On Writing Romance (31 page)

The plot of your romance novel is the sequence of events that keep the characters together until they've learned to love each other and until they've grown and changed enough to resolve their long-term problems — the character flaws or past experiences that have kept them from forming a permanent commitment.

A story's plot can't simply be a series of random events — the kind of thing we experience day after day. Real life sprawls and wanders; it doesn't have neat beginnings and endings; and the loose ends are almost never completely tied up. A story that does the same thing — that wanders from one event to the next — will quickly lose the readers' attention.

Simply falling in love isn't a plot, either. There isn't enough action to keep the readers involved if you simply show two people dating, going out for dinner or to the movies, and talking about their childhoods, pets, jobs, or dreams.

So the plot of your romance novel must be a meaningful and logical series of events, not just a bunch of things that happen to your characters. Those events must cause the hero and heroine to become more involved with each other. Each occurrence or decision or episode should lead to the next, creating a surprising yet believable pattern of events that carry the characters from beginning to end.

In a romance novel, the events of the plot are closely related to the developing romance. Most of the plot events will involve both the hero and heroine, drawing them closer together — forcing them to spend time together and learn about each other — rather than separating them.

You can build a plot by using the principles of cause and effect. Things don't happen in isolation; every decision you make and everything you do has consequences. In real life, most of those consequences are minimal and easily overlooked, but they're there. And sometimes they're not minimal at all.

Your kid's soccer uniform is dirty and he needs it for practice tonight, so you stop on your way out the door to throw in a load of laundry, which makes you five minutes late to work. You aren't there yet when the phone rings, so your boss answers it instead and he finds out you've applied for another job, so when you come in he starts to yell at you for arranging a job interview on company time, so you yell back and quit. … One event leads to another, which leads to another. Every event in your plot should be both an effect of what came before and a cause of (or at least an influence on) what will come next. Thinking about cause and effect can help you create a plot that builds, rather than a series of unrelated events.

Once you have your main character's first basic problem in mind, you can use
What if ?
to begin building events and consequences:
What if
the heroine is out of a job and she's evicted from her apartment?
What if
her preoccupation with her job loss makes her careless, and she causes a fire that forces her to move?
What if
it's a college town with the school year just starting, so apartments are in short supply?
What if
she loses control of her car and totals it?
What if
somebody assumes she wrecked the car on purpose, despondent over the job?
What if
she has no insurance?

Let your mind roam freely as you brainstorm. At this point, don't worry if you create contradictory scenarios. (You probably wouldn't want to use both the eviction and the car accident, because you're writing about a heroine, not about Poor Pitiful Pearl tied to the railroad tracks.) Later, you can choose which lines of thought work best, which ones fit together, and which ones rule out other possibilities.

What if ?
allows you to start with the nugget of an idea and develop it into the future. This technique works well throughout the writing process. Look at the problem as it currently appears and ask
What if ?

Backward plotting is almost the opposite of the
What if ?
technique described above: You start with the situation or scenario you want to create, then figure out what you need to have in place beforehand to make that scenario logical, believable, and inevitable. Backward plotting can work on any specific plot point — especially one that the readers may find hard to swallow.

One of my favorite examples of the value of backward plotting is a story in which one of the main characters is eventually revealed to be the long-lost grandson of another major character. To reveal that relationship out of the blue stretches the readers' credulity. But if two supporting points are established beforehand — that there's a mystery about the family, and that the grandson is investigating and searching for something — the revelation, while still surprising, is emotionally satisfying rather than confusing. Of course, you can't be obvious about those things, or you won't have much suspense.

By using the two plotting techniques —
What if ?
and backward plotting — in tandem, you can easily create a believable scenario:
What if
, instead of having your hero openly admit that he's searching for his roots, you give him another very good reason for curiosity about this mysterious family? And
what if
he has some possessions that indicate there's something not quite on the up-and-up about him? But what kinds of possessions could he have that would offer clues and help him search, without giving him an easy answer? Backward plotting can help you figure out not only what items he has but how they came into his possession and what they mean.

By using the two techniques together, you can establish the hero's curiosity without giving away the reasons behind the curiosity. By showing the hero's possessions and hinting that there's a secret about him, you lay the groundwork for when one of his possessions leads to a breakthrough. When his suspicions are proved true, the readers will be prepared for the secret to come out.

What if ?
and backward plotting work extremely well together. By using them in turn you can develop your characters' problems, create a believable plot, and at the same time spot troublesome areas or holes before they develop.

Let's put cause and effect, backward plotting, and
What if ?
together and see what happens.

What if
your heroine's long-term problem is that she's never felt truly loved — and her short-term problem is that she discovers, just as she's about to walk down the aisle, that her fiancé is only after her money?

