On Writing Romance

by Leigh Michaels

  “If that train hadn't started moving, I don't know what I would have done.” I shake my head. “You feel so … impotent!”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” says the man intensely. “They don't realize that some of us …” He gestures toward me. “We aren't just idly traveling. It matters whether we arrive or not.”

  “Absolutely!” I say. “Where are you off to?”

  “My wife's in labor,” he says. “Our fourth. … How about you? What's your urgent business?”

  Oh God. … I can't tell this man that my urgent business consists of picking up a scarf from Denny and George.

  I mean, a scarf. It's not even a suit or a coat, or something worthy like that.

  The heroine redeems herself — if only barely — by realizing that her own mission is hardly as important as his and by not continuing to whine about her own problems. Kinsella has carefully walked a fine line here; some readers will love the heroine's honesty, while others will find her so shallow and unsympathetic they'll be hoping for her comeuppance.

  Third-Person Selective

  In third-person selective, it's as if the person telling the story — the narrator — is sitting on the main character's shoulder, able to see and hear what the character sees and hears, but also able to eavesdrop on and report the character's thoughts and feelings. The narrator reports the actions of the characters using the words he, her, their, etc., to tell the story. If the main character is Jane, the narrator will refer to her with Jane or she.

  Because of its close connection between narrator and character, third-person selective has almost as much immediacy and personal impact as first person, without being as constrained by the character's own deficiencies and prejudices. The narrator in this case is almost invisible, simply sharing the details and making no comment on the story.

  Third-person selective means the readers see what the viewpoint character sees, hear what she hears, and know what she thinks (though not every single thought). Third-person selective includes only scenes in which the viewpoint character is present. If Jane walks out of the room, the readers walk out with her — so the readers can't hear what is said after Jane leaves, any more than Jane can.

  The readers also know how the other characters look, see the actions they take, hear the exact words they say, and can draw conclusions about what they're thinking from Jane's observations of such things as facial expressions, tone of voice, etc. Because the readers see what's going on, they may draw different conclusions about events than Jane does. If Jane deduces from the look on another character's face that he's angry, the readers know what Jane's thinking — but they don't know for sure whether Jane is right.

  In this example from Heather Graham's romantic suspense novella Bougainvillea, notice how the heroine's perceptions as she sits by her father's hospital bed are shared with the readers:

  As Kit slowly awoke and opened her eyes, she saw a man standing in the doorway.

  He was very tall, and in the shadowy, dim light he at first appeared to be dark — and sinister. She had the uneasy feeling that he had been standing there, staring into the room in silence for a long time. Staring as she slept, making her feel oddly vulnerable.

  His shoulders were broad beneath a heavy winter coat, and he seemed to stand very straight, with a great deal of confidence and assurance. She sensed that he wasn't watching her. He was watching her father.

  Waiting for him to die.

  Kit blinked, and awkwardly tried to rise, wanting to demand to know who he was and what the hell he was doing. But when she blinked, he was gone. There was no man in the doorway.

  Was there a man in the doorway? Was he sinister, threatening, confident, assured? Is he really waiting for Kit's father to die? Though Kit believes so, the readers — who have seen the evidence for themselves through the third-person POV — may or may not agree.

  If you were using a third-person selective/multiple POV, you might follow up a scene like this one with a scene from the POV of the man who was standing in the doorway, relaying his thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions to Kit.

  Third-Person Dual

  Many authors want to include the thoughts of both main characters within a single scene — using a third-person dual POV. It seems logical that the readers need to know what both hero and heroine are thinking, so the author tells them what Jane says and what she's thinking, then shifts to John and what he's thinking, then back to Jane.

  In the following example from her short contemporary novella An Officer and a Gentleman, Rachel Lee uses typographical tricks to make clear which POV we're in at any given instant, and because both characters are thinking similarly, the passage quickly and effectively shows us both characters' feelings.

  Giving up on the newspaper, Dare carried his coffee into the living room and stared out the window at the bleak North Dakota winter morning. What had he done? What was he going to do about it? He'd acted like a damn —

  — cowboy, Andrea thought as she walked into Dare MacLendon's office Monday morning. A damn cowboy. Her shoulders ached miserably, perfectly in tune with her mood. She still felt as if most of her energy had slipped down a black hole some where. Anger sustained her and drove her in to work, determined to show that damn cowboy just what he deserved for toying with her like that. She was going to —

  — freeze him, Dare realized when his gaze met hers across the conference table that morning. The little minx gave him a look glacial enough to cause frostbite. While the other officers wandered into the room and poured themselves coffee, he met her stare for stare and allowed himself to imagine her lying naked and trembling on his bed, reaching out for him —

  — touching his chest, Andrea thought, stroking her hands downward to grasp his buttocks and pull him —

  — into her, Dare imagined, … and reality returned with a crash. Major Francis was pulling out his chair at the far end of the table, the last one to arrive. Dare glanced around, taking attendance mentally. No one missing. “Good morning, people.”

  In this case, Lee is very successful at relating the two points of view while keeping them distinct and clear. By using this device, she also moves her story along rapidly, far more quickly than she could have using separate scenes from each main character's POV.

