Romance, hot steamy romance. It’s the most popular fiction genre in the world.

And the competition isn’t even close.

Romance rakes in as much dough as the Crime/Mystery and Religious/Inspirational genres combined, which make up the 2nd and 3rd most popular genres respectively.

It is the undeniable leader of fiction, but the genre is a curious one. There are tight tolerances on what constitutes romance. Fans of the genre have very clear expectations when they sit down to read, and if those elements aren’t there, you may have some unhappy readers.

The Requirements

The first (and most important) requirement is pretty obvious. The main plot of the story must revolve around two people falling in love. I don’t just mean that there needs to be a romantic arc or that the two main characters must be in love.

The main plot has to be about people falling in love.

The second requirement is that the couple has to get together in the end. This may seem boring since it makes the genre predictable, but it is a requirement nonetheless. Those two young sweethearts better be living happily ever after when the curtains close.

If your characters don’t get together in the end, then you haven’t written a romance. You’ve likely written a drama.

The final requirement is the declaration of love. You’ve spent the entire book building the relationship. You need a big romantic moment. Your characters have to say they love each other.

The Tropes

Romance isn’t just defined by these three rules though. It is a genre with well-established tropes. You have no doubt seen these tropes play out in books, movies, and television over and over again. They are everywhere and fundamental.

We can’t take a look at all of them, but we’ll cover a few.

Love Triangle

Our main lady has made the mistake of falling for two dashing young lads. The suitors are often foils of each other and represent different values. The driving force of these types of stories is often the question “Who will she choose?”

That choice can be tied thematically to a lesson that our protagonist must learn. The girl must choose between the rich man that she can bear or the poor man she adores, and by the end, she realizes the importance of love and chooses the man she truly loves.

This is an incredibly popular trope in the genre. The most popular example is probably the love triangle in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. Bella has to choose between Edward, the sultry vampire, or Jacob, the grisly werewolf. Spoiler alert: Jacob ends up falling in love with their child, not weird at all.

Forbidden Love

The two characters have fallen for each other, but some external circumstance forbids them from being together. Whether it be two people from warring countries or warring families like in Romeo and Juliet (although Romeo and Juliet is considered a tragedy, not a romance), the two main characters fall in love anyway.

These stories focus on overcoming the separation. They also tend to have themes of understanding and peace. Perhaps this young couