On Writing Romance

by Leigh Michaels

  A flashback is a scene that takes a character back in time to an event, so the character actually relives what happened. The readers see the scene from the character's point of view at the time, and they hear the actual words spoken, not the character's recollection of what was said. The scene takes place just as it would if it were a present-day event; it's not just a memory.

  Flashback is most often used in romance stories in which the hero and heroine have had an earlier relationship. The flashbacks show significant bits of their past interaction so the readers can see these important events for themselves and understand why the characters are still reacting to those events today.

  Since a flashback presents events as they actually happened, it uses straightforward narrative. Because flashback scenes are usually relayed just like a scene from the present action, readers sometimes find it difficult to tell when they've entered a flashback. You can use a number of techniques to help make the transition clear to the readers.

  Warn the readers of what's coming. Make sure they know they're about to enter a flashback. You can do this by using past perfect tense during the shift from the current story to the flashback. During the rest of the flashback scene, use the simple past tense, returning briefly to past perfect to finish the flashback. In many cases, a sentence or two of summary at the beginning and end of the flashback are necessary to set the scene and establish place and time. (If the main part of the story is being told in present tense, then the body of the flashback also will use present tense. You can signal the start of a flashback in this case by using past tense.)

  Create a logical transition from present to past. Memories don't come out of nowhere. What brought the past event to mind? What's making the character think about it right now?

  Place the flashback in a plausible spot in the story. Does the character have time for the luxury of memory? While the heroine's being chased down the street by the bad guys, she's not likely to be reconsidering her life. If she's holed up in a closet, holding her breath and hoping they'll overlook her, she might.

  Don't use flashbacks early in the book. Never start a story with a flashback. Get the present-day story well established first. By focusing on the main story, you'll build sympathy for your characters and reader interest about what happened in their pasts. If you've done a good job of making your characters sympathetic by the time you take your readers on that journey into the past, they'll be happy to accompany you.

  Break large flashbacks into smaller portions. If your story has a great deal of important past action, it's a good idea to feed it to your readers in small chunks, returning to the present at intervals — even if only for a few paragraphs — in order to reestablish the main story.

  Finish a flashback by returning your readers to where (and when) they were before the flashback started. This helps make it apparent that the side trip is now finished and the readers are once again on the main path.

  In one of my books, Promise Me Tomorrow, the hero and heroine have a vast amount of shared history, including an unplanned pregnancy, a marriage of convenience, a miscarriage, and a divorce. All of that is important because it affects what happens to them in the present-day story; the readers need to see the events and be allowed to judge for themselves what happened, rather than seeing things as interpreted much later by the now more mature characters.

  To put all that powerful history into a single flashback would overwhelm any story, no matter how carefully the flashback was handled. I split the past events into a half-dozen segments scattered throughout chapters two, three, and four — almost the entire first half of the book — and as a result, the flashbacks became a powerful secondary narrative, almost a subplot.

  One of these flashback episodes is introduced when the heroine, shortly after encountering the hero for the first time in several years, is alone in her bedroom:

  There was a shadow on the lawn of the sorority house. A dog? A trick of the moonlight, perhaps? Or a prowler, stalking the house? One of the sororities up the street had reported a peeping Tom, a couple of weeks ago.

  Cassidy watched the shadow for long minutes, until she was certain that no human being could have stayed still for so long.

  Then, with a sigh, she turned away from the window. Don't be a fool, she told herself. You know perfectly well there's nothing out there. But you'd rather face the bogeyman in the dark than your own memories, tonight.

  The flashback begins, using past perfect tense (had been, had had) to indicate a time long past, then sliding into past tense (was, said) as summary gives way to action:

  Reid had been as good as his word that night; it had been almost midnight when her work was done, and he had still been sitting patiently in the booth, drinking coffee, idly turning the pages of the morning's newspaper. She had had a couple of hours to think it over, and so when she came back to the booth for the last time she was considerably calmer. Perhaps Kent's family had a right to know what she had decided. In any case, it seemed, it was no longer her choice whether to tell them; the man in that booth was a force to be reckoned with.

  “I've clocked out,” she said. “I'm finished for the night.”

  The body of the flashback is in real-time narrative and past tense, allowing the readers to watch the characters interact:

  “You might as well tell me what you want, Cassidy.”

  She thought bitterly, You'll never believe it — but why not tell you? “A good home for my baby,” she said. “That's all. So I'm giving him up for adoption, and you can just run along and not worry about it any more.” She started to slide out of the booth.

  He said, impassively, “That makes things much easier.”

  Cassidy stopped. “What on earth do you mean?”

  He didn't answer. “When is the baby due?”

  “Why do you care?” But she couldn't hold out against that cool stare. “The middle of December.”

  “December,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Have you talked to an agency yet?”