  However, this example is an exception; the dual POV is seldom the best way to tell a story. When you rapidly switch back and forth from one character's POV to another's, the readers may feel like they're watching a tennis match, looking quickly from one player to the other and unable to concentrate on either. When readers are deluged with thoughts and feelings from both sides, it's harder for them to empathize with either character. Unless you are very skillful and careful, the readers may even be confused as to whose thoughts they're getting at any particular moment.

  If you feel you cannot limit yourself to one POV character per scene, then you should switch from one to the other only when it's absolutely necessary to provide immediate access to the second character's thoughts. Such changes should not be frequent and should be made deliberately, not out of laziness or carelessness.

  In this example from her romantic suspense novella Capsized, author Sharon Sala starts with the hero's POV, then switches — clearly and strongly — to the heroine's, at the point where the heroine regains consciousness:

  The woman was still shivering, despite the pile of covers Quinn had put over her. He knew he needed to get her warm, and the quickest way he knew how to do that was a hot bath. He ran the tub full of water, keeping it as hot as he dared. Hesitating only briefly, he slipped the T-shirt over her head, then carried her into the bathroom. Gently, he began lowering her into the tub, unprepared for any kind of protest. But when the water reached her knees, it obviously triggered a memory she would rather forget. She bucked in his arms, then began to thrash and moan. Before he knew it, she'd swung a fist in his direction. He ducked as she cursed and then swung again. …

  “Lady … lady … it's okay. I'm trying to help you, remember? You
're freezing cold. You need to get warm.”

  She swung at him again and slung a long, shapely leg over the side of the tub, still trying to get out.

  “Christ almighty!” Quinn said and, in disgust, just let her go.

  Unprepared for the sudden freedom, Kelly slipped and then sank beneath the water before coming up sputtering, still ready to fight. Only there was no one trying to push her head beneath the water or stick a knife to her throat — just a wet and rather disgusted looking man watching her from the doorway. …

  And then Kelly remembered — everything from the knife sinking into Ortega's chest to the stranger on the shore. He'd probably saved her life.

  Sala couldn't start with the heroine's POV because she was unconscious; yet Kelly's thoughts and fears when she does rouse are so important that it's necessary for the readers to see them directly. So when Quinn lets go, we're still in his POV (he's feeling disgust), but in the next paragraph we're in Kelly's POV (she's unprepared for him to drop her). Notice that since these two don't yet know each other's names, the narrator doesn't use them in thoughts — when we're in Quinn's POV he refers to “the woman” and when we're in Kelly's POV she refers to “a wet and disgusted looking man.”

  Another example of switching from one POV to another within a scene is the selection we read from Penny McCusker's Noah and the Stork, on page 115. Mc Cusker starts off the scene in the heroine's head, but at the crucial moment when the hero comes face-to-face with his daughter, realizing for the first time that he has a child, she switches smoothly to his thoughts instead.

  Using More Than One Character's Point of View

  The use of more than one POV in a book — whether the POV switches between scenes or within a single scene — should not be an afterthought. If a character's thoughts are to be included anywhere in the story, you shouldn't wait until late in the book to begin; you should be fairly consistent from the start. It isn't necessary to assign an equal number of pages to each POV, or to alternate POV with each scene, but the second POV shouldn't disappear for so long that the readers forget about it.

  When using more than one POV in a book, always make the POV of the most important character more prominent. In a story shared between two points of view, the division should not be fifty-fifty. One (most often the heroine's) should dominate.

  DANGERS OF USING MORE THAN ONE POINT OF VIEW

  Frequently, when relaying more than one character's POV, it's tempting to tell the readers too much, too soon. If the main characters have no secrets from the readers, it's harder to keep up the suspense level, particularly if the conflict isn't an exceptionally strong one. If the hero thinks the heroine is the girl of his dreams, and the heroine thinks the hero is Mr. Right, and the readers know that up front, what's going to keep them reading?

  Another danger of using multiple points of view is the tendency to use the characters' thoughts as a substitute for actual verbal confrontation between the characters. It's tempting to show the heroine's angry thoughts about the hero, then switch to show the hero's angry thoughts about the heroine. But it's much more effective to make the two of them actually fight their battles face-to-face.

  Secondary Characters' Points of View

  Relating a scene from the POV of a secondary character should be done with great caution. Long books with strong subplots can benefit from an occasional scene told from a secondary character's POV, but shorter books don't allow much room for such a luxury.

  The rule of thumb, with rare exceptions, is that if a main character is present, then the POV should be that of the main character. So if the heroine is talking to her masseuse, readers get the heroine's thoughts, not the masseuse's. Use the secondary character's POV only if that person is the most important character in the scene.

  In Roxanne Rustand's long contemporary A Montana Family, Lily is an important secondary character — the hero's daughter, who's fourteen and facing a health crisis that has her scared out of her mind:

  Ninety-six pounds. Fear washed through Lily as she stepped off the scale on Monday morning before school. A month ago she'd been a hundred-five. Two weeks ago, on the day she'd started school here, she'd been a hundred.

