Fantasy is a popular genre because it involves people, and sometimes it features romantic love. People are creatures of biology and emotion. When you throw them together in close quarters, romantic connections can form within the narrative.
I’m not a Romance writer, but I do write about relationships. Readers expecting a standard romance would be disappointed in my work which is solidly fantasy. The people in my tales fall in love, and while they don’t always have a happily ever after, most do. The other aspect that would disappoint a Romance reader is the shortage of smut.
I think of sex the way I do violence. Both occur in life, and we want our characters to live. While I have been graphic when the story demanded it (Huw the Bard, Julian Lackland, and Billy Ninefingers), the stories are about them as people and how events shaped them. I’m more for allowing my characters a little privacy.
I flounder when writing without an outline. Even in the second draft, I’ve been known to lose my way.
I struggle when attempting to write the subtler nuances of attraction and antipathy. We are sometimes repulsed by a person, and when trying to show that, I find myself at a loss for words.
When I’m building the first draft, emotions seem to come out of nowhere and feel forced.
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For me, the struggle is in foreshadowing these relationships and showing the gradual connection as it grows between two people.
I have friends who write Romance. I read their work, and I’ve attended workshops given by Romance writers and learned a great deal from them. However, being on the spectrum, as they say nowadays, I learn by pursuing independent study.
That works for me because I can’t pass up buying any book on the craft of writing.
Two books in my writing craft library that have seen heavy use were written by Damon Suede, who writes Romance. He explains how word choices can make or break the narrative.
As a reader, I have found his viewpoint to be accurate. As a writer, I have found putting it into practice takes work.
In his book Verbalize, Mr. Suede explains how actions make other events possible. Crucially for me, he reminds us that even gentler, softer emotions must have verbs to set them in motion.
Emotions are nouns. I sometimes struggle to find the best verbs to push my nouns to action.
Matching nouns with verbs is key to bringing a scene to life.
This is where writing becomes work. It’s time to get out the Oxford Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms and delve into the many words that relate to and describe attraction. Or I can go online: ATTRACTION Synonyms: 33 Synonyms & Antonyms for ATTRACTION | Thesaurus.com
I make a list of the words that I think will fit my characters’ personalities. Then, I have to choose the words that say what I mean and fit them into the narrative. Sometimes, this means I will rewrite a sentence two or three times before it says what I intend and flows naturally.
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I have written two accidental novels. Both feature romances, and because the novels were spewed onto the page, the relationships developed without preplanning.
Now, I’m in the final stages of one of these novels. The last two years have been spent fine-tuning the attractions and showing the growth of their relationships while exploring the central theme through the events my protagonists experience. (Have I mentioned it takes me four years to get a book from concept to publication?)
For me as a person and as a reader, true Romance has an air of mystery, of something undiscovered. It has to be a little bit magical, or I can’t suspend my disbelief.
I have no trouble writing adventures for my people. I have no difficulty noticing when two characters are gravitating toward one another. Writing the mystery of attraction, injecting the feeling of magic into it is the tricky part.
When a beta reader tells me the relationship seems forced, I go back to the basics and make an outline of how that relationship should progress from page one through each chapter. I make a detailed note of what their status should be at the end. This gives me jumping-off points so that I don’t suffer from brain freeze when trying to show the scenes.
As I am rewriting the scenes involving a romance, I want to avoid weak phrasing. I look at the placement of verbs in my sentences. If it feels weak, as if told by an observer, I move the verbs to the beginning of the sentence so that my characters do things. I don’t want someone saying they did it. I want the reader to experience doing it.
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- Nouns followed by verbs feel active. Bystanders narrate, but characters do.
Don’t get me wrong—some stories need an all-encompassing narrator. But most of the time, we’re not interested in being told what happened. We want to experience it ourselves, which is why I gravitate to one character’s point of view. Our characters are unreliable narrators, giving us their opinions and shading the truth, and are more interesting because of that.
I think our characters have to be a little clueless about Romance, even if they are older. They need to doubt, need to worry. They need to fear they don’t have a chance, either to complete their quest or to find love.