  As the flashback draws to a conclusion a few pages later, I shift to past perfect tense to indicate to the readers that the flashback is ending:

  She swore to herself that she would take his help only as long as she must, that she would regard it as a loan, and that someday she would pay every penny back, because to do anything else was to put a price tag on her baby.

  She did it, too, as far as she was able. Last May, she had finally finished at the university, and on the first day of June, when the annual check was deposited, she closed the account. She took every remaining cent of Reid Cavanaugh's money to Chicago with her when she went to a news reporters' convention, and she bought the first of that series of money orders. And every month thereafter she would send a little more, until she had paid back the part of his money she had spent.

  Then I return the readers to the present-day story by using word clues and references to the scene as it was before the flashback started. This clearly tells the readers that they're back to the main story, and back in the present:

  The moon was high now, in the wee hours of the morning, and the shadow out on the lawn of the sorority house stayed solidly in place.

  WHAT FLASHBACKS CAN'T DO FOR YOUR STORY

  Flashbacks should be used only if the past action illustrates the motivation for the main conflict and if it is necessary for the readers to see that action actually occurring in order to understand the present-day story.

  Before you commit to using flashbacks, keep in mind that they seldom move a story forward. In fact, they slow the action of the main story and can even bring it to a dead halt — from which it may never recover. They also do not work well to develop a character. If your intent is simply to insert the character's history, a summary may be more effective. You could also relate the necessary history through dialogue with another character, a technique that allows you to include a later and more mature interpretation of the events.

  SETTING AND BACKGROUND DETAILS

  Choosing the right detail
s — and using enough, but not too many, of them — is particularly important when it comes to conveying the setting and background of your story. Setting is the location of the story; background is the jobs, hobbies, social structure, etc., that add texture to the story.

  The romances I read when I was a kid were set in places like the south of France, a hacienda in Mexico, a cruise ship, or a sheikh's tent in the desert. It seemed that an exotic location was a necessary part of the romance genre — quite a hurdle for an Iowa girl, raised on a farm, who'd never seen an ocean.

  But my desire to write romance outweighed my common sense, so I plunged in anyway and hoped that by the time my work was good enough to sell, I'd be able to go someplace glamorous, or the publishers would have changed the rules.

  As a matter of fact, both of those things happened. But the more important change was the alteration in the definition of exotic location. Now, romances don't need to be set in glitzy, glamorous sites. Anything that is new to the readers can be considered exotic.

  However, some settings are more popular than others. Ranches in the American West, both historical and contemporary, are perennial favorites, as is the Australian outback. Greece and Italy are popular settings with some categories (especially Harlequin Presents), while others favor small to mid-size American cities (especially Harlequin American Romance).

  Cruise ships and resorts are not big sellers, though nobody seems to know why. Media backgrounds — stories set at newspapers or magazine offices, or featuring war correspondents, news anchors, or television hosts — are not well received. Movie sets, sports stadiums, and symphony orchestras are also less successful as backgrounds, perhaps because it's difficult to evoke a celebrity character so realistically that the readers can suspend disbelief.

  Certain geographical areas — especially Africa, the Balkans, and Southeast Asia — are not popular with readers. There seem to be two reasons for this: Cultural unfamiliarity makes it more difficult for the readers to identify, and perceived political instability threatens the readers' conviction that the couple can achieve a truly happy, peaceful ending. The stereotype may be unfair, but the prejudice is a fact.

  Like everything in romance, there are exceptions. Single-title romances are more flexible than category romances and can take up unusual settings and backgrounds; there are many more celebrities, sports stars, and reporters in single-title than in category romance. Still, stories that buck the trends must be very strong in order to overcome the initial resistance to the background. So if you think you want to write a story about an actor falling in love with a reporter while filming a movie on a cruise ship headed to South Africa, you might want to think again.

  Why Does Setting Matter?

  Setting is important because it adds depth and texture to your love story.

  Perhaps it's not a romantic place at all, but one that is made romantic only by circumstances. It might be foreign to the readers, so they can feel like they're traveling with the heroine, or it might be familiar, giving the readers a sense of comfort and informality. In any case, setting functions as a backdrop, not as a major portion of the story. You're writing a romance, not a travelogue.

  Details about the setting are best presented as they relate to the character, as in this example from Debbie Macomber's single title Thursdays at Eight:

  It was barely November, and already Christmas decorations were up. Clare pulled into the strip mall where Mocha Moments was located, noting that Liz Kenyon's Seville was parked out front. Knowing her friend, Clare suspected Liz had ordered her croissant and coffee, and had their window table secured.

  The air was cool and damp this morning, with a breeze coming in from the Pacific, but Clare didn't mind. The Santa Ana winds had dried out the valley these past few months, and the moisture was a refreshing change.

  We know quite a bit about the restaurant, the time of year, and the geographical area from this brief selection, even though Macomber has used just a few setting details. Because she's chosen details that evoke the senses — like the cool, damp breeze — we can feel as well as see the coffee shop where the characters are meeting.

