At this point it was probably last year that Mills & Boon teamed up with newsagent W.H. Smith and eBookseller Kobo for RoWriLife, or Romance Writing Life, for the longer, but equally problematic, name. RoWriLife gave authors the opportunity to recycle their failed So You Think You Can Write manuscripts. The Florida-based journalist Kerry McKay has since been announced as the winner. Her novel, A Country Affair, beat out 465 submissions and is described as, 'Highly original, eccentric but romantic, a traditional romance with quirky characters in uniquely British situations.' Meanwhile, on the website and blog, the competition organisers were kind enough to offer their Top Ten tips on how to Romance Write Life. Are these perceptive critiques on the typical problems plaguing amateur fiction? Let us delve in and discover that no, they are not.
1. 'Grab readers’ attention with a gripping first chapter and a killer first line.' Beyond the title, author's name, blurb, tagline, reader's biography and some legal details about copyright and publishing dates, the opening line of a novel is often the first thing the reader will read, assuming that they start at the beginning. 'The novel’s opening can’t be all build up or backstory – something exciting has to happen!' What exciting things would be appropriate for a Romance novel featuring few characters outside the heroine and hero? The entrants of So You Think You Can Write preferred the traditional concepts of other genres, using thriller tropes to draw readers in before the big reveal that their book was a tedious will-they-won't-they love story after all. Resisting the Billionaire Playboy saw its heroine scaling the wall of a nightclub, to introduce intrigue and danger into a tale of weddings and the business of weddings.
2. 'Establish the emotional conflict that your characters are facing so that readers are dying to know how it will be resolved.' Couldn't this statement be rephrased in the form of a question that doesn't make sense? 'What is that these characters want the most and what is standing in their way?' Thank you. Without the establishing of an emotional conflict, readers would be left to guess at was keeping the characters apart, emotionally. Once the reader knows what is happening they will often keep reading to find out how things will end. In the case of Romance, the ending will be happy
3. 'Keep your central plot unique and fresh but also a clear and defined idea that you can pitch in a maximum of three sentences. You want to entice readers into a compelling novel, not confuse them with too many plot strands.' Nothing confuses a romance reader quite like plot strands. One plot is usually enough, bulked out with two subplots that are easily resolved within the central story. To simplify matters further, the two subplots can be the same as the main plot. The challenge the author faces is stringing out their idea into three sentences without repeating themselves.
4. 'Avoid clichés. The hero and heroine bumping into each other and spilling each other’s drinks has been done 1000 times! Find something new that’s completely your own.' So many spilled drinks. Should people in the throes of love be allowed to carry beverages? History says not, but at least now that cliché has been pointed out, the days of either drink-carrying or drink-spilling may be over. The avoidance of clichés is important, as is recognising what a cliché is. Fortunately Mills & Boon have spent upwards of one hundred years creating every romantic cliché they could think of. Now it is up to a new generation of writers to create some more.
5. 'Your characters need to be complex – they can’t just have one trait personalities.' Does your heroine love horses? Perhaps they love horses because of unresolved issues with their father, who himself was a horse who abandoned his daughter when she was little. This is the different between superficial archetypes and characters who feel real. While heroes often have only one thing on their mind - marriage - they carry that same obsessional will into the other areas of their life, such as billionairing and home-decoration. If they are doctors they are often also single parents. Playboys are no longer just one-dimensional caricatures. Authors have added other identifiers, including Greek and Italian, and complex traits such as ruthlessness.
6. 'Your characters also don’t have to be perfect. Flawed characters with interesting emotional conflicts make for stronger stories than characters who are practically perfect in every way.' The days of idealization are over. As we move into a new era where people are more three-dimensional than ever, readers expect their fictional characters to accurately reflect this. Mills & Boon has expanded its oeuvre to cater for as many peculiar tastes as their marketing team are capable to thinking up. There are now subgenres devoted to rich characterisation, heart-breaking emotional crises and quirky small-town locations. The publisher's tendency towards idealising the hero physically has allowed them to play around with different kinds of personal deficiencies including committmentphobia, haughtiness and having more money than they know what to do with.
7. 'Your central characters need to go on a journey throughout the story. Usually from a state of (self) ignorance or misunderstanding about what will make them happy to a point of self-awareness and acceptance.' Sometimes involving physical movement, but more often than not the journey is one of worrying while stood. The questions every romance novel asks are a series of simple ones. What makes these two characters happy and what should make them happy and why is it taking so long for them to figure out that happiness can only be found in the formulaic results of Romance Fiction? The answers are independence, marriage and narrative.
8. 'Show don’t tell. Characters and events need to be revealed through actions rather than long passages of narrative which can weaken the tension in your story.' This point misuses the word narrative, and seems confused over what events are, but the argument for show rather than tell is valid, albeit irrelevant. Reveal character flaw, motivation and unresolved father issues through the nuanced use of action and subtext. For example, rather than this how-to guide telling the reader that spelling out Bewildered Heart's loneliness, instead we can reveal so much more by subtly hinting at the problem, to no one, because Bewildered Heart has no readers.
9. 'What your characters say or don’t say to other characters can often reveal a lot more about how they are really feeling than what they directly tell the reader.' This point is identical to the previous point, reminding the aspiring not to lay things on too thickly. Despite this, speaking directly to another character is not the same as speaking directly to the reader, at least until Mills & Boon invent the 'Make Your Own Romance' genre. Even then a gentle approach will most often be better, and perhaps this will be explained by a final thought that is the same as the previous two, only worded differently.