Romance writers have it right: overcoming the roadblocks to happiness makes for great love stories. This is why I read in every genre. I try to learn what I can from the masters, seeing how they use their words to write their scenes and construct their stories.
Romance is drama, but it isn’t the entire story.
Adam Savage said something about drama and creativity on his recent podcast, talking about Stanley Kubrick’s creative process. He said that what Kubrick was good at was recognizing the points when a story could create drama.
And recognizing those places with potential is crucial to creating a great novel or short story. We will explore that thought further on Wednesday.
But the scenes themselves are pictures within the larger picture of the story arc. Think of the story arc as a blank wall. We place the scenes on that blank wall in the order we want them, but without transition scenes, these moments in time appear random, as if they don’t go together.
Our bookend scenes are not empty words. They should reveal something and push us toward something unknown. They lay the groundwork for what comes next.
One of my favorite authors sometimes has chapters of only five or six hundred words, keeping each character thread separate and flowing well. A hard scene break with a new chapter is my preferred way to end a nice, satisfying fade-to-black.
The second draft is where the real work begins. I set the first draft aside for several weeks and then go back to it. I look at my outline to make sure the events fall in the proper order. At that point, I can see how to write the transitions to ensure each scene flows naturally into the next.
In a novel or story, each scene occurs within the framework of the environment.
The Dragonriders of Pern series is considered science fiction because McCaffrey made clear at the outset that the star (Rukbat) and its planetary system had been colonized two millennia before, and the protagonists were their descendants.
The scenes we are looking at today have two distinct environments to frame them. In both settings, the surroundings do the dramatic heavy lifting. This chapter is filled with emotion, high stakes, and rising dread for the sure and inevitable tragedy that we hope will be averted.
Sallah enters the shuttle just as the airlock door closes, catching and crushing her heel. She manages to pull it out so that she isn’t trapped, but she is severely injured.
This is an incredibly emotional scene: we are caught up in her determination to seize this only chance, using her last breaths to get the information about the thread spores to the scientists on the ground.
So, let’s take a look at theme, the thread that binds emotions and points of no return together. It’s time to take another look at how 
Saunders gives us the character of Ray Abnesti, a scientist developing pharmaceuticals and using convicted felons as guinea pigs as part of the justice system. The wider world has forgotten about those whose crimes deserve punishment, whose fate goes unknown and unlamented.
Then there is the theme of compassion. Abnesti explores love vs. lust for his own amusement. The different drugs Jeff is given prove that both are illusionary and fleeting. Yet Saunders implies that the truth of love is compassion. Jeff’s final action shows us that he is a man of compassion.
A common theme in science fiction is the use of drugs to alter people’s behavior and control them emotionally. That theme is explored in detail here, ostensibly as a means to do away with prisons and reform prisoners. But really, these experiments are for Abnesti, a psychopath, to exercise his passion for the perverse and inhumane and for him to have power over the helpless.
This short story was as powerful as any novel I’ve ever read, proving that a good story stays with the reader long after the final words have been read, no matter the length. His questions resonate, asking us to think about our true motives.
But what happens when a few insignificant cracks appear in that construction? What is the point of no return for the people living downstream?
We must identify this plot point, and by mentioning it in passing, we make it subtly clear to the reader that this moment in time will have far-reaching consequences. Knowing something might be wrong and seeing the workers unaware of a problem ratchets up the tension.
Nick Carraway, the 
Fitzgerald is deliberately unclear if this act is deliberate or accidental—the murkiness of Daisy’s intent and the chaos of that incident lend an atmosphere of uncertainty to the narrative. If Nick had turned back at any of the above-listed points, Daisy wouldn’t have been driving Gatsby’s yellow Rolls Royce and wouldn’t have killed Myrtle in a hit-and-run accident.
When I am writing a first draft, the crucial turning points don’t always make themselves apparent. It’s only when I have begun revisions that I see the opportunities for mayhem that my subconscious mind has embedded in the narrative.
