Romance / 10 posts found
F.T. Lukens: On When the Writing Flows
F.T. Lukens is the author of In Deeper Waters and five young adult novels published through Interlude Press. Their book The Rules and Regulations for Mediating Myths & Magic was a 2017 Cybils Award finalist in YA Speculative Fiction, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Gold Winner for YA fiction, the Bisexual Book Award for Speculative Fiction, and on ALA’s 2019 Rainbow Book List. F.T. lives in North Carolina with their spouse, three kids, three dogs, and three cats. Visit them at ft-lukens.com. Find them on Twitter and Instagram. F.T. Lukens In this post, F.T. discusses the process of […]
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 […]
The Rise of Closed-Door Romance
It’s almost ironic to talk about Closed-Door Romance on the heels of the second season drop of Netflix’s widely popular Bridgerton. In book and film form, Julia Quinn’s blockbuster series espouses romance for both the mental and physical senses. Heavy on the physical, if one engages between the pages of her familial threaded story and more viscerally pronounced on screen in moments of heightened passion. (3 Tips on How to Spark Romance in a Character Who Is Content With Being Single) Indeed, from the earliest iterations of romance from its peek-a-boo French Flaps highlighting a couple embracing to the shirtless […]
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 […]
Nisha Sharma: On Authentic Writing
Nisha Sharma is the award-winning author of YA rom-com My So-Called Bollywood Life, and contemporary romance drama The Singh Family Trilogy. She grew up immersed in Bollywood movies, 80s pop-culture, and romance novels, so it comes as no surprise that her work features all three. Her writing has been praised by Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Cosmopolitan, Teen Vogue, Buzzfeed, Hypable, and more. She lives in New Jersey with her Alaskan-born husband, her cat Lizzie Bennett, and her dog Nancey Drew. You can find her online at nisha-sharma.com or on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. Nisha Sharma Photo by Jon Macapodi In this […]
Libby Hubscher: On Revision Shifting Genre
Libby Hubscher is an author and scientist. She studied biology at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and holds a Doctor of Philosophy in molecular toxicology from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared online and in textbooks, scientific journals, and literary journals. Her short story “The Unwelcome Guest” was long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2018. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, two young children, and a menagerie of pets. Find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Libby Hubscher In this post, Libby discusses writing between genres for her new contemporary romance novel, If You Ask […]
How To Write About Love While the World Is Falling Apart
I wrote what I hoped would be a slightly unconventional novel that would ideally be really accessible. It took me a long time to figure out how to do this! Part of the problem was that when I was in middle school and they tried to get us to write short stories, they would tell us to write a summary of what was going to happen and then write the story. This is great! Here’s the problem: If I write out what’s going to happen in the story, then I already wrote the story. I have no idea how to […]
Starting Your Romance Novel off With a Bang
My first manuscript went through four years of intense, alone-in-a-basement-cluelessly-banging-on-a-keyboard level work. I was passionate about that book. Adored that book. I just knew that, if people could just get 40 pages in, they would see it for what it was. (5 Keys to Writing a Slow Burn Romance) And so, after a careful vetting process of determining an agent’s merit based on the quality of their website design and font choices, I began to send out emails, full to the brim of naïve optimism. One day passed without reply. One week. One month. Four. Why didn’t they like it? […]
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 […]
5 Keys to Writing a Slow Burn Romance
Anyone who really knows me would happily tell you that patience is not a virtue I possess. (What Writers Should Know About High-End Weddings) And yet, patience is key when writing a slow burn romance, because it’s not just the reader waiting to get to “the good parts,” but the writer as well. You have to lay the foundation, create the tension, and amp up the angst, so that by the time your couple finally gives in, all the pining pays off. Here are a few tips to make that slow burn flame hot hot hot: 1. Build the tension. […]