Writing Romantic Comedy / 3 posts found
3 Tips on How To Make Murder Funny in Fiction
How do you make murder funny? In fiction, that is. When I first started writing, I wrote mostly twisty, dark thrillers that involved a healthy (or unhealthy, depending how you look at it) body count. I had a lot of fun writing these thrillers, and I think that was part of the problem, because my critique partners came back with the same feedback over and over again. “Your characters are way too flippant about something as serious as murder,” they told me. (On Mining Humor From Family Dynamics in Your Writing) I tried to make my characters behave in a […]
3 Tips on How to Spark Romance in a Character Who Is Content With Being Single
In the 1998 Nora Ephron romantic comedy classic You’ve Got Mail, Joe Fox (played by Tom Hanks in the heyday of a cinematic era I like to call “this is Tom Hanks’s world and we’re just living in it”) is in the throes of a big-box retailer vs. independent bookseller battle with Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly when his words are taken wildly out of context on the local news. “I sell cheap books. I do. So sue me.” Despite Joe’s insistence that the rest of his comments were “eloquent” and if reported in full would have reflected positively on his […]
Alana Quintana Albertson: On Giving a Tragedy a Happy Ending
Alana Quintana Albertson has written 30 romance novels, rescued 500 death-row shelter dogs, and danced 1,000 rumbas. She lives with her husband in sunny San Diego with her two sons and too many pets. Most days, she can be found writing her next heart book in a beachfront café while sipping an oat-milk Mexican mocha or gardening with her children in their backyard orchard and snacking on a juicy blood orange. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Alana Quintana Albertson © Berkley Jove (TR) 2021 In this post, Alana discusses how she reimagined Romeo and Juliet with a happy […]