Writing good romance is so difficult because the entire plot is based on character interactions and producing chemistry. The readers need to believe in the love, whether the hero and heroine have known one another for a week or for years. We need to believe.
So often I see ppl criticize the romance in books and it comes off as them hating romance and I’m like no no no no no, a well done romance is an exquisite piece of writing. It’s not romance in general that sucks, it’s bad romance that sucks. Insta love with no chemistry. Relationships with no conflict. Badly written heroes. Those romances suck.
But romance books? Written by masters of the genre? Those are amazing.
THIS RIGHT HERE
It’s easy to write bad romance, because good romance requires a near-doctorate level understanding of human psychology and motivations.
Here’s the thing… certain emotions are easy to evoke and others are very hard to master and write.
Anger. Hate. Rage. Fear. <– negative emotions are the easiest to write because they rely on primal instinct programmed into the human brain by thousands of years of evolution. Within cultures there are certain things that will always evoke rage (and this is why not all books translate well to other cultures). Certain fears are universal.
Every bestseller every written has a Universal Fear driving at least the opening act of the book if not the whole book itself. Most bestsellers use “I fear I am worthless.” or “I fear death.” as their driving focus. Everything from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to HARRY POTTER has used this and it’s why it sells so well.
It’s also why Romance isn’t taken seriously at times.
Romance promises as a happy romantic ending. Which means the two most common universal fears are utterly erased by the genre requirements alone. No one is going to die. The characters are going to be loved and feel worthwhile by the end of the book.
Since readers are programmed by society to instinctively fear those things some people have trouble relating to a romance story where they must latch onto something other than fear to get through a book.
Joy. Humor. Laughter. Happiness. <— positive emotions are really hard to write because they are complex emotions. There is nothing that makes people universally happy. I know, it’s shocking. Not kittens. Not puppies. Not a mother’s love. That thing you love, adore, and can’t live without? Yeah, someone hates it.
This is why writing satire or humor is so difficult. It’s why happy books are dismissed as fluffy or silly. They have a much narrower audience. The author has to reach into the reader’s head and manipulate their emotions so that they can feel soaring triumph. There isn’t a shortcut to writing happiness.
LOVE. <– Such a complex thing. Little understood. Hard to define. Ever roving about. Love, especially sexual and romantic love, are so individual that there will never be a One Size Fits All.
When an author sets out to write a romance they have to convince the reader not only to abandon fear but they have to write humans who are complex, convincing, and through storytelling explain the psychology of these individuals so the reader goes, “Yes, yes! I see it! I see why these two are perfect together and could never be with anyone else!”
It’s at once something many people have an innate talent for (hello, shippers!) and that many people don’t understand. Understanding love requires a very unselfish, un-egocentric view of the world. You have to think like someone else. And then, as the author, you have to create a way for a reader to easily step into the mind of someone else and understand this attraction without using shortcuts like “I saw her and got a boner. It’s love!” Because that isn’t.
It’s easy to write bad romance. It’s easy to use shortcuts and script the book like a film. But where films can rely on music and facial expressions to convey the complexity of emotion a writer only has words. There is no soundtrack for Chapter 7. There is no set of words in the English language that properly express the depth of feeling, the longing and desire, of seeing someone you treasure turn and smile at someone else and knowing from the depths of your soul that you would give up everything just to keep them smiling.
Writing a good romance means balancing internal and external conflict, knowing a person’s weaknesses and strengths, and pairing them with someone(s) who fill in their gaps, boost their strengths, and make them happy at the same time. And then, after all of that, you have to find readers who will understand and appreciate the characters you’ve written. You have to make the reader fall in love too.
Done well Romance is the most complex literary form.
wayhaughtshipper: Dom: “Usually if you do something like that it’s probably gonna be a little bit awkward, you know, you suddenly realize you’re dressed like you’re dressed and then you get all insecure and nervous. And I think it was really … Continue reading →
Our society has a number of loveable buffoons who fool around and are excused from acting like prats because they’re funny. They might be rubbish at most things but as long as their banter is flowing, we put up with it.
These types are almost exclusively men. You don’t get hilarious, idiotic women being lorded as icons of our culture. Diane Abbott is dismissed as a cretin while Boris Johnson is a joker.
Which begs the question: is conscious male incompetence a form of misogyny?
If you labour the point that you can’t cook, then chances are that you won’t be made to cook. If you make a hash out of doing the laundry or hoovering, you’re forcing someone else to take over.
Few have the patience to watch someone do a job badly over and over again and so often, they’ll just take it upon themselves to do your chores as well as their own. Emotional labour is doubled when you’ve got an incompetent clown on your hands.
I was recently listening Semi Circles, a BBC radio comedy starring Paula Wilcox, first broadcast in 1989.
It’s about a housewife who recently wakes up to the fact that she’s spent the past eight years being a slave to her kids and nice-but-emotionally-dim husband.
Part of this awakening is the realisation that she does all the housework because her husband is crap at it. Left alone, he makes inedible food. He lets the kids stay up well beyond their bedtime. He leaves the house a tip.
