On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [44]
Her gut wanted to tell him to forget it. She didn't want her son to have anything to do with Pine Gulch's busiest bachelor.
[Her son] had had enough lousy male role models in his life—he didn't need a player like Seth teaching him all the wrong things about how to treat a woman.
... Seth Dalton was being surprisingly decent about this ... [S]he would have expected him to be hot-tempered and petulant.
Instead, she found him rational, calm, accommodating.
And extremely attractive.
She let out a slow, nervous breath. Was that the reason for her instinctive opposition to the man's reasonable proposal? Because he was sinfully gorgeous with that thick, dark hair, eyes a stunning, heartbreaking blue and chiseled, tanned features that made him look as though he should be starring in Western movies?
He made her edgy and ill at ease and that alone gave her enough reason to wish for a way to avoid any further acquaintance between them. She was here in Pine Gulch to help her little family find some peace and healing—not to engage in useless, potentially harmful fantasies about a charming, feckless cowboy with impossibly blue eyes and a smile that oozed sex.
Jenny has excellent reasons for being attracted—not only by Seth's good looks but by his sex appeal and his willingness to rescue her son from criminal proceedings—but she also has excellent reasons for trying to fight off her attraction, because giving in to it may put her son at risk.
BALANCING ATTRACTION WITH REASON
For a romance novel to be successful, the hero and heroine must be drawn together by something more than mere physical desire. They must have logical and believable reasons for liking each other, as well as for being angry or frustrated with each other, in order for the love story to be convincing.
People who feel nothing for each other between the extremes of anger and lust, or who see nothing attractive about the other person except in a sexual way, are not believable lovers. What else do your characters see in each other besides physical attractiveness? What reasons do they have to like each other? What reasons do they have to trust each other?
Tenderness, caring, respect, a sense of humor—these are important building blocks of lasting love, and they're every bit as important as the physical reactions.
Of course, if you overdo the trust and the nurturing and the tenderness and the jokes, you've got a cozy little duo who are merely going through the motions for 60,000 words or so before they can finally get to the happy ending.
This is why it's so important to have a real, believable, honest conflict between these people—not just a misunderstanding, not just the interference of another person, not just an unwillingness to admit that they're attracted to each other, and not just superficial nastiness, but a real problem that causes tension between these two characters. Then, against the background of that problem, you must show these two people struggling to deny fate and ultimately realizing that, despite their disagreement, the other is the one person who means the world to them.
THE ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME LOVE
The love between your hero and heroine needs to be the kind that appears only once in a lifetime. That means the readers must be convinced that this couple is the best possible romantic combination—that they're the perfect fit for each other. So it's not enough for the hero and heroine simply to fall in love, especially if it seems that any one of a dozen other men (or women) would do just as well. What makes this couple absolutely right for each other, better than anyone else could ever be?
In many a beginner's story, the conflict is that the hero is still deeply in love with his late wife—in fact, he's so wounded that it's hard to believe the heroine could ever be anything more than a feeble substitute. But such a story line is unsatisfying