On Writing Romance

by Leigh Michaels

  Once you have your main character's first basic problem in mind, you can use What if ? to begin building events and consequences: What if the heroine is out of a job and she's evicted from her apartment? What if her preoccupation with her job loss makes her careless, and she causes a fire that forces her to move? What if it's a college town with the school year just starting, so apartments are in short supply? What if she loses control of her car and totals it? What if somebody assumes she wrecked the car on purpose, despondent over the job? What if she has no insurance?

  Let your mind roam freely as you brainstorm. At this point, don't worry if you create contradictory scenarios. (You probably wouldn't want to use both the eviction and the car accident, because you're writing about a heroine, not about Poor Pitiful Pearl tied to the railroad tracks.) Later, you can choose which lines of thought work best, which ones fit together, and which ones rule out other possibilities.

  What if ? allows you to start with the nugget of an idea and develop it into the future. This technique works well throughout the writing process. Look at the problem as it currently appears and ask What if ?

  Backward Plotting

  Backward plotting is almost the opposite of the What if ? technique described above: You start with the situation or scenario you want to create, then figure out what you need to have in place beforehand to make that scenario logical, believable, and inevitable. Backward plotting can work on any specific plot point — especially one that the readers may find hard to swallow.

  One of my favorite examples of the value of backward plotting is a story in which one of the main characters is eventually revealed to be the long-lost grandson of another major character. To reveal that relationship out of the blue stretches the readers' credulity. But if two supporting points are established beforehand — that there's a mystery about the family, and that the grandson is investigating and searching for something — the revelation, while still surprising, is emotionally satisfying rather than confusing. Of course, you can't be obvious about those things, or you won't have much suspense.

  Using What if? and Backward Plotting Together

  By using the two plotting techniques — What if ? and backward plotting — in tandem, you can easily create a believable scenario: What if, instead of having your hero openly admit that he's searching for his roots, you give him another very good reason for curiosity about this mysterious family? And what if he has some possessions that indicate there's something not quite on the up-and-up about him? But what kinds of possessions could he have that would offer clues and help him search, without giving him an easy answer? Backward plotting can help you figure out not only what items he has but how they came into his possession and what they mean.

  By using the two techniques together, you can establish the hero's curiosity without giving away the reasons behind the curiosity. By showing the hero's possessions and hinting that there's a secret about him, you lay the groundwork for when one of his possessions leads to a breakthrough. When his suspicions are proved true, the readers will be prepared for the secret to come out.

  What if ? and backward plotting work extremely well together. By using them in turn you can develop your characters' problems, create a believable plot, and at the same time spot troublesome areas or holes before they develop.

  Plot Building 101

  Let's put cause and effect, backward plotting, and What if ? together and see what happens.

  What if your heroine's long-term problem is that she's never felt truly loved — and her short-term problem is that she discovers, just as she's about to walk down the aisle, that her fiancé is only after her money?

  What if she decides to run instead of going through with the wedding? But why would she go to such lengths? Heroines by definition are grown-ups. Wouldn't she just tell her father about the fiancé, or walk into the church and announce she's not getting married?

  Probably — so what if you have her try to call off the wedding, but her father refuses to believe she means it and goes to get the fiancé to soothe her pre-wedding jitters? That creates time pressure — if she's going to leave to give herself time to think without being pressured, she's got to do it immediately, without any time to plan or pack.

  What does she take with her? What does she leave behind? Where is she going — does she have any idea at all? If she only has fifteen minutes to escape, how does she go about it? Does she run in her wedding gown? That could be really inconvenient for the story later on — so perhaps she should take five minutes to get out of her fancy dress and into jeans. But that means she has five fewer minutes to think about where she's going and what she'll need.

  Or, for that matter, how she's going to get away. What if the wedding's not at an ordinary church but at her father's estate — which is locked up even tighter than usual to provide security for the wedding guests and gifts? If she tries to get past the gates, she'll be discovered. She can't take her car; she can't throw a suitcase over the wall. And time is ticking away.

  What if she has help? Who would be in a position to help her? An estate employee? Not likely — that would be a great way to lose a job. A short-term employee, like a florist or a caterer? A wedding guest? Maybe. But how's she going to find this person who's willing to help? How will she know who's safe to approach?

  What if she doesn't approach him but runs into him — almost falls over him? What's he doing? Why is he there? What if he's someone who has ties to the estate and the family but who isn't dependent on it for his livelihood? That means he can take action without fear of losing his job.

  Why, though, is he even there, if he's not a part of the wedding? What if his father works on the estate, and your hero has known the heroine forever? What if he's suffering from a long-term crush on the heroine, so he's come to be near for a last hopeless moment before she's lost to him? How about making him the gardener's son, who's come to visit his father? He grew up there and he knows where there's a secret gate, so he can help the heroine get out.

