When I began writing seriously—that is, investing the time to finish a novel and learn about the publishing business in order to see my work in print—I started with romance novels.
I was from an unfashionable suburb of Baltimore, and I felt inadequate to write literary fiction. I hadn’t gone to an Ivy League college. I hadn’t studied writing. I’d never attended a writing workshop. I didn’t know a single person in the literary or publishing world. I thought anything outside of genre fiction was for people who were born into literary families and lived in New York. Or Connecticut. Or maybe the South.
My sister was a romance novel fan, and she encouraged me to take up the pen in that genre. So I bought some Harlequin novels, devoured them, and thought, oh, yeah, I can do this.
Many rejections later, I had my first adult book published by a Harlequin imprint. Today I’m also a freelance editor for that house, and, though my own writing has taken me into historical fiction, women’s fiction, and, yes, even literary fiction, I have never lost my respect for the romance genre and the women who make their living in it. Yes, women.
Romance is a field dominated by women writers and readers who often don’t get the same respect as other genre writers. Mysteries and thrillers might be reviewed regularly in the pages of mainstream publications, but romance gets little attention, though it makes up a top-selling portion of the overall fiction market.
As I look back on my brilliant writing career, I have come to realize that starting by writing romance novels was the best way for me to learn the craft of writing. So I offer this advice to aspiring fiction writers in any area:
Learn to write romance novels. Penning those stories will teach you immeasurable lessons about storytelling and characterization.
Romance novels are formulaic. Roughly, that formula is:
Meet Cute
Fall in Love (but can’t be together)
Black Moment
Resolution
HEA (happily ever after)
Before you mock this blueprint, consider that this is the template for Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Jane meets Edward Rochester by causing him to fall off his horse, they eventually fall in love but social status keeps them apart, and when they finally wed, the biggest of all “black moments” presents itself—Rochester’s mad wife in the attic—before readers eventually get to Jane and Ed’s HEA.
Many writers might be shocked to think of Bronte’s classic as a model for romance novels—she certainly didn’t think of it that way—but its structure is the same even if the result is literary fiction.
Today’s romance novels are tightly written stories that impose the discipline of that recipe on writers. They’re almost always told from only two points of view—that of hero and heroine, often in alternating scenes or chapters.
So that is the first discipline this genre places on the writer, to tell the story exclusively from the points of view of two main characters.
The second discipline the genre imposes is to make the characters and plot believable even though its readers know the ending.
Making readers who absolutely already know the ending believe that the grand finale just ain’t gonna happen takes tremendous skill.
Nor is it easy to write real attraction between hero and heroine. It’s not a matter of having the hero look at the heroine with a smoldering glance or the heroine rendered speechless by the hero’s sculpted abs. While some romance does focus on the physical attraction of hero and heroine, most of them delve more deeply into characterization, personality and motivations.
Beyond the discipline of romance writing, though, I found the romance community very supportive with numerous writing contests available at low fees whose feedback helped me hone my craft.
I also met a critique partner through this community who went on to become a published romance novelist and dear friend. She lives thousands of miles from me, and we’ve only met twice in our lives, but for more than two decades now we email each other every day and have held each other’s hands through turmoil outside of the publishing world.
Even though my own writing has moved beyond romance, I still pen the occasional tale in that genre, and I still have enormous respect for its writers and readers. It is my great privilege to edit many of its writers as a freelancer.
So, if you aspire to be a writer and you’ve no degree in creative writing, if you’ve never been to a prestigious writing workshop or if you don’t have a clue on how to structure long-form fiction, pick up some good romance novels, and start learning how to… write like a girl. The genre’s strict formula and its readers’ expectations will provide a discipline that will help you wherever your writing heart takes you.
About the Author
Libby Sternberg is the author of romance (she has sold one rom-com to a film studio), historical fiction, women’s fiction and more. Her novel Daisy (Bancroft Press, September 2022), a refashioning of The Great Gatsby, has been hailed by Publishers Weekly’s BookLife: “The author writes with a poised composure that reads like a continuation of Fitzgerald’s prose…A delightful portrayal of a female character claiming the story as her own, repossessing her own voice.”