What if
she decides to run instead of going through with the wedding? But why would she go to such lengths? Heroines by definition are grown-ups. Wouldn't she just tell her father about the fiancé, or walk into the church and announce she's not getting married?

Probably — so
what if
you have her try to call off the wedding, but her father refuses to believe she means it and goes to get the fiancé to soothe her pre-wedding jitters? That creates time pressure — if she's going to leave to give herself time to think without being pressured, she's got to do it immediately, without any time to plan or pack.

What does she take with her? What does she leave behind? Where is she going — does she have any idea at all? If she only has fifteen minutes to escape, how does she go about it? Does she run in her wedding gown? That could be really inconvenient for the story later on — so perhaps she should take five minutes to get out of her fancy dress and into jeans. But that means she has five fewer minutes to think about where she's going and what she'll need.

Or, for that matter, how she's going to get away.
What if
the wedding's not at an ordinary church but at her father's estate — which is locked up even tighter than usual to provide security for the wedding guests and gifts? If she tries to get past the gates, she'll be discovered. She can't take her car; she can't throw a suitcase over the wall. And time is ticking away.

What if
she has help? Who would be in a position to help her? An estate employee? Not likely — that would be a great way to lose a job. A short-term employee, like a florist or a caterer? A wedding guest? Maybe. But how's she going to find this person who's willing to help? How will she know who's safe to approach?

What if
she doesn't approach him but runs into him — almost falls over him? What's he doing? Why is he there?
What if
he's someone who has ties to the estate and the family but who isn't dependent on it for his livelihood? That means he can take action without fear of losing his job.

Why, though, is he even there, if he's not a part of the wedding?
What if
his father works on the estate, and your hero has known the heroine forever?
What
if
he's suffering from a long-term crush on the heroine, so he's come to be near for a last hopeless moment before she's lost to him? How about making him the gardener's son, who's come to visit his father? He grew up there and he knows where there's a secret gate, so he can help the heroine get out.

What if
he realizes that the ex-bride is too stressed to be sensible, so he goes along to keep her safe? (Maybe you can give him more gentlemanly instincts than are really good for him, to make that work.)

He even takes her in his car, since she can't get hers out of the garage. And you don't want her to have a car anyway — it would be too easy to trace. But now you're back to having all the same problems — she'll be seen leaving in his car. Unless she leaves through the wall, and he drives out in the usual way, and then they won't be suspected of being together.

Now you have them both outside the wall, with a set of wheels but not much else. No change of clothes, no cash, just what's in his pockets and her purse. And make it a little tiny purse, just to limit how much useful stuff she can have.

But where are they going to go?

What if
she's so annoyed at her father for not believing her that she's ready to run away altogether? And
what if
she's ticked enough about being fooled by her fiancé the gold digger that she proposes to the gardener's son?
What if
she decides that if she's going to be married for her money, it might as well be to a man of her choice?
What if
he thinks she might be crazy enough to marry just anyone, so he agrees to the proposal in order to keep her from doing something even crazier?
What if
they decide to elope, choosing a destination where they can be married without delay?

Does she mean to go through with it? Does he? Or are they just going through the motions? In the meantime, they've got to start off somewhere; they can't just sit outside the estate. So
what if
they head toward their selected marital destination?

It's a long way, and they know her father will be looking for them. How are they going to manage the trip? You don't want it to be too easy, so do some backward plotting here — have her be honorable and leave her diamond ring behind so she can't pawn it.

What resources do they have? Surely they each have at least one credit card, but card transactions are easily traced. He'd planned for a day trip to see his father, so he's only got a little cash. She was figuring on a honeymoon, so she doesn't have much cash either.

What if
they're pulled over by a highway patrolman for having faulty lights? (Here's another good backward plotting point: If you make the car an old one, you also gain an excuse for the heroine tripping over the hero — he was lying in the driveway, changing the oil.) With a ticket, they can't drive the car until the lights are fixed, but they can't wait around for the mechanic either — so
what if
they buy another vehicle for their getaway? Since they're short of cash, they have to settle for a clunker of a truck — which is bound to lead to more trouble, but at least now nobody can guess what they're driving.

Now they have no cash left at all. In order to replenish their resources, they have no choice but to use a credit card. To throw off pursuers, they drive in the opposite direction from their real destination to get a cash advance from an ATM. That goes smoothly — now you've arranged it so they can at least eat and buy a change of clothes. Their success prompts them to try for a bigger score before the credit card issuer is notified that there's a problem. But when they go into a bank to make a larger withdrawal, the teller realizes there's a flag on the account and she confiscates both the credit card and the heroine's ID. They have to run again to avoid being questioned about how they got the credit card, without the cash they'd hoped to get and now with the heroine having no driver's license.