  What if he realizes that the ex-bride is too stressed to be sensible, so he goes along to keep her safe? (Maybe you can give him more gentlemanly instincts than are really good for him, to make that work.)

  He even takes her in his car, since she can't get hers out of the garage. And you don't want her to have a car anyway — it would be too easy to trace. But now you're back to having all the same problems — she'll be seen leaving in his car. Unless she leaves through the wall, and he drives out in the usual way, and then they won't be suspected of being together.

  Now you have them both outside the wall, with a set of wheels but not much else. No change of clothes, no cash, just what's in his pockets and her purse. And make it a little tiny purse, just to limit how much useful stuff she can have.

  But where are they going to go?

  What if she's so annoyed at her father for not believing her that she's ready to run away altogether? And what if she's ticked enough about being fooled by her fiancé the gold digger that she proposes to the gardener's son? What if she decides that if she's going to be married for her money, it might as well be to a man of her choice? What if he thinks she might be crazy enough to marry just anyone, so he agrees to the proposal in order to keep her from doing something even crazier? What if they decide to elope, choosing a destination where they can be married without delay?

  Does she mean to go through with it? Does he? Or are they just going through the motions? In the meantime, they've got to start off somewhere; they can't just sit outside the estate. So what if they head toward their selected marital destination?

  It's a long way, and they know her father will be looking for them. How are they going to manage the trip? You don't want it to be too easy, so do some backward plotting here — have her be honorable and leave her diamond ring behind so she can't pawn it.

  What resources do they have? Surely they each have at least one credit card, but card transactions are easily traced. He'd planned for a day trip to see his father, so he's on
ly got a little cash. She was figuring on a honeymoon, so she doesn't have much cash either.

  What if they're pulled over by a highway patrolman for having faulty lights? (Here's another good backward plotting point: If you make the car an old one, you also gain an excuse for the heroine tripping over the hero — he was lying in the driveway, changing the oil.) With a ticket, they can't drive the car until the lights are fixed, but they can't wait around for the mechanic either — so what if they buy another vehicle for their getaway? Since they're short of cash, they have to settle for a clunker of a truck — which is bound to lead to more trouble, but at least now nobody can guess what they're driving.

  Now they have no cash left at all. In order to replenish their resources, they have no choice but to use a credit card. To throw off pursuers, they drive in the opposite direction from their real destination to get a cash advance from an ATM. That goes smoothly — now you've arranged it so they can at least eat and buy a change of clothes. Their success prompts them to try for a bigger score before the credit card issuer is notified that there's a problem. But when they go into a bank to make a larger withdrawal, the teller realizes there's a flag on the account and she confiscates both the credit card and the heroine's ID. They have to run again to avoid being questioned about how they got the credit card, without the cash they'd hoped to get and now with the heroine having no driver's license.

  When they reach a place where they can be married, she can't prove her identity — an effect of having lost her driver's license. So they're refused a marriage license but — another bit of backward plotting here — if that honeymoon she was planning was outside the United States, she'd have her passport, so they can get over that hurdle.

  One event leads to the next. One incident becomes the cause of the next event. One problem complicates the next. What if ? and backward plotting work together to create a logical, almost inevitable plot in which each event involves both the hero and the heroine, drawing them closer together and giving them every opportunity to fall in love.

  Plotting Practice

  Use the What if? and backward plotting techniques to develop the following ideas into potential stories:

  In the middle of winter, a half-frozen man stumbles into the heroine's house.

  The heroine wants to have a baby, but she doesn't want a husband.

  The hero needs a date to the company Christmas party.

  A couple who split up a year ago are asked to be best man and maid of honor at the wedding of mutual friends.

  The hero gets the job the heroine wanted.

  LOGICAL AND BELIEVABLE ACTION

  Sometimes, when you know that your hero and heroine are lovely people who are perfect for each other, it's easy to forget that the main characters themselves don't yet know that they're destined to be together. So the characters start acting as if they already have an understanding about how they'll spend the rest of their lives, even if they've just met.

  This is how you get a heroine who, when her car breaks down in the middle of a strange neighborhood, puts her trust in a stranger with a gun, follows him back to his place, and spends the night — instead of locking the doors and asking him to call the auto club. This is how you get a hero who's sure that the strange woman shrieking insults at him is just having a terrible day, that she isn't ordinarily like that, and that she'll be the perfect woman to bear his children.

  How would a sensible person react in these circumstances — knowing what she knows right now, not what she'll know in a few days or a few weeks? Is the character acting logically? Is she reacting realistically to the events in your plot?

  What's the Motivation?

  The character's motivation — her reason for doing what she does — is all-important, and the more understandable the character's motivations are, the more engaging the story will be. Why do the characters get involved? Why do they think the action they're taking is the best one for them at the moment?

