On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [23]
What your hero and heroine have experienced in their pasts will influence how they react to the problem they face in your story. The nature of the conflict between them will influence their relationship and how the sexual tension develops. The traits that make this couple fall in love will influence what the happy ending will be. If the conflict has no satisfactory resolution, it's not going to be a truly happy ending, even if the hero and heroine fling themselves into each other's arms on the last page.
Knowing the basics up front will keep you from reaching the middle of the book with a limp conflict, no sexual tension, and two characters who have absolutely no reason to want to be together.
HERO AND HEROINE
Without two people to fall in love, there is no story. Since you're asking readers to spend several hours with your characters, it's important to create a hero and a heroine they want to know more about. That means the characters have to be both real (so readers can relate to them on a human level) and sympathetic (so readers feel the time they spend reading the characters' story is worthwhile).
If the readers spend several hours reading the story, most of that time will be in the company of the heroine. So your heroine must be someone the readers can
understand, like, and respect—someone they want to hang around with. Someone who seems like a real person.
The hero must be someone the readers can picture themselves falling in love with. But you want them not just to fall in love with him—experiencing that dizzying, glorious rush of emotion—you want them to stay in love with him and believe that the heroine will be truly happy with him forever.
The next chapter, which goes into detail about heroes and heroines and how you can develop your main characters, may be the most important chapter in this book. If your hero and heroine don't come to life for your readers—if they aren't people they care about, root for, and want to be happy—they're not likely to spend their precious time reading a book about them.
Knowing your characters is extraordinarily important. If you don't know these people almost as well as you know yourself, then how will you know how they would react to the problems you've created for them—or to each other? You will sometimes hear an author say something like, "I wanted my heroine to be shaken up by the bad guy making a pass at her, but she just rolled her eyes and said, Yeah, right, like that's going to upset me.' So I had to figure out another way to make her turn to the hero for help."
Your reaction might be to wonder if the writer is having a hallucination. After all, the writer creates the character—so how can the character simply refuse to cooperate? What the writer is really saying is that she created a character so believable—so real—that she knows how that person would act or react in a given situation. When she then tries to write a situation that is inconsistent with the character's values or personality, the character just won't go along with the plan.
Chapter four will go into more detail about creating real, sympathetic, believable characters—the first requirement for your romance novel.
CONFLICT
While the developing relationship between the hero and heroine (which we'll address next) is at the center of the story, it is not the entire story. If the main question in a romance novel is simply whether and when the hero and heroine will admit they love each other, then the story will be unsatisfying. Readers know from the beginning that they will, because they're reading a romance. Watching two people date, get to know each other, and slowly explore their growing attraction isn't terribly exciting.
It's the difficulties that surround this couple falling in love at this moment— the difficulties that threaten to keep them from reaching a happy ending—that keep the readers' attention. The way in which these difficulties impact these particular characters, putting pressure on them and bringing out their good points and their flaws, is what makes their story