10. 'Know your market. Who are the author you write in a similar style to? What makes your book appeal to fans of these authors and what will make it stand out? Think about why a reader would choose your book over that of another author aiming at the same market.' The call for originality is idealistic and all, but the most important question to ask is, who is you most derivative of? Is they successful? Is they very successful? If so, please continue pursuing a career in romance writing. If your influences have struggled to sell their novels, you might as well quit now.
1. 'Grab readers’ attention with a gripping first chapter and a killer first line.' Beyond the title, author's name, blurb, tagline, reader's biography and some legal details about copyright and publishing dates, the opening line of a novel is often the first thing the reader will read, assuming that they start at the beginning. 'The novel’s opening can’t be all build up or backstory – something exciting has to happen!' What exciting things would be appropriate for a Romance novel featuring few characters outside the heroine and hero? The entrants of So You Think You Can Write preferred the traditional concepts of other genres, using thriller tropes to draw readers in before the big reveal that their book was a tedious will-they-won't-they love story after all. Resisting the Billionaire Playboy saw its heroine scaling the wall of a nightclub, to introduce intrigue and danger into a tale of weddings and the business of weddings.
2. 'Establish the emotional conflict that your characters are facing so that readers are dying to know how it will be resolved.' Couldn't this statement be rephrased in the form of a question that doesn't make sense? 'What is that these characters want the most and what is standing in their way?' Thank you. Without the establishing of an emotional conflict, readers would be left to guess at was keeping the characters apart, emotionally. Once the reader knows what is happening they will often keep reading to find out how things will end. In the case of Romance, the ending will be happy
3. 'Keep your central plot unique and fresh but also a clear and defined idea that you can pitch in a maximum of three sentences. You want to entice readers into a compelling novel, not confuse them with too many plot strands.' Nothing confuses a romance reader quite like plot strands. One plot is usually enough, bulked out with two subplots that are easily resolved within the central story. To simplify matters further, the two subplots can be the same as the main plot. The challenge the author faces is stringing out their idea into three sentences without repeating themselves.
4. 'Avoid clichés. The hero and heroine bumping into each other and spilling each other’s drinks has been done 1000 times! Find something new that’s completely your own.' So many spilled drinks. Should people in the throes of love be allowed to carry beverages? History says not, but at least now that cliché has been pointed out, the days of either drink-carrying or drink-spilling may be over. The avoidance of clichés is important, as is recognising what a cliché is. Fortunately Mills & Boon have spent upwards of one hundred years creating every romantic cliché they could think of. Now it is up to a new generation of writers to create some more.
5. 'Your characters need to be complex – they can’t just have one trait personalities.' Does your heroine love horses? Perhaps they love horses because of unresolved issues with their father, who himself was a horse who abandoned his daughter when she was little. This is the different between superficial archetypes and characters who feel real. While heroes often have only one thing on their mind - marriage - they carry that same obsessional will into the other areas of their life, such as billionairing and home-decoration. If they are doctors they are often also single parents. Playboys are no longer just one-dimensional caricatures. Authors have added other identifiers, including Greek and Italian, and complex traits such as ruthlessness.
6. 'Your characters also don’t have to be perfect. Flawed characters with interesting emotional conflicts make for stronger stories than characters who are practically perfect in every way.' The days of idealization are over. As we move into a new era where people are more three-dimensional than ever, readers expect their fictional characters to accurately reflect this. Mills & Boon has expanded its oeuvre to cater for as many peculiar tastes as their marketing team are capable to thinking up. There are now subgenres devoted to rich characterisation, heart-breaking emotional crises and quirky small-town locations. The publisher's tendency towards idealising the hero physically has allowed them to play around with different kinds of personal deficiencies including committmentphobia, haughtiness and having more money than they know what to do with.
7. 'Your central characters need to go on a journey throughout the story. Usually from a state of (self) ignorance or misunderstanding about what will make them happy to a point of self-awareness and acceptance.' Sometimes involving physical movement, but more often than not the journey is one of worrying while stood. The questions every romance novel asks are a series of simple ones. What makes these two characters happy and what should make them happy and why is it taking so long for them to figure out that happiness can only be found in the formulaic results of Romance Fiction? The answers are independence, marriage and narrative.
8. 'Show don’t tell. Characters and events need to be revealed through actions rather than long passages of narrative which can weaken the tension in your story.' This point misuses the word narrative, and seems confused over what events are, but the argument for show rather than tell is valid, albeit irrelevant. Reveal character flaw, motivation and unresolved father issues through the nuanced use of action and subtext. For example, rather than this how-to guide telling the reader that spelling out Bewildered Heart's loneliness, instead we can reveal so much more by subtly hinting at the problem, to no one, because Bewildered Heart has no readers.
9. 'What your characters say or don’t say to other characters can often reveal a lot more about how they are really feeling than what they directly tell the reader.' This point is identical to the previous point, reminding the aspiring not to lay things on too thickly. Despite this, speaking directly to another character is not the same as speaking directly to the reader, at least until Mills & Boon invent the 'Make Your Own Romance' genre. Even then a gentle approach will most often be better, and perhaps this will be explained by a final thought that is the same as the previous two, only worded differently.
10. 'Know your market. Who are the author you write in a similar style to? What makes your book appeal to fans of these authors and what will make it stand out? Think about why a reader would choose your book over that of another author aiming at the same market.' The call for originality is idealistic and all, but the most important question to ask is, who is you most derivative of? Is they successful? Is they very successful? If so, please continue pursuing a career in romance writing. If your influences have struggled to sell their novels, you might as well quit now.
