your characters find an answer to one portion of their conflict, you need to set up the next set of complications.

  Pacing

  Proper pacing results in a story that neither rushes nor drags; it unfolds as if the readers were there watching. Tell the readers what they need to know when they need to know it, and not one moment sooner. You can heighten tension by delaying a revelation as long as possible, dangling it just out of reach until the readers can't bear not knowing.

  Keep in mind that good pacing often involves telling several parts of the story at once. At any given moment, you'll not only be showing what's going on right now, you'll be wrapping up loose ends from action in the last scene or chapter. At the same time, you'll be hinting at what's coming in the next few scenes. All this is tough to do. Straight-line writing, handling one thing at a time, is much easier. But the hints and the extras are what creates suspense.

  Proper pacing requires you to always keep at least one problem or difficulty hanging over your characters. Never leave your characters without a threat to deal with, and never leave your readers without a worry — right up to the last few pages before the ending.

  VARYING THE PACE

  It's important to vary the pace of the story. Too much action or tension soon grows tedious. Not every event can be a slam-bam car chase, and if you try to maintain that kind of speed, you'll wear out the effect. It's the variations in pacing that make action scenes so effective. Consider following a short scene with a longer one. Consider the benefits of following an active scene with a slower and more reflective one. In general, the more important a scene is, the longer and deeper it can be.

  Even your word choice has an effect on the pacing of your story. Use short sentences and lots of verbs to move action along quickly, longer sentences and more adjectives to slow the story down so the readers have a chance to take everything in.

  USING TRANSITIONS TO MANIPULATE PACE

  Transitions — the shifts from one time and place to another — can make or break your pacing. Many writers are tempted to go into too much detail about how a character gets from one place to another, or what happens to her in the time between her arrival at home and her date picking her up for dinner.

  If something very important is occurring during that time — perhaps the heroine is working out her strategy for dealing with the hero, or perhaps there's a burglar waiting to leap out of her closet — then show it. Otherwise, stick to brief summary. If the heroine is thinking of something important, show only a few of her actions, just enough to provide a background for her thought process.

  The readers don't need to know that the heroine looked through her closet and pulled out three different dresses; they don't need full descriptions of the three dresses. They don't need to know that she decided to wear pants instead, then brushed her teeth and opened a new bottle of shampoo and washed and conditioned her hair until it was silky smooth and then got dressed, starting with red thong underwear.

  It's adequate to tell the readers the following:

  She tossed her keys on the hall table and went to get ready. She'd figured out what she was going to tell him over dinner, and she was just stepping into the sexiest pair of shoes she owned when the doorbell rang.

  The readers will assume all the rest, because they've gotten ready for a date or two in their lives. If the details interfere with the momentum of the story, you prob
ably don't need the details.

  WITHHOLDING THE BACKSTORY

  Most writers feel a temptation to pour out the backstory — what's happened to the main characters to bring them to this point in their lives — early in the writing process. Revealing a character's whole history will explain exactly how he's gotten into the current problem, but it also tells the readers much more than they need to know — more than they're prepared to take in early in the story.

  Hinting at what's happened to the character in the past helps to build suspense, but save the details of the backstory until it's absolutely necessary for the readers' understanding — or, as my first editor inelegantly put it, until “the reader's tongue is hanging out to know what really happened.” Keep the readers wondering and guessing, and they'll keep reading.

  In this example from the first few pages of her sweet traditional novel In the Arms of the Sheikh, Sophie Weston hints at her heroine's dramatic past:

  Natasha's frown deepened. She had never heard Izzy sound like that before. Well, not since —

  She pulled her mind away from the dark memories. The bad time was three years past. Gone. She and Izzy had got out of the jungle alive and well and so had everyone else. All was well that ended well, in fact. The nightmares would go too, in time.

  But that didn't explain why Izzy sounded so stiff and false.

  It's another hundred and fifty pages before Weston tells us what happened to Natasha in the jungle, and even then she gives few details, just the overarching story — because that's all we need to know in order to understand why Natasha reacted this way here.

  The best place to present the details of the character's backstory is usually in dialogue. It's a powerful scene when the heroine explains to the hero how being jilted (or abandoned as a child, or accused of murder, or whatever) has made her reluctant to trust and share her life. If you simply show her thinking about it, or if she tells a secondary character who then tells the hero, the resulting scene is much less emotionally compelling.

  You may be tempted to present the backstory through flashback, but that's seldom a good idea. Returning the readers to the past stops the progress of the main story. If we were to flash back to the jungle with Natasha and relive her experiences there, the past story might overwhelm the current one. Only if the backstory involves both hero and heroine can you really justify using a flashback, one that actually shows what happened between them.

  No matter how you opt to share the backstory with the readers, use only as much as you absolutely must in order to make your characters' motivations clear. The story is not about the character's painful childhood or his horrible marriage. A few well-chosen examples will usually make the point; using more than that will put the current story at risk.

  Keeping the Hidden Story Under Wraps

  The same basic rules apply to the hidden story — what's really going on that one of the main characters (usually the heroine) doesn't know. Is the ragged-looking hero a millionaire in disguise? Why is he so reluctant to commit to a marriage? What was the real reason he didn't want to have children?

  Even in a story that uses both the hero's and heroine's points of view, it's possible to keep the hidden story hidden until the readers are dying to know what's going on, and doing so increases the suspense level in the entire book.

