How To Write A Romance Novel

Romantic novels are very popular. It was David O. Selznick, a famous film director, who said there's really only one plot, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy meets girl again and that really sums up a romantic novel.

It's a formula and you don't want to stray too far from your formula otherwise your readers won't be satisfied. So, it's important that your heroine is realistic, you don't want to have someone who's perfect that is really boring and your readers won't like her. So, you need to have a realistic modern heroine, somebody with a job, somebody who's interesting in her own right.

You need to introduce your man pretty early but if it's obvious that this is the right man, then that's not going to be a very exciting story. You need to have a rival, so all the time, your reader is reading your story, they are thinking maybe it's this one or maybe it's that one. You've got to keep your reader thinking that there are at least two possibilities.

It's also useful sometimes to introduce your main character in a slightly different way. If you read Jane Austen's Emma which is one of the best romantic novel ever written, Mr. Knightley is introduced right at the beginning of the story, but because he is introduced as an old friend of family, somehow, we never think of him being the right man for Emma and she doesn't realize it either until we are almost at the end of the story.

We think she is in love with someone else and so does she, but she's not and that's what makes the story really interesting. If you are writing a really formulate romantic novel like in Mills & Boon, Mills & Boon will actually give you a formula. They will say the girl has to meet the man by page five, he has to be so many years older than her, they have to have some misunderstanding, she has to think that he's in love with someone else and then by page two hundred and forty or whatever it is, that's when he declares himself and she falls into his arms.

Another issue today with romantic novels is, do I put intimate scenes in my romantic novel? And the answer is you can. However, intimate scenes are the most difficult things to write. Well, so if you can't do it, well it's best not to do it at all.

It's best to hint it because romantic fiction is such a formula, it's really important to think of ways that you can make it a bit different, ways that you can do that are to choose a different location, maybe an unusual location, maybe somewhere really odd that you wouldn't think of as a background for a romantic novel and that environment will make your story different to everyone else's and it will also give your character something to do when they are not falling in love with one another and that's important, too, because if all the characters do, I think about Mr. Right and Ms. Right, then that will be pretty boring characters and that's how to write a good romantic novel. .