On Writing Romance (33 page)

You don't have to keep the pressure on every single moment — but if you create believable tension, the readers will always know that the troubles are there in the background. Even when you're allowing your characters a short break, problems are ready to pop up again at any moment, and they'll probably be even worse than before.

When your characters solve a problem, the readers can relax — and perhaps put the book down. Even if you know there's another difficulty waiting in the wings, if you haven't told the readers it's coming, then the readers can't be worried over what will happen. So before you solve one problem or let your characters find an answer to one portion of their conflict, you need to set up the next set of complications.

Proper pacing results in a story that neither rushes nor drags; it unfolds as if the readers were there watching. Tell the readers what they need to know when they need to know it, and not one moment sooner. You can heighten tension by delaying a revelation as long as possible, dangling it just out of reach until the readers can't bear not knowing.

Keep in mind that good pacing often involves telling several parts of the story at once. At any given moment, you'll not only be showing what's going on right now, you'll be wrapping up loose ends from action in the last scene or chapter. At the same time, you'll be hinting at what's coming in the next few scenes. All this is tough to do. Straight-line writing, handling one thing at a time, is much easier. But the hints and the extras are what creates suspense.

Proper pacing requires you to always keep at least one problem or difficulty hanging over your characters. Never leave your characters without a threat to deal with, and never leave your readers without a worry — right up to the last few pages before the ending.

It's important to vary the pace of the story. Too much action or tension soon grows tedious. Not every event can be a slam-bam car chase, and if you try to maintain that kind of speed, you'll wear out the effect. It's the variations in pacing that make action scenes so effective. Consider following a short scene with a longer one. Consider the benefits of following an active scene with a slower and more reflective one. In general, the more important a scene is, the longer and deeper it can be.

Even your word choice has an effect on the pacing of your story. Use short sentences and lots of verbs to move action along quickly, longer sentences and more adjectives to slow the story down so the readers have a chance to take everything in.

Transitions — the shifts from one time and place to another — can make or break your pacing. Many writers are tempted to go into too much detail about how a character gets from one place to another, or what happens to her in the time between her arrival at home and her date picking her up for dinner.

If something very important is occurring during that time — perhaps the heroine is working out her strategy for dealing with the hero, or perhaps there's a burglar waiting to leap out of her closet — then show it. Otherwise, stick to brief summary. If the heroine
is
thinking of something important, show only a few of her actions, just enough to provide a background for her thought process.

The readers don't need to know that the heroine looked through her closet and pulled out three different dresses; they don't need full descriptions of the three dresses. They don't need to know that she decided to wear pants instead, then brushed her teeth and opened a new bottle of shampoo and washed and conditioned her hair until it was silky smooth and then got dressed, starting with red thong underwear.

It's adequate to tell the readers the following:

The readers will assume all the rest, because they've gotten ready for a date or two in their lives. If the details interfere with the momentum of the story, you probably don't need the details.

Most writers feel a temptation to pour out the backstory — what's happened to the main characters to bring them to this point in their lives — early in the writing process. Revealing a character's whole history will explain exactly how he's gotten into the current problem, but it also tells the readers much more than they need to know — more than they're prepared to take in early in the story.

Hinting at what's happened to the character in the past helps to build suspense, but save the details of the backstory until it's absolutely necessary for the readers' understanding — or, as my first editor inelegantly put it, until “the reader's tongue is hanging out to know what really happened.” Keep the readers wondering and guessing, and they'll keep reading.

In this example from the first few pages of her sweet traditional novel
In the Arms of the Sheikh
, Sophie Weston hints at her heroine's dramatic past:

It's another hundred and fifty pages before Weston tells us what happened to Natasha in the jungle, and even then she gives few details, just the overarching story — because that's all we need to know in order to understand why Natasha reacted this way here.

The best place to present the details of the character's backstory is usually in dialogue. It's a powerful scene when the heroine explains to the hero how being jilted (or abandoned as a child, or accused of murder, or whatever) has made her reluctant to trust and share her life. If you simply show her thinking about it, or if she tells a secondary character who then tells the hero, the resulting scene is much less emotionally compelling.

You may be tempted to present the backstory through flashback, but that's seldom a good idea. Returning the readers to the past stops the progress of the main story. If we were to flash back to the jungle with Natasha and relive her experiences there, the past story might overwhelm the current one. Only if the backstory involves both hero and heroine can you really justify using a flashback, one that actually shows what happened between them.

