Tag: Conflict in Romance

Categories
Romancing Your Story

A Trope with a Twist

Readers, particularly romance readers, love stories that feel familiar—shorthand for they use tropes—but also seem new and bring a surprise. As writers, how do we craft novels that deliver on all counts?

There are several strategies to writing fresh stories that still feel as comfortable as a warm sweater on a cold day. Let’s look at just a few:

Twist a Common Trope

Enemies to Lovers is a popular trope that can have several variations. The hero and heroine can dislike each other for their personal points of view, such as in Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy have different worldviews and values which lead them to disagree about virtually everything. Or the protagonists can actually be friendly personally, but enemies professionally, such as in Mr. and Mrs. Smith who are in “love” but also rival assassins. Or in Two Weeks Notice, Sandra Bullock’s and Hugh Grant’s characters were different both personally and professionally but finally realized their differences attracted them to each other and made them compatible.

Combine Tropes

Another Sandra Bullock movie, The Proposal, combined Enemies to Lovers and Fake Relationship, with a dash of Forced Proximity. Ryan Reynolds (along with all of Bullock’s other employees) hated her because she was rigid, mean, and cold. She needed a fiancé to avoid deportation. He agreed to her proposal to pretend to be in a relationship because of what she could do for him professionally. One element of that movie I appreciated was the change in Bullock’s appearance. As she grew to care for Reynolds and his family, she softened. She let her hair down (literally), and she dressed more casually.

Another great combination, Forbidden Love (Romeo and Juliet) plus Forced Proximity (Green Card) guarantees sparks on the page.

Unfamiliar Settings

Sticking with Sandra Bullock (and why not?), let’s talk about The Lost City. Set on a tropical island, both Bullock’s and Channing Tatum’s characters are out of their elements and forced to work together to escape the crazed billionaire who’s kidnapped Bullock’s romance novelist character. There’s also a Forced Proximity combination with Loretta (Bullock) and Alan (Tatum) on the run together.

No matter the tropes you choose to combine, there are some things to keep in mind:

  • Characters. They should always have great backstories and motivations that work with the trope. For a Second Chance story, both protagonists will have shared memories with emotional layers. Use those emotions to help your reader connect with the characters.
  • Conflict and Resolution. The conflict should be genuine, not something that could be resolved with a discussion. It needs to stem from who the characters are and what they believe. The resolution should be a result of growth and lessons learned.

With the many, many romance tropes available to writers, the combinations for something new and fun yet familiar are nearly endless. To paraphrase a current credit card commercial, “What’s in your Trope Wallet?”

Pull it out and put it to work.

Carrie Padgett lives in Central California, close to Yosemite, but far from Hollywood, the beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She believes in faith, families, fun, and happily ever afters. She writes contemporary fiction with romance. She recently signed a contract with Sunrise Publishing to co-write a romance novel with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hauck that will be published in 2022. Carrie and her husband live in the country with their high-maintenance cat and laid-back dog, within driving distance of their six grandchildren.

You can find her online at:

Categories
Writing Romance

REALISTICALLY RELATABLE

Making your hero and heroine relatable is key to creating characters your readers will care about, will laugh with, and will cry over. Your protagonists must also care about each other. They must have enough in common so that their attraction makes sense, but they also must have enough differences to create conflict.

How do we create characters who leap off the page and into our readers’ hearts?

Characters need to have:

