Plot for Romance Stories Part II

By Sascha Illyvich

In our last article covering plot for romance stories, we discussed a three act structure to achieve our story. That three act structure carries us regardless if we’re writing 30k or 100k. The main determining factor lies in where your plot is. If it’s erotic romance, we already know that the focus is on character growth through inciting incident all the way to climax and that sex plays a huge part in that.

In fact, sexual interaction drives the plot by developing character growth. M. Christian has done a nice job of giving us a reason to label ourselves or not give a shit but when it comes down to the truth as writers, we’re only concerned with two things: Telling a great story and finding an audience that loves our great story.

To extend plot from a 20k story (where we focus only on the major acts) we add intrusions into our plotting.

Take for instance a basic story outline from earlier:

Act One: Inciting Incident – What is the eternal incident that brings the characters together?
Act Two: Crisis/Ordeal – This is where we begin to throw internal issues of the characters into things.
Act Three: Confrontation – Our characters confront the issue and deal with it. If it’s an action story, a villain and H/H all share the same issue only the villain either dies a megalomaniac or fails to learn the lesson after it’s too late.

That will get us through about 10 to 20k worth of words. Now let’s go for a larger market (the novella market)

Not only do we have our major acts, but each act has a structure in it that dictates what else must go on. Again, using Morgan Hawke’s well researched plotting pad we have the following:

Act One
1-Inciting event – Denial
Act Two
2-Crisis – Anger
3-Reversal – Despair
4-Ordeal – Sacrifice
Act Three
5-Climax – Acceptance

In that basic three act structure we’ve added stages of grief for character development. This gives us range of emotion for character development AND gives us a better climax due to a better conflict. Now we’ve added angst in the mix and made things a little deeper.

When I write a story I set out to identify the market first and foremost. Am I targeting Harlequin, or Loose ID? The difference in storytelling lies in a very simple question: How deep can I go?

I ask this question because it makes a huge difference depending on the market. Markets like Harlequin (for the most part), Liquid Silver, some of the sweeter romantic e-book publishers and some of the print lines have a basic formula they follow. It’s the SAME as what I mentioned in the last post but the human emotion level cannot go so dark and deep.

Publishers like Loose ID, Kensington, Sizzler Editions, Berkeley and Samhain allow for more depth of character emotion because that is what SELLS. It sells because the average reader for those markets expects a fucked up character they can relate to. They want to think the world is ending if not only does their relationship screw up but they can’t get over their fears or realize their greatness.

The newer generation of romance authors struggles for depth. Look around you at all the vampire novels and were-shifter novels. Those characters have flaws that you can’t possible think match the human condition—except they do.

Vampires are outcasts as manifestations of human sexuality that we often repress.
Werewolves change once a month and embrace a more primal instinct. As humans we have to justify our love of violence simply by tuning it out and growing numb. I’m not sure that’s the best example but it makes sense to me.

So now the plotting question is, who is controlling who? The author, the readers, or the characters?

Next time we’ll cover another facet of writing

Sascha Illyvich