On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [78]
Referring to Your Characters
When you're referring to characters via narrative or describing the action in your story, choose one name or nickname and use it consistently. If you refer to your hero sometimes as Jake, sometimes as Mr. Wilder, and sometimes as the Professor, the readers are going to become confused about who is who and how many people are involved. If you decide to call the hero Jake, use that name consistently in your narrative and your dialogue tags.
In contrast, when characters talk to each other, the names they use will vary. The doorman will call your hero Mr. Wilder, his students will call him Professor or Dr. Wilder, and the heroine might call him anything from Wild Card on down. But in straightforward narrative, he should have one name and one name only.
There are two exceptions to this rule. First, if your heroine is usually referred to as Elizabeth but the hero thinks of her as Betsy, then when you're writing from his point of view, you can refer to her as Betsy in narrative as well as in his dialogue. Consistency is the key.
The other exception occurs early in the book and concerns both the hero and heroine. If they've just met for the first time, they're probably not on a first-name basis. If the first section of the book is in the heroine's point of view, the heroine will probably refer to the hero by both first and last name until a connection begins to form between the characters. If you're writing from the hero's point of view, he may think of the heroine as Melanie Stafford for a while before switching to Mela-nie or Mel. Once he makes the switch, however, the style should remain consistent.
1. Look through the romance novels you've been studying. How many secondary characters are there?
2. Is there a villain? An Other Woman? A Wrong Man? A significant third?
3. What purposes do the secondary characters fulfill?
4. How much do you learn about the secondary characters themselves? About their private lives? About their opinions regarding the main characters?
1. What types of secondary characters will be useful in telling your story?
2. Will the heroine have a best friend, a co-worker, a sister? What secondary characters will be most closely involved with the hero?
3. How can your secondary characters help tell the story?
4. Write a scene in which the hero or heroine talks to a secondary character about the other main character.
The love scenes in a romance novel are different from those in other kinds of fiction. Love scenes in romance novels are integral to the plot and to character development, thus they're more important than love scenes in most other fiction. Since the love developing between the main characters is such an enormous part of a romance novel, the physical expression of that love is a crucial element of the story.
Like many components of romance novels, however, love scenes and all their particulars are difficult to sum up in a few words. People who haven't read a lot of romance novels are apt to ask, "Is there always a love scene?" or "How many love scenes are there in the average romance?" or "Where are the love scenes placed? Should there be one in the first chapter?"
The answer to all these questions is "It depends on the kind of romance novel." There are many varieties of romance novel, and physical affection is handled a bit differently in each one. A wide range of love scenes from many different kinds of romances