Leigh Michaels - On Writing Romance: How to Craft a Novel That Sells

When I was fourteen years old and a freshman in high school, I wrote my first romance novel. It was painfully derivative and naive, and despite the number of years that have passed (and let's not go into that, please), it's painful even to think about it now. Thank heaven I maintained enough good sense not to let any of my classmates read it.

In the dozen years after that first effort, I wrote five more complete romancesand burned them all, sending more than a quarter of a million words up in smoke. I've never regretted burning those booksin fact, I'm awfully glad they're not hiding in a closet to embarrass me somedaybut I do regret that it took me so long and so many tries to get to the point that an editor could look at my work without bursting into giggles.

When I first started writing, I'd have given anything to have the book you're now holding in your handsa step-by-step guide to developing and writing a romance novel that works, a love story that brings readers to laughter and tears.

On Writing Romance is the distilled wisdom I've gained from writing eighty successful romance novels (and from writing that armful of unsuccessful ones), and from teaching romance writing to hundreds of students, many of whom have gone on to success with commercial romance publishers. While On Writing Romance is intended mainly for writers working on romance novels, the techniques are useful to all those who include romantic elements in their books. I hope you will find it helpful!

Falling in love has been a prominent theme in literature since people first started recording stories. Romantic lovewhether fated, doomed, or happyhas drawn the interest of uncounted generations around the world.

The romance novel, however, is a modern concept. A romance novel is more than just a story in which two people fall in love. It's a very specific form of genre fiction. Not every story with a horse and a ranch in it is a Western; not every story with a murder in it is a mystery; and not every book that includes a love story can be classified as a romance novel.

WHAT IS THE ROMANCE NOVEL?

Distinguishing a true romance novel from a novel that includes a love story can be difficult, because both types of books tell the story of two people falling in love against a background of other action. The difference lies in which part of the story is emphasized.

In a romance novel, the core story is the developing relationship between a man and a woman. The other events in the story line, though important, are secondary to that relationship. If you were to take out the love story, the rest of the book would be reduced in both significance and interest to the reader to the point that it really wouldn't be much of a story at all.

In contrast, in other types of novels that contain romantic elements, the love story isn't the main focus. The other action is the most important part of the story; even if the love story were removed, the book would still function almost as well. It might not be as interesting, but it would still be a full story.

So let's say you're writing a story about a woman who's being chased by the bad guys, and she falls in love with the bodyguard who's protecting her. Is this a romance novel? Or is it general fiction?

That depends on which elements of the story are emphasized. If the main focus of the story is the chase, what the bad guys are actually up to, and why they're after the main character, the novel is general fiction. If the main focus of the story is the couple falling in love while they're hiding out, it's a romance novel.

The Modern Romance Novel

Though love and romance have long been a part of the literary world, the romance novel as we know it today originated in the early twentieth century in England. The publishing firm of Mills & Boon, established in 1908, brought out the work of such authors as Agatha Christie and Jack Londonand also published romantic fiction. The firm soon realized that its hardcover romances, sold mostly to libraries, were more in demand than many of its regular titles. As the years passed, romantic fiction outstripped other book sales by even greater margins, and eventually the firm dropped other types of books in order to concentrate on publishing romance novels.

In the late 1950s, the success of Mills & Boon romances was noted by a Canadian publishing company, Harlequin Books, which began publishing Mills & Boon books in North America as Harlequin Romances. The two firms merged in the early 1970s, with Mills & Boon becoming a branch office of Harlequin. Harlequin began setting up independent publishing offices around the world and started to publish romances in translation. In 1981, the firms became a division of the Tor-star Corporation, a Canadian communications company.

For a number of years, Mills & Boon continued to be the sole acquiring editorial office, buying books mostly from British authors. Though it began publishing American author Janet Dailey in the 1970s, Mills & Boon didn't truly open up to other American authors until the early 1980s.

In the 1980s, Harlequin purchased its main rival, Silhouette Romance, from its founding publisher, Simon & Schuster. Since that time the two companies have functioned with relative independence under the Torstar corporate umbrella, though in recent years the line between the two houses has become less distinct. Other major publishers of romance include Kensington, Avon, Bantam/Dell, Berkley/Jove, Dorchester, New American Library (NAL), Pocket Books, St. Martin's, and Warner. (Appendix E includes a more complete list of current romance publishers.)

For many years, only one brand of romance novel existed, known generically in the United Kingdom as a Mills & Boon, and in North America as a Harlequin. Despite the lack of brand-name variety, however, the stories published under

these imprints were widely divergent. Contemporary, medical, and historical romances were all published as Harlequin Romance or Mills & Boon Romance.

But readers who gobbled up those original romances wanted even more variety, and authors wanted to stretch their wings with different kinds of stories longer, spicier, more sensual, more confrontational, and including elements that just didn't fit in the short, sweet, traditional package.

Various types of romances began to split off from the long-established core. Harlequin editorial offices in New York City and Toronto began acquiring new kinds of stories, written by new authors. Radically different cover designs and distinctive brand names helped the reader more easily distinguish between the various styles of romances.

Some of those changes were made in response to other publishers, who had noticed the success of the Harlequin/Mills & Boon machine and started bringing out their own romance novels. But not long after those other publishers launched their romance titles, they discovered that a commercially successful romance novel requires more than a simple handsome male meets cute female formula. Unsuccessful lines and subgenres soon disappeared from the market. Since then, the romance market has been ever changing, as new lines are brought out and foundering lines and subgenres are abandoned.