Writing Romance – Why Love can help Your Fiction Sell

When writing romance, put aside any cynical thoughts and focus instead on innocent dreams and memories from your youth because capturing that all important innocent essence is vital when trying to portray that spark of attraction between two of your characters. Writing romance can add sparkle to a scene or indeed, depth to a character and as it can encompass different layers for your characters, it provides glimpses of the person you are trying to create. Writing romance scenes can be fun for the writer too and it can help the story or novel to sell, because romantic fiction is hugely popular in these stricken financial times.

We all like escapism. Readers may want a story which has a semblance of gritty realism but they also want stories of hope, laughter and romance. Fiction needs to have aspects of true life so that readers can relate to it and interlacing romantic moments can produce feel - good factors throughout. When writing romance just remember that it does not all have to be hearts and flowers and over the top romantic gestures to make it work, in fact, depending on the type of fiction that you are planning to write, it can have variations of romance which either carry or support the story as it unfolds.

Romance can also add much needed obstacles to the story and these add weight to any storyline and draw the reader in. Obstacles work in a variety of ways because they add depth to the characters and to the storyline but they also take the reader on a voyage of discovery and leaves them wanting to know whether the obstacles were finally overcome. Using obstacles to prevent the romantic liaisons from progressing also works incredibly well and the actions of the characters involved then start to reveal a great deal about their personalities going forward.

Of course, if writing a short story, word count is going to be limited greatly and so the writer must know exactly what the story is about and also how much romantic content it will contain. Finding the relevant starting point is also important and writing a compelling opening paragraph essential.  All readers secretly want a happy ending in some shape or form, it doesn’t have to be that the romance works as long as there is some hope that it has worked out for the best or perhaps within those final paragraphs, there are hints of a better alternative as the story closes. Sometimes leaving out some information and avoiding finalising the story down to the very last detail can have the reader’s imagination soaring as they being to perceive those characters as three dimensional entities and start to think about the plot, how it progresses and ultimately ends.

Romantic interludes work well. The writer does not need to write intense or heavily erotic scenes if they feel uncomfortable with that, instead they can suggest a positive intensity between their characters by well-crafted dialogue and descriptive scenes. When writing romance, it is essential to provide dark and light elements to vital scenes and allow the reader to convey the subtle influences within the text.