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That doesn't mean you have to make the late wife utterly nasty, but in some way the new romance should offer more potential for deep and lasting happiness than his previous marriage did, or ever could have.

How are your main characters the best combination that could be imagined? In this example, from Lisa Cach's chick-lit novella Return to Sender; the hero enunciates what he's looking for in a relationship:

[lan's] dark blue eyes locked with mine, his expression intense. "I want to know that a woman wants me, Ian McLaughlin. Not just that I'm the right age and have the right income, and treat my mother well. I want to feel that a woman's world would not be complete without me; that I gave her something that no one else in the world could. That she found something in me that made her feel that she had come home after a long journey through a cold and lonely winter, and that she could never find exactly that same feeling with anyone else."

I didn't answer. I couldn't answer. ... I hadn't known that a man could need to be needed in that way.

Ian's definition of a onee-in-a-lifetime love and his unwillingness to settle for less helps to make him a fascinating hero.

HOW TO RUIN A RELATIONSHIP

The developing love story, when well written, is like a river. Sometimes it moves slowly, sometimes it runs fast. Sometimes it's lazy and carefree, sometimes it's threatening and scary. Sometimes its course is level and smooth, sometimes it boils into rapids. Water, once set in motion, will wear away anything that stands in its path. In the same way, the love developing between the two main characters, once it is set in motion, should wear away the objections, problems, and differences that stand in its path.

This concept is easy to understand in the abstract, but applying it to the story is a little harder. So let's approach it by studying the ways you can diminish the romance, push it out of its place in the spotlight, and destroy the developing love story:

• Develop a too-complex plot and background. If you can't describe your characters' disagreement in a brief sentence, the conflict may be too complex, and you may find yourself spending time explaining the details instead of developing the story. The same goes for jobs—if you have to explain in depth what the heroine does for a living, maybe your story would be better off if she had a different, more straightforward career.

• Overload the story with too many technical details. If the hero, a pro golfer, is giving lessons to the heroine, a sales manager who has to learn the game, and you detail every golf term, shot, stance, club, and piece of gear, your readers will be ready to scream. Golfers know all this and will be bored. Nongolfers don't care.

• Separate the hero and heroine. If his job is to catch poachers in the national forest and hers is to babysit his kid back home, when are they going to spend time together? How are they going to have a chance to get to know each other, much less fall in love?

• Have the hero and heroine talk about each other instead of to each other. If the hero and heroine meet in the first chapter and exchange three sentences, and then you use the rest of the chapter to show the hero having dinner with his extended family and telling them all about how great the heroine was, what she'd said to him, what he'd said to her, and what her accent was like, the readers will go to the mall instead of reading chapter two.

• Bring in lots of characters. Tell us all about them. Let them take over the story. If you spend an entire chapter introducing every member of the hero's family and providing extensive histories for each, the readers are likely to drop the book.

• Let everybody think a lot. It's a great deal easier to let the characters get introspective—to show them rambling on in their heads about what the other one said, did, or might have been thinking—than it is to present a real conversation, with real issues and disagreements.

HOW TO MAKE A RELATIONSHIP WORK

There are several