  The hero knows perfectly well why he doesn't want to have children — but it's not something he enjoys thinking about. So he veers away from the subject even in his thoughts, leaving the readers with no more than hints, intrigued but still in the dark.

  In this selection from her long contemporary romance Operation: Second Chance, Roxanne Rustand hints at two hidden stories. Both the heroine and the hero are keeping secrets. The heroine's photographs show a woman very different from the one the hero meets, a contradiction the heroine would prefer not to explain. And the hero neglected to tell the heroine that he rented a room in her house because he's investigating her. With two sets of hints to follow, the readers are doubly intrigued:

  He'd intended to check out the glamorous Mrs. Hilliard and carefully begin investigating her past. He'd never expected to end up living in her house. He'd also never expected to find her so … interesting. …

  The photograph clipped from a society page of the newspaper bore little resemblance to the woman herself.

  Where were the diamonds, the cold elegance? And she wasn't as tall as he'd guessed, though high heels and a low camera angle could account for that. There'd even been a merry twinkle in her eyes when she'd bantered with the little girl.

  If she'd been involved in her late husband's activities, that twinkle would disappear fast enough when she found herself staring at prison walls during a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence. Though now, after meeting her, the thought didn't fill him with the same sense of satisfaction that it had before.

  Foreshadowing

  Foreshadowing heightens suspense by hinting at action that is yet to come. If you foreshadow correctly, the readers will be able to accept events that otherwise might strike them as illogical, unbelievable, or coincidental. By properly preparing your readers, you eliminate the need to explain what's going on when the event actually takes place. For instance, if the elevator is going to crash, make it creak a time or two first — the hint to your readers will make them anxious to see what happens. (Of course, if it creaks and creaks and then doesn't crash, your readers will feel cheated.)

  Even relatively unimportant action can benefit from foreshadowing. I planned to get a hero and heroine into an intimate and embarrassing position by having her trip over a carpet seam, upset his office chair, and fall on top of him. But that's an awfully convenient outcome — one that might make readers say, “Yeah, right, like that would really happen.”

  So I planted two bits of information ahead of time. Well ahead of time — almost a hundred pages before the chair upsets. On her first visit to his office, the heroine notes that the hero's chair “looked as if it were defying gravity,” and that it “tipped back alarmingly.” The second foreshadowing appears just a couple of pages before the crash, when the heroine comments about the state of the hero's office furnishings, and he replies that the carpet may be slightly threadbare, but it's clean. When the heroine trips over a loose seam in that carpet just a few minutes later, the readers are well prepared.

  The trick in foreshadowing is to give the readers all the information they need to figure out the book's secrets, but to do so in such a way that they won't succeed in doing so. Each bit of foreshadowing should have at least two outcomes, with the real one a trifle less obvious than the red herring you want your readers to pursue. For instance, if you want your heroine to observe the hero getting angry at a comment that's made to him, you can put in two comments — one that would annoy anyone, another that seems innocuous. The heroine will assume that the annoying comment is the one he's reacting to, and she'll pass over the second one. But the readers have heard it, so when the truth eventually comes out, they'll be prepared when they find out that the seemingly innocent statement is the one that actually caused the trouble.

  Foreshadowing can be presented in narrative, action, or dialogue. You can mask it by slipping it in among a lot of other details, or by surrounding it with humor to distract the readers from the importance of the clue.

  Foreshadowing can also be present in what a character doesn't do or say. If the hero, seeing a baby crib in the heroine's apartment, asks, “Do you have children?” and the heroine answers, “I keep my friends' kids a lot,” the readers are unlikely to notice that she didn't really answer the question — and only later will the implications of that nonanswer become apparent.

  Foreshadowing can even be presented straight out, if there are several possible interpretations of the hint and you emphasize one of the alternatives instead of the real thing. This kind of foreshadowing is like a magician's sleight of hand, when he draws your attention to one hand so he can use the other one to manipulate the white rabbits unseen. You can draw the read
ers toward a false interpretation while guiding them away from the correct one.

  In this selection from my sweet traditional romance The Husband Sweepstake, socialite Erika has begged the concierge of her apartment building to find someone to escort her to a banquet, and he suggests his assistant, Amos:

  “What kind of a banquet is it and who will be there? If there are connections to be made, then maybe —”

  “It's for adult literacy,” Erika said. “So your friend can hang out with authors and publishers and readers and agents and —”

  Stephen was smiling.

  “You've thought of someone? Stephen, you're an angel.”

  Amos slid off the desk. “Now that you have the problem solved, I'll be —”

  “It sounds right down Amos's alley,” Stephen said.

  Erika stared at him. “This is no time for a joke.”

  “I was serious. Amos is writing a book. That's why he's here.”

  Erika tipped her head to one side and inspected Amos. She thought she saw irritation flicker in his eyes.

  Well, that makes two of us who are annoyed at being fixed up with each other, she thought.

  What really caused the irritation flickering in Amos's eyes? Being fixed up for a date with a socialite? That's what I want you to think, and that's why I used Erika's reaction to point you that way. In fact, he's annoyed at being outed as a writer, because his real reason for taking this job is to research Erika's life for his book — something the reader doesn't find out for another hundred pages.

  The earlier an event is foreshadowed, the less obvious the foreshadowing will be to the readers. Foreshadowing in the first few pages of a story can be very effective, because the readers are still getting acquainted with the characters and haven't yet settled in to read analytically.