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Quick tips for writing romance
- Consider what your characters like about each other
- Compliment their personalities. How can character A help with character B’s weaknesses?
- Create boundaries
- Make the characters notice each other’s quirks
- Have your characters get annoyed by some of their quirks
- Go slow on getting them together
- Build trust between characters
- Give them a life outside of their relationship
- Let your characters be vulnerable in front of each other
- Have scenes where they’re helping each other
- What makes your characters want to stay together?
- If your romance is a sub-plot, how much attention to they give the other character?
- What does character A notice about character B?
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when you’re trying to write and your last two functioning brain cells start yelling at each other
Just in case this needs to be said:
It’s the first draft. Use the word “suddenly.” Put as many dialogue tags and adverbs as you want. Say “he saw” “she remembered” “she felt” “they wondered” as many times as you need to. Put the em dash there, put in too many commas, use semi-colons with reckless abandon. Type in [whatever] instead of thinking up a title for something. Just write it. If you worry too much about the particulars, about all the advice posts you’ve seen saying whatever you’re doing is wrong or not good enough, you won’t get anything done. It will slow you down as you go back and try to reword what you just wrote to make it better, proper. The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be done. And when you get to the end, you’ll find that all those “mistakes” are just clues for your future self to put together to make it all better.
Putting in adverbs and certain dialogue tags are a note for you as to who is saying something and how they’re saying it. When you’re editing, you can make sure it shows through the story instead. The word “suddenly” is a reminder to make things more abrupt. The first draft is just you mapping out where you want to go and how you want to get there. Don’t waste time trying to get it 100% right now, because then it will never get done. Don’t think too much– just write. Save the thinking for editing later.
“you’re a writer, right?”
Me, staring at the one sentence ive managed to add in the last hour: In theory
Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study. If you have the strength to lift a coffee cup, they figure, you can write a novel.
But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process—sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track—requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you.
Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.
Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
- were street lamps invented in ww2????
- how much does an arm cost tho
- Everyone is nodded. All the heads are nodding in this conversation
- wait no it was raining wasn’t it *looks back ten pages* yeah okay why did i do that
- It’s still night right?
- It’s been night for like 30 years at this point
- what’s that guy’s name again? I should know this these are my babies
- I have no idea how you guys are going to get out of this alive so figure it out kids
- *googles* how to travel across Europe during the middle ages
- effects of the bubonic plague???
- shoot, comas don’t work like I want them to. I need a convenient coma
- Everyone has the ability to quirk one eyebrow why is this
- how smart are rats
- I think they’ve sighed like 30 times now
- how do i describe what its like to run a mile I’ve never done that in my life
- Im sure its just like super hard
- No one cares about the weather stop
- i just wrote twenty pages in two hours why cant i do this in school
- everyone smirks too much but what else do i say its not a smile its too sad for that
- and now everyone is just ‘smiling sadly’.
- chuckled sounds like santa clause but laugh is too much but snickered is evil but giggled is too bubbly…
- what is the purpose of a rubber duck
- no, don’t make references this is a serious piece of literature
- “now if I reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”
- okay i need tea and music and oh wow look at that someone liked my tumblr post…
How Long Your Stories Should Be (And What Publishers Want)
First of all, thank you so much for over 8,000 followers!!
Short Story
-Under 500 Words is described as flash fiction. It’s one scene
-Between 1,000 and 8,000 Words is a short story
-Between 5,000 and 10,000 Words is as long as a short story should ever be
Novella
-A story between 10,000 and 40,000 Words
Novel
-Anything over 40,000 Words is considered a novel, but 50,000 should be the minimum amount of words you should have (If you’re trying to get published)
-Most novels are between 60,000 and 100,000 Words
-Publishers generally don’t like more than 110,000 words, unless you’re already established
Adult fiction
-Between 80,000 and 100,000 Words
Science and Fantasy
-Generally Between 90,000 and 120,000. Not abnormal to reach the 150,000 range. (It takes time to build a whole new world)
Romance Novels
-Between 50,000 and 100,000
Crime, Mysteries and Thrillers
-Between 70,000 and 90,000
Young Adult
-Between 50,000 and 80,000
Children’s Novel
-Between 25,000 to 50,000
For any of you who are writing ‘across the pond’-here is a little guide I put together of some common differences between British and American English!