  In the example of the runaway bride, the story would be much less compelling if she'd been having doubts all along or if — with no outside impetus — she simply decided not to get married that day. Because she has a good reason for calling off the wedding (discovering her fiancé is more in love with her trust fund than with her) and for running away rather than facing her guests (her father's refusal to believe her), the plot is much more plausible and engaging. Of course, the story would also be much less interesting if the hero just went along on a whim. But, because he has a reason for wanting to protect the heroine (his gentlemanly instincts, brought out by her self-destructive impulses) and a reason for wanting to get closer to her (that crush he's had on her), his decision to go along for the ride is understandable.

  Why does the character do this, rather than that? What does the character want, and why? Why is this event happening right now instead of last year or next month? Why is this event or problem seemingly the worst thing that could happen to this person?

  If you can explain why — and make your readers believe that the reason is logical and sensible — then you can do almost anything you like with your characters and your plot.

  The Convenient Coincidence

  In real life, coincidences happen all the time. We shrug them off and go straight on. So the temptation when we're writing fiction is to say, “Well, it could have happened that way,” no matter how improbable the situation.

  The trouble is that, unlike events in real life, the events in a story have to make sense. Too many coincidences — too many convenient happenings, chance encounters, and just-happen-to-overhears — only serve to remind the readers they're reading a story.

  In fact, books are full of coincidences. The trick is to make them so logical and believable that the readers don't notice (for example) what a strange thing it is for the hero and heroine to be in the same place at the same time.

  If you have the slightest suspicion that an episode in your story is just a little too convenient, then it probably is. Your challenge is to find a way to make it logical and believable that your characters would be at that place, at that moment, in that company, under those circumstances.

  To keep your coincidences under control, give your characters a reason for what they do, and foreshadow their actions (foreshadowing will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter).

  MAINTAINING MOMENTUM: THE IMPORTANCE OF SUSPENSE

  In order to keep the readers' attention through the long midsection of the book, you'll need to continue to develop the conflict and advance the plot in logical steps without making the story predictable. What keeps the readers turning pages is suspense, which you can create using a variety of techniques, including tension, pacing, and foreshadowing.

  The suspense that keeps the readers paging through your book isn't the same kind of suspense named in the romantic suspense subgenre — books that involve characters being chased by bad guys, or trying to solve mysteries, or spying on the enemy. The suspense we're discussing here doesn't necessarily involve the characters being in peril; it's created whenever there's something the readers want to know. Will Joe kiss Brenda? Will Sally give in to Brad's demand that she work for him? Will the letter Jill just took out of her mailbox be the answer she wants? Will Jared answer Katherine's question or dodge it?

  Whenever you cause the readers to be curious about what comes next, you're creating suspense. Suspense arises naturally from good writing — it's not a spice to be added separately.

  In fiction, you create suspense by withholding information from the characters and/or the readers. You, as the author, can therefore create suspense in three main ways:

  By withholding information from the readers. The author knows the entire hidden story behind the plot and characters: the backstory and the plot twists that are yet to come. A new writer is apt to spill out the backstory and hidden story right away, but most stories are improved when at least some of that information is held back — sometimes up to the very end.

  By withholding informati
on from the characters. This is the Hitchcock effect — so called because Alfred Hitchcock was a master of it in his films. By reading between the lines and applying common sense and experience, the readers (like Hitchcock's movie audience) can draw conclusions about what's likely to be coming up. But, like the movie audience, the readers are powerless to prevent a character from stepping into a yawning trap that only the readers can foresee.

  By having the main characters withhold information from the readers and other characters. Just because a character knows something doesn't mean he has to share it with the readers (even if he's a POV character). And even hidden motives will affect how a character acts, clueing alert readers to what's really going on.

  When you're writing scenes in which suspense is crucial, keep in mind that putting too much backstory early in the book and using too much introspection to divulge information about your characters are great ways to bore the readers and destroy any suspense you may have established.

  There are, however, a number of techniques you can use to increase the level of suspense in your scenes:

  Keep the action intense. If significant amounts of time go by without suspenseful action, with the hero and heroine living their everyday lives, the story loses momentum and the readers may lose interest.

  Make the danger feel real to the readers. If the hero and heroine stop in the middle of a chase scene to share a passionate interlude, trusting to dumb luck to keep them from being discovered, then it's going to be hard to convince the readers that they have reason to be fearful. If the readers are to believe in the danger, then the characters must act as if they're threatened. Even if the danger isn't physical, keep pressure on the characters; don't let their problems slip into the background.

  Keep the bad guy in check. The villain needs to be believably, logically bad, not a cartoon. But to allow him to actually rape, pillage, and torture moves the book into general fiction rather than romance.