He doesn’t even try to do a good job because he fears that if he’s too good at these jobs, his wife will make him do more of them.
Put these garbage men in the garbage where they belong.
I went and checked the original source and it’s worse. While most of the comments get the problem (the lying, not the eggs) some of them just cannot see that this shit is actually a big honking warning sign for bigger shit. A loving person is not capable of doing this.
He literally puts his mere convenience over her actual well being. This guy thought up and executed a plan where she has to do *all* the work (because of course it wasn’t just this one specific thing) while he watches her tire herself out from the sidelines. Imagine this going on for *years*. …now imagine this with kids. You think this guy cares if she gets off during sex? Would he take care of her if she were to get sick? Would he ever lift a finger if he could get away not doing it?
She can’t trust a word he says and he doesn’t give a shit about her needs. It’s not about the *eggs*.
Sorry to reblog from you, stranger, but this commentary is all very good. I especially appreciate the emphasized statement that “a loving person is not capable of doing this.” That line is going to rattle around my brain for ages — the words feel good in my mouth. How you’ve said it is just so right.
I want to add some of OP’s further comments on the thread she made:
“To be fair, I have pretty high standards for cleanliness and his idea of clean vastly differs from mine and honestly, that’s okay! But now I’m starting to seriously wonder if he sabotaged cleaning, too, just to get me to do it. Dishes, for instance. He will wash half and leave a nasty sink full of the rest, claiming he’ll do them later. This drives me nuts, so I just do them. Often he will leave crusted on shit on then, too, so okay, I’ll just do them, right? Now because of the egg business, I’m seeing it as malicious.”
→ The husband is lazy. He seemingly commits to housework, only to bail partway through, and doesn’t even put in the effort required to do the job right in the first place.
“Yes, he sucks at dishes and laundry to the point he is banned from doing them. He will leave clothes in the washer overnight and doesnt separate anything to the point I’ve had many white clothes ruined. My favorite white brassiere is now pink due to his bullshit.”
→ The husband is inconsiderate of his wife’s property, even that which is well-loved. Could his repeated failure to learn how to do this task have been a ruse? Did he anticipate his banishment from laundry duty? OP now has to genuinely wonder about this.
“I’m starting to think he does things wrong on purpose now just to get me to do it. Another example! My car. For a while my driver side door wouldn’t open from the outside, so I had to crawl through the passenger side. He ordered a handle and kept putting it off for WEEKS. Finally, he says his hands are too big to do it, so I had to do it.”
→ The husband makes excuses for himself that cast him as an unwitting victim to fate, with the implication that he would totally do [action], if only he could. He distances himself from any possibility of blame.
Obviously, anonymous forum posts are taken with a grain of salt — we, as readers, will never know for sure if OP is real. That’s not a concern for me, though. Like I don’t care. The fact is that if one assumes this is all true, it is very obvious that the poster’s husband is a perfect example of maliciously feigned incompetence. He’s manipulative and lazy to the point of cruelty, expecting his wife to work while he fails to lift a single functioning finger. The statement that “he likes her eggs better” isn’t cute like some have stated in the replies to this post; it’s just another excuse that walls him off from criticism, a bullshit reason he pulled out of his ass to make her feel guilty and unreasonable for being upset.
The absurdity of the situation when taken at face value — lying about eggs, getting mad about making eggs, even just the reality of deviled eggs (an inherently silly prep style) being someone’s favorite food — extends an air of the absurd to the wife’s concerns, and to others’ warnings. I have noticed several comments to the tune of, “These people are all mad about eggs? What a joke! How oversensitive. That’s just how men are; this is just what marriage looks like.”
It’s fucked up, is what it is.
…deviled egg lady, if you’re truly out there somewhere, I hope you told your husband to make his own goddamn eggs from now on. It’s literally the least he can do.
I often refer to my bottle-raised lamb as my adopted daughter, because it’s mostly true, it temporarily keeps nosy strangers from knowing I’m an eeeevil childfree woman, and it’s hilarious when people find out. And by that time they’re usually too disturbed by the “her-daughter-is-a-sheep” thing to get on my case about the “woman-with-no-husband-or-kids-oh-the-horror” thing.
Most of my friends are aware that I do this, and will back me up in conversations without batting an eye when I reference my daughter. And the best part is that they literally never drop the story. They just 100% all the time accept that I have a two-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that she happens to be a sheep is an unimportant detail, not worth mentioning until an anecdote gets too weird to plausibly be about a human toddler.
Which actually takes much longer than you’d think, since human toddlers apparently have absolutely zero sense. “She bites if you stop paying attention to her” is believable, “she tries to eat rocks out of the landscaping” is believable, “she stuck her head through a fence and couldn’t get out” is believable. “She jumped a five foot fence and came screaming back into the house through the dog door when I left her outside in the pasture” does get some strange looks, though usually not for the right reason.
Occasionally the joke gets turned around on me, though. I posted a picture on my not-tumblr blog of her wearing my glasses, and every comment was “Oh my gosh she looks just like you!!!” “I would never have known she was adopted If you hadn’t told me!!” “Are you sure that’s not an old picture of you?!”
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 