No matter how you opt to share the backstory with the readers, use only as much as you absolutely must in order to make your characters' motivations clear. The story is not about the character's painful childhood or his horrible marriage. A few well-chosen examples will usually make the point; using more than that will put the current story at risk.

The same basic rules apply to the hidden story — what's
really
going on that one of the main characters (usually the heroine) doesn't know. Is the ragged-looking hero a millionaire in disguise? Why is he so reluctant to commit to a marriage? What was the real reason he didn't want to have children?

Even in a story that uses both the hero's and heroine's points of view, it's possible to keep the hidden story hidden until the readers are dying to know what's going on, and doing so increases the suspense level in the entire book.

The hero knows perfectly well why he doesn't want to have children — but it's not something he enjoys thinking about. So he veers away from the subject even in his thoughts, leaving the readers with no more than hints, intrigued but still in the dark.

In this selection from her long contemporary romance
Operation: Second Chance
, Roxanne Rustand hints at two hidden stories. Both the heroine and the hero are keeping secrets. The heroine's photographs show a woman very different from the one the hero meets, a contradiction the heroine would prefer not to explain. And the hero neglected to tell the heroine that he rented a room in her house because he's investigating her. With two sets of hints to follow, the readers are doubly intrigued:

Foreshadowing heightens suspense by hinting at action that is yet to come. If you foreshadow correctly, the readers will be able to accept events that otherwise might strike them as illogical, unbelievable, or coincidental. By properly preparing your readers, you eliminate the need to explain what's going on when the event actually takes place. For instance, if the elevator is going to crash, make it creak a time or two first — the hint to your readers will make them anxious to see what happens. (Of course, if it creaks and creaks and then
doesn't
crash, your readers will feel cheated.)

Even relatively unimportant action can benefit from foreshadowing. I planned to get a hero and heroine into an intimate and embarrassing position by having her trip over a carpet seam, upset his office chair, and fall on top of him. But that's an awfully convenient outcome — one that might make readers say, “Yeah, right, like
that
would really happen.”

So I planted two bits of information ahead of time.
Well
ahead of time — almost a hundred pages before the chair upsets. On her first visit to his office, the heroine notes that the hero's chair “looked as if it were defying gravity,” and that it “tipped back alarmingly.” The second foreshadowing appears just a couple of pages before the crash, when the heroine comments about the state of the hero's office furnishings, and he replies that the carpet may be slightly threadbare, but it's clean. When the heroine trips over a loose seam in that carpet just a few minutes later, the readers are well prepared.

The trick in foreshadowing is to give the readers all the information they need to figure out the book's secrets, but to do so in such a way that they won't succeed in doing so. Each bit of foreshadowing should have at least two outcomes, with the real one a trifle less obvious than the red herring you want your readers to pursue. For instance, if you want your heroine to observe the hero getting angry at a comment that's made to him, you can put in two comments — one that would annoy anyone, another that seems innocuous. The heroine will assume that the annoying comment is the one he's reacting to, and she'll pass over the second one. But the readers have heard it, so when the truth eventually comes out, they'll be prepared when they find out that the seemingly innocent statement is the one that actually caused the trouble.

Foreshadowing can be presented in narrative, action, or dialogue. You can mask it by slipping it in among a lot of other details, or by surrounding it with humor to distract the readers from the importance of the clue.

Foreshadowing can also be present in what a character
doesn't
do or say. If the hero, seeing a baby crib in the heroine's apartment, asks, “Do you have children?” and the heroine answers, “I keep my friends' kids a lot,” the readers are unlikely to notice that she didn't really answer the question — and only later will the implications of that nonanswer become apparent.

Foreshadowing can even be presented straight out, if there are several possible interpretations of the hint and you emphasize one of the alternatives instead of the real thing. This kind of foreshadowing is like a magician's sleight of hand, when he draws your attention to one hand so he can use the other one to manipulate the white rabbits unseen. You can draw the readers toward a false interpretation while guiding them away from the correct one.

In this selection from my sweet traditional romance
The Husband Sweepstake
, socialite Erika has begged the concierge of her apartment building to find someone to escort her to a banquet, and he suggests his assistant, Amos:

What really caused the irritation flickering in Amos's eyes? Being fixed up for a date with a socialite? That's what I want you to think, and that's why I used Erika's reaction to point you that way. In fact, he's annoyed at being outed as a writer, because his real reason for taking this job is to research Erika's life for his book — something the reader doesn't find out for another hundred pages.