  More Than Just a Place

  Setting is more than geographical location — it's the background against which the story takes place. Background includes the main characters' jobs and their lifestyles. However, the background must not be allowed to outweigh the story. If your heroine's job is so exotic or so far outside your readers' experience that you can't explain it in a couple of sentences, perhaps you should modify the job rather than risk making the romance secondary to the background. If your fictional society is so complex that you're spending more pages describing it than telling the readers what the characters are up to, perhaps it's time to rethink the setting. If the heroine's hobby is more interesting to you than her romance, then the hobby may be too prominent in the story.

  Looking again at Thursdays at Eight, you can see how Macomber gives a quick, clear picture of her main character's job:

  Liz stared at the phone on her desk, dreading its ring. Her Monday had begun badly, and already she could see that this first week of the new year was going to be a repeat of December, with many of the same problems she'd faced then. The hospital was no closer to a new contract with the nurses' union, and the state health inspectors were scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

  Without going into loads of detail, Macomber makes it clear that Liz is a hospital executive, not a health-care worker, and gives us enough detail to understand why Liz would be frustrated with her job just now. Since Liz's job isn't the story, that's all we need to know.

  USING WHAT'S REAL

  One way to increase the sense of reality in your stories is to refer to real movies, songs, dances, fashions, people, and products. But this kind of verisimilitude comes with a downside: Hit movies and dances will look very tired in a few years. (Remember the Macarena?) Quoting from current songs means getting permission from the musicians' organizations, something that is not easy to do. Hairstyles change from year to year, and designers wax and wane in popularity, so being too specific about your hero's haircut or your heroine's dress style may rapidly date your story.

  Real people have a habit of changing. Celebrity couples break up. People grow old, get arrested for possession of drugs, or die before their time — and if you've referred to them in your book as young, vivacious role models, you've made your contemporary romance into a historical without even trying.

  Real products also change over time and can date your story. Packaging and slogans seldom stay static for long. If you choose to refer to real products, use the trademarked names correctly (e.g., Coca-Cola or Coke, not coke). And if you want to refer to a product in a negative sense, it's safer to make up a name than to refer to a real product and risk irritating the corporation's attorneys.

  SCENES AND CHAPTERS

  Writing a book doesn't look like such an overwhelming project if you think of the task in terms of constructing the individual scenes that make up the story — each one just a few pages in length.

  Scenes

  A scene is a single unit of real time, including action by the characters. Something happens, and the readers see it happen. Each scene has a definite beginning and ending, and it consists of a sequence of consecutive events. It may include reflection or flashback, but if there is a lapse in time between story events, the author usually ends the scene and starts another.

  With rare exceptions, each scene should have one — and only one — well-defined point of view (we'll discuss point of view in greater detail in chapter eleven).

  Every scene must have at least one major purpose or goal, and preferably several minor purposes as well. If you can't state what the purpose of the scene is, it may be merely occupying space instead of advancing the plot. Each scene should be an essential part of the story, furthering the relationship between the main characters. If cutting a scene wouldn't seriously wound the book, then it shouldn't be there in the first place.

 
; Scenes differ in length according to their relative importance in the story. A scene may be no more than a single page long; a chapter may contain several such short scenes. But a scene may also be so important that it fills an entire chapter. It might even carry over from one chapter to the next, breaking for the chapter end at an exciting or dramatic point and then picking up at the start of the next chapter, perhaps from a different point of view.

  The break from one scene to another within a chapter is marked typographically by an extra blank line — a white space that alerts readers to expect a change in time, place, or point of view. (Adding a few crosshatches or asterisks to the blank line ensures that it will not be overlooked in editing or typesetting.)

  Chapters

  In many kinds of fiction, each scene is simply assigned a number, and no matter how long or short, the scene functions as a chapter. The book might have dozens of chapters, some a page or two long and some running to fifteen or twenty pages.

  In category romance, the rules tend to be a little more rigid, with the book divided into roughly equal chapters, each of which contains one or more scenes. The average length of a chapter in category romance is 5,000 words, though that's not a rule.

  The number of chapters varies according to the romance category, and some are more definite in their guidelines than others. Typically, a short romance will have ten to twelve chapters, while long contemporaries might have seventeen to twenty, and historicals might have twenty-five or more. Single-title and mainstream romance novels, like general fiction, vary widely in the number and length of their chapters.

  While each scene is a well-defined unit of time, location, and point of view, a chapter can be much more expansive. A single chapter that includes several scenes might cover a span of days or even months.

  The chapter is a convenient, if somewhat artificial, unit of storytelling. Each chapter is another step in the characters' upward climb, another section of the story. Unlike nonfiction, in which chapters are neatly constructed packages and each is independent of the others, in fiction each chapter ends with another twist in the plot, leading into the next chapter and making it difficult for readers to put the book down. In romance, that chapter-ending twist usually relates to both main characters.