On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [40]
If the heroine's ex-husband was a crooked cop, then the worst possible person for her to fall in love with is probably another cop. If the hero's parents tried to control his life, then the worst possible person for him to fall in love with may be a woman whose family members are always minding each other's business.
Of course, in the long run these people aren't actually bad for each other, because the second cop isn't dishonest and the heroine's family isn't controlling. But it's only logical that, at first, the pairing appears to be a very bad combination; and it's also logical that it takes a while for the characters to figure out that things are different this time around.
In Beth Cornelison's In Protective Custody, Max and the heroine, Laura, are on the run to protect Max's newborn nephew. But each of them has an internal reason why playing house, pretending to be a family, and falling in love are all very bad ideas. Max is still recuperating from a marriage that failed because he couldn't father children:
It had been three years since he'd slept with a woman. More like six years since he'd made love for the sake of pleasure and sexual gratification.
In the final years of his marriage, sex had been about ovulation and conception and maximizing windows of opportunity. ... Knowing he couldn't get a woman pregnant had struck a massive blow to his sense of masculinity.
Meanwhile, Laura—the product of a long series of foster homes—wants nothing more than a family of her own.
The desperate yearning for her own baby, a desire she'd suppressed for years, blossomed inside her and left a hollow ache in her soul. How could she ever have children of her own when she was scared to death of forming a relationship with a man? ... She could never risk that sort of betrayal and abandonment. Hadn't the difficult years, bouncing between foster homes, left enough scars?
Is there anyone who could be worse for a woman who's longing for a family than a guy who can't give her a baby? Is there anyone who could be worse for a man with a shaky sense of masculinity than a woman who's skittish about trusting men at all?
How the Short- and Long-Term Problems Fit Together
A character's short-term and long-term problems need to be closely related, because the short-term problem focuses a spotlight on the long-term one. The immediate, life-altering threat or challenge (the short-term problem) is what forces the character to own up to and deal with the character flaw or the troublesome past experience (the long-term problem).
The long-term problem is the reason a character finds a particular short-term problem so hard to face. When Beth Cornelison saddles her hero-who-can't-be-a-father and her heroine-who-wants-to-be-a-mom with an infant, it's like holding a magnifying glass on their long-term problems. A different sort of short-term problem would have had much less emotional appeal.
When the immediate difficulty (the short-term problem or external conflict) the hero and heroine face is complicated by the kind of people they are (the character flaw or past experience that is the long-term problem or internal conflict), then you have the potential for a deeply emotional story that the readers can never forget.
For instance, if an infant were dumped on the hero's doorstep with a note implying that the hero is the father, any heroine would be upset. But for a heroine who was raised in an orphanage and who has struggled with her own issues of abandonment, this situation would be particularly horrible. How could the hero not know about his baby? How could he have turned his back on his child?
If the short-term problem is that your hero has suddenly lost all his money, perhaps the long-term one is that he's always bought whatever he wanted—and that, in his experience, others liked him mostly for what he could give them. Because he's always been able to buy everything, the loss of