On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [41]
If the long-term problem is that the young widow refuses to deal with her loss and go on with her life, perhaps the short-term problem is that she is suddenly forced to move out of the home she shared with her husband. Nobody
likes to lose a home, but because she has turned the house into a shrine for her late husband, having to move would be a bigger blow for her than it would be for other people.
Developing Complementary Short- and Long-Term Problems
In a romance novel, the long-term problem for each character is always, in essence, what tendency or flaw makes it difficult for the couple to end up together. In each story, however, the precise problem is different.
Can Mary overcome the trauma of her family's poverty and accept that John is not really a free-spending gambler like her father?
That's a long-term problem—the effect of her father's gambling on the family is a past experience that colors everything in Mary's life today. If you then establish that John owns the casino where Mary's father gambled, and begin the story with Mary trying to find a way to close it down or to convince John to return enough of her father's losses to allow her mother to get necessary medical treatment, then you have tension-producing short- and long-term problems that are closely related and intolerable for the character.
Meanwhile, John will have a long-term problem of his own. It may be every bit as huge as Mary's (childhood experiences have left him addicted to risk), or it may be smaller (he's inherited the casino and he'd like to simply close it down, but that would throw hundreds of people out of work; he can't in good conscience sell it to another operator, because he's actually opposed to gambling).
Often, if one character's long-term problem is huge, the other's problem is more manageable—but each of them will have a long-term problem, a past experience or character flaw that causes trouble in the present. In the most effective stories, the long-term problems of the two characters put them in opposition to each other, in addition to the complications of their short-term problems.
THE FORCE
As you develop your short- and long-term problems, keep in mind that because your two characters have so many reasons to disagree and so many things keeping them apart, they need a really good reason to stick around at all. Under ordinary circumstances, when you're frustrated by someone, you just avoid him—you don't hang around long enough to fall in love. In fact, unless they're family members or co-workers, you might even avoid such annoying people entirely.
Realistic characters will do the same thing—walk away unless they're forced to stay. What requires the hero and heroine to stay in the same space long enough to realize that, despite their differences, they're perfect for each other?
In a romance novel, the situation that makes it impossible for the characters to avoid each other is called the force.
Sometimes the force is built in to the short-term problem—maybe your heroine's life is in danger, and the hero is assigned to protect her. But in other cases, you have to look a little deeper. Does your couple need to cooperate in order to succeed? If they're both assigned to a project, perhaps their jobs depend on making it work. Do they desperately need each other's help? Maybe your heroine is in danger, and the hero is the only one who can protect her. Do circumstances force them into close contact? Perhaps they're stranded together by an accident.
For a romance to be successful, it has to have a force in the form of one of these three scenarios:
1. The hero and heroine must need each other so badly they can't just walk away. She needs his help as a doctor in order to have the baby she wants, and he needs a wife or he'll lose his job in the medical practice.
2. Either the hero or the heroine has a logical and valid reason for forcing the other into the situation. He thinks she's cheated a charity and challenges