  • Relatability. Make them human, not perfect. Give them flaws, real character flaws, not just physical imperfections. I once edited a book by a man whose heroine was perfect. I told him she needed to have a flaw. “She does,” he assured me. “She has a limp.” A limp is not a flaw, it’s an imperfection. Being quick to judge is a flaw. Lying about inconsequential matters is a flaw. An inability to apologize is a flaw.
  • Strong personalities. I’m a fairly passive introvert and my first drafts heroines are very much like me. In other words: boring. It’s in the rewrite that I figure out their personality and give them some sass and spunk. I’m in the process of doing that with my work-in-progress’s heroine. She’s still way too passive, but she’s getting there. I’ll often think of something outrageous that I would never do and force my heroine to do that. I’ve had characters go bungee jumping, sing karaoke, and appear on a reality television show.  
  • Conflict. Both within themselves and with each other. In my work-in-progress I’m pairing a hero with a strong sense of justice and honesty with a heroine who is intent on helping someone, but it means not telling the full truth. Instant conflict!
  • Attraction. They need to have chemistry, which is easy to see, but hard to write and describe. I guess I’m a prude, because physical attraction is the hardest thing for me to write. Kissing scenes about kill me. I’m beyond grateful I don’t write sex scenes. But showing physical attraction between your protagonists is crucial to getting your readers to cheer them on to their happily ever after.
  • Obstacles. Kind of like Conflict, but bigger, harder, more intense. Always be thinking, What can happen to keep this character from reaching his/her goal? What can I throw at them or put in their way? It can be anything from weather to mechanical to physical/geographical distance to family or work responsibilities to employer policies to those pesky personality differences.
  • Authenticity. Nothing makes a reader lose interest in a book quicker than a character who does something unrealistic. I once read a “romance” where the hero gave the heroine not one clue that he was interested in a relationship. I was convinced that at the end, he’d give her an incredulous look and say, “Where did you get the idea I liked you, much less that we were dating?” and she would realize she’d made up the whole relationship in her head. Alas, he apologized for all the ways he’d failed her and promised to be a better boyfriend in the future. I instantly apologized to my heart for making it pump all the hours I’d wasted reading a book with zero plausibility.

Writing realistic and relatable characters is a skill worth learning. It’s the secret sauce that will turn your stories from good to can’t-put-down-able.

Carrie Padgett lives in Central California, close to Yosemite, but far from Hollywood, the beach, and the Golden Gate Bridge. She believes in faith, families, fun, and happily ever afters. She writes contemporary fiction with romance. She recently signed a contract with Sunrise Publishing to co-write a romance novel with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hauck that will be published in 2022. Carrie and her husband live in the country with their high-maintenance cat and laid-back dog, within driving distance of their six grandchildren.

You can find her online at:

Categories
Writing Romance 101

conflicting your romance

If your planning your first romance novel, you’re probably thinking about all the great romantic scenes you can write about the love in the relationship. Maybe you’ve already written most of the book, but now as you read back over it, something seems to be missing.

Oh, it’s got a lot of great romance, but is it going to capture and hold your reader’s attention?

Then it dawns on you – there’s not enough conflict. Every story, even a romance that will end with “happily ever after” needs a lot of conflict—things that keep your hero and heroine apart throughout most of the story. That’s what’s going to keep reader’s turning pages and sitting on the edge of their seat waiting for that sweet ending when the hero and heroine finally pledge to love one another until death do they part.

 So, what kinds of conflict can you use to add some suspense to your romance?

First of all, your conflict or series of conflicts needs to be believable. And yes, your story will need more than one conflict. Some of the conflict has to be between the leading man and his love interest because readers don’t want to read a romance where the handsome hero and the sassy heroine realize they are right for each other and everything is awesome once they get rid of the leading lady’s meddling best friend. That’s not really a romance story.

Something needs to keep the hero and heroine apart. A mix of internal and external conflict usually works best. In other words, what’s going on around the hero and heroine is external. The external situations and other characters can be used to cause conflict. The thoughts and feelings of the main male character and main female character is internal and can also be used to cause conflict.

Internal conflicts can come from the character’s fears, a lie he or she believes, something they struggle with such as self-confidence or being able to trust the other.

Internal examples: maybe he was engaged before and the woman left him standing at the altar. Now he’s afraid he’ll be abandoned or rejected again. Maybe she’s overweight and has been told all her life that she’d be pretty if she just lost weight, so she can’t believe he could possibly find her attractive.

External examples: maybe the hero and heroine don’t like each other when they first meet and this comes out in the way they talk to each other or behave toward each other. Maybe she is a waitress in a restaurant and accidentally spills a plate of spaghetti in his lap, getting them off on the wrong foot.

Some things can be used as either external or internal conflicts, such as character flaws.

Just remember, there have to be lots of bumps on the road to “happily ever after” if you want your readers to read your romance novel from cover to cover.

Kelly F. Barr lives in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She is married and has three sons. She writes historical romance. She has also been a blogger for ten years, and every Friday, you can find her Flash Fiction stories posted for your reading pleasure. She loves her family, including the family dog, books, walks, and chai lattes.

You can find her online at:

Website: kellyfbarr.com

MeWe: KellyBarr8