  Her knees shaking, she braced her hands on the bathroom sink and stared at the hollows of her cheeks and the violet shadows under her eyes. Most of the other kids in middle school grew a lot at her age. She'd seen those changes in neighborhood friends back home.

  Mom got thin before she died.

  Lily sank onto the edge of the bathtub and wrapped her arms around her waist. The scared feeling was in her stomach all the time now, making her want to scream and run, or hide under the blankets and not even get out of bed each morning.

  Maybe I have cancer too. But telling Dad how she felt, going to a doctor, might make it all too real. I don't want to know. I don't want to know.

  Fragments of last night's dream floated back. The way Mom's beautiful face had turned yellow, her skin felt like tissue paper. The way her shiny dark hair had fallen out in tufts until she'd looked like an old, worn doll at a garage sale. …

  Lily stood up — too fast, because a wave of dizziness nearly sent her to the floor. And then she prayed that she wasn't going to die.

  The first choice when you need to share a secondary character's thoughts is to have the character speak them aloud, to have the character talk to the hero or heroine. Here, Rustand could have stayed in the heroine's POV by having Lily talk to the heroine, telling her about her fears. But in this case, Lily's scared out of her mind — unlikely to confide in anyone because voicing her fears would make them even more frightening — so a dialogue would be illogical. The most effective way to share what's going on inside her is to let the readers overhear her thoughts directly.

  If you choose to use the viewpoint of a secondary character, make those scenes short and to the point. (Lily's entire scene — not all of it is quoted here — is less than three hundred words, just under a page long.) If the secondary character is important enough to have a POV at all, then she should appear with some regularity — perhaps in a half-dozen short scenes during the story.

  But keep in mind that going into the head of a secondary character can pull the readers' attention from the main story. It can be a danger sign, indicating that your main story is dragging and you're trying to fill pages while waiting for the action to heat up again. Or your main characters may have bogged down, and the secondary ones have become more interesting. If the heroine's friend's thoughts are more interesting than the heroine's, perhaps the story is really hers — and she should be the main character instead.

  HANDLING POINT OF VIEW

  Choose a viewpoint character at the start of each scene. In the first paragraph or two of the scene, in addition to establishing where and when the action is taking place, be sure to tell the readers who the main character is in this part of the story — whose thoughts they will be getting.

  That can be done in a variety of different ways:

  Through a thought. “Until that morning, Hannah had started to think it didn't matter what hour of the day or night she walked Mrs. Patterson's dog.”

  Through a sensation. “Within two hours of arriving at work, Hannah was beginning to feel as if she'd been buried alive in the law library.”

  Through an emotion. “Hannah was steaming, too agitated to sit still.”

  Through an action. “Cooper tugged at his bow tie and impatiently straightened the pristine white cuffs of his formal shirt.”

  Through a comment about another character. “Wherever Cooper had gone that morning, it wasn't far enough for Hannah's taste.”

  The Dreaded Wandering Point of View

  Whether you intend to use just one POV or several, it's easy to let more than one character's thoughts creep into your scene. You have to know as you write what each character is thinking at that moment (even when you're not using her POV), because what the characters are thinking will affect what they say and do. Because you know what they're thinki
ng, it's very natural to slip up and include those thoughts. Sometimes you aren't even aware that you've wandered from the head of the viewpoint character into that of another.

  Drifting from one POV to another can happen so subtly that the lapse sneaks by even the most alert of authors. You don't need to write “Jane thought” in order to include Jane's thoughts. If you write “Jane met Gina as she strolled down the sidewalk. It was good to see Gina taking better care of herself these days,” then you've included Jane's thoughts on the subject of Gina's grooming.

  This classic example includes three points of view in a single sentence: “Greg looked genuinely horrified as his mind jumped to the same conclusion Cara was reaching.” (Can you find all three? The first is indicated by “Greg looked horrified”; since we can see his facial expression, we're observing him from another character's POV. The second POV is Greg's, because we're eavesdropping on his thoughts: “his mind jumped.” The third POV is Cara's, whose thoughts we hear next: “the same conclusion Cara was reaching.” Triple play.)

  The confusion that comes from a wandering POV is the reason behind the standard admonition to limit each scene to one viewpoint character. In order to change points of view, all you have to do is leave a blank line — a simple white space, or a few asterisks or crosshatches to make your intentions clear, as in the example on page 149 of third-person selective/multiple — and start a new scene. Then stick to the new POV character's thoughts and feelings for the duration of that scene.

  By choosing one POV character at the beginning of each scene, you can reap the benefits of dual POV — access to all the actions, thoughts, and feelings of two characters — without confusing the readers or sacrificing the deep involvement with one character that keeps them reading.

  CHOOSING THE RIGHT TENSE

  While some literary fiction is written in the present tense (“She shouts at him”; “He drives the car off the bridge”), the majority of fiction is written in the past tense (“She shouted at him”; “He drove the car off the bridge”). Once you have selected present or past tense for the narrative, stick to it for the duration of the story; you don't want to switch back and forth.