On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [127]
• Give your sequel characters as heroic a persona as you can in the first book so they're worthy of being heroes and heroines in their own book. Best friends and family members can be tart without being nasty, which allows them to be useful secondary characters while preserving their heroic potential. Just don't tone them down so much they aren't able to function in the roles they play in the original story.
• Keep your eye on the ball. It's the first story that is important right now; if it doesn't sell, the second one in your series has much less chance of making it.
1. Look back at the romance novels you've been studying and read the last few pages of each one. Can you locate the black moment? The switch?
2. How does each ending relate to earlier elements in the book? Is the tone, the sensuality level, the humor similar to the rest of the story?
3. Does the ending hark back to the beginning of the story? Does it answer a question or use a theme the author has developed earlier in the rest of the story?
1. What will be the black moment in your story when everything seems to be lost and there can't be a happy ending?
2. Which of your main characters will break that impasse and switch things around so there can be a happy resolution?
3. Will there be a proposal? How would your hero (or perhaps your heroine) propose?
4. How will your story end? Can you use elements from the beginning of your story to create a circular ending? Can you repeat thematic elements from throughout the story to bring events to a neat close, perhaps tying up one last loose end? Can you create a genuine surprise for your readers?
No matter how good a plan you had when you started writing your book, your first draft is likely to have problems, holes, inconsistencies, and spots where your characters did the unexpected and threw you off course. The story may have ended up shorter or longer than you thought it would. Or perhaps you've got the horrible feeling that something is off-kilter, but you're unable to deduce exactly what it is.
FIVE REASONS ROMANCES GO WRONG
If there is something wrong with your story, chances are it's one of the Big Five: (l) inadequate conflict, (2) unrealistic characters, (3) lack of force, (4) focus not kept on the romance, or (5) poor writing.
In every unsuccessful romance novel I've ever read, one (or more) of these problems lies at the heart of the trouble:
1. There isn't really a conflict, or the conflict between the characters is a misunderstanding rather than a real disagreement about substantial issues. A story that features two people who are fighting their overwhelming attraction for each other, but doing nothing else, is unlikely to hold up for the necessary number of chapters.
If your hero, on the slimmest of evidence, jumps to the conclusion that your heroine is a slut, while your heroine reacts to the hero's first statement by writing him off as a bully, and they continue thinking of each other this way throughout the story, you have a misunderstanding but not a conflict.
Real conflict involves important issues. What's at stake? What do both hero and heroine want that only one of them can have? Or what do they both want so badly they have to work together to get it?
A real conflict has at least two realistic, believable, sympathetic sides—positions that reasonable human beings could logically take. If you (and the readers) can't argue from either POV changing sides from time to time as if you were a debater, then your conflict is one-sided and flat.
When you have real conflict, your characters will have lots to talk about. When you don't, they may argue till doomsday, but their conversation won't lead anywhere.
Symptoms of this malady include:
• Characters who argue but don't simply talk to each other. If explaining their positions would solve the problem in chapter one, then it's only a misunderstanding, not a conflict.