Then, there’s hunting down and killing the trash and recycling so that we don’t live in a slum, alongside the unlovely side-quest for a clean bathroom. I do these tasks, but they don’t “bring me joy.” I do them so I can get to the good stuff, the best part of the day—which is writing.
Motivations drive emotions, and emotions drive the plot. People have reasons for their actions, and I needed to give my bad guy a good one. Now I know why he must go there.
Sometimes, the story demands a death, and 99% of the time, it can’t be the protagonist. But death must mean something, wring emotion from us as we write it. Since the characters we have invested most of our time into are the antagonist and protagonist, we must allow a beloved side character to die.
Motivations add fuel to emotions. Emotions drive the scene forward.
Characters aren’t fully formed when you first lay pen to paper. They evolve as you go, growing out of the experiences you write for them. Sometimes, these changes take the story in an entirely different direction than was planned, which involves a great deal of rewriting. It helps me remain consistent if I note those changes on my outline because then I don’t forget them.
I highly recommend the 
At any gathering of authors, a determined group will proclaim that thoughts should not be italicized under any circumstances. While I disagree with that view, I do see their point.
In a good story, bad things have happened, pushing the characters out of their comfortable rut. They must become creative and work hard to acquire or accomplish their desired goals.
Mood is long-term, a feeling residing in the background, going almost unnoticed. Mood shapes (and is shaped by) the emotions evoked within the story.
Robert McKee tells us that emotion is the experience of transition, of the characters moving between a state of positivity and negativity. 
These visuals can easily be shown. Grief manifests in many ways and can become a thread running through the entire narrative. That theme of intense, subliminal emotion is the underlying mood and it shapes the story:
This is part of the inferential layer, as the audience must infer (deduce) the experience. You can’t tell a reader how to feel. They must experience and understand (infer) what drives the character on a human level.
As we read, the atmosphere that is shown within the pages colors and intensifies our emotions, and at that point, they feel organic. Think about a genuinely gothic tale: the mood and atmosphere 
However, there is an accessible viewpoint just at the entrance, and we can go there and just absorb the peace. Several years ago, I shot this photo from that platform.
Action and interaction – we know how the surface of a pond is affected by the breeze that stirs it. In the case of our novel, the breeze that stirs things up is made of motion and emotion. These two elements shape and affect the structural events that form the plot arc.
So, how can we use the surface elements to convey a message or to poke fun at a social norm? In other words, how can we get our books banned in some parts of this fractured world?
Creating depth in our story requires thought and rewriting. The first draft of our novel gives us the surface, the world that is the backdrop.
Beta Reading is the first look at a manuscript by someone other than the author. The first reading by an unbiased eye is meant to give the author a view of their story’s overall strengths and weaknesses so that the revision process will go smoothly. This phase should be done before you submit the manuscript to an editor. It’s best when the reader is a person who reads for pleasure and can gently express what they think about a story or novel. Also, look for a person who enjoys the genre of that particular story. If you are asked to be a beta reader, you should ask several questions of this first draft.
Editing is a process unto itself and is the final stage of making revisions. The editor goes over the manuscript line-by-line, pointing out areas that need attention: awkward phrasings, grammatical errors, missing quotation marks—many things that make the manuscript unreadable. Sometimes, major structural issues will need to be addressed. Straightening out all the kinks may take more than one trip through a manuscript.
A good proofreader understands that the author has already been through the editing gauntlet with that book and is satisfied with it in its current form. A proofreader will not try to hijack the process and derail an author’s launch date by nitpicking their genre, style, and phrasing. 
The problem that frequently rears its head among the Indie community occurs when an author who writes in one genre agrees to proofread the finished product of an author who writes in a different genre. People who write sci-fi or mystery often don’t understand or enjoy paranormal romances, epic fantasy, or YA fantasy.
Repeated words and cut-and-paste errors. These are sneaky and dreadfully difficult to spot. Spell-checker won’t always find them. To you, the author, they make sense because you see what you intended to see. For the reader, they appear as unusually garbled sentences.
At some point, your manuscript is finished. Your beta readers pointed out areas that needed work. The line editor has beaten you senseless with the 
Life in the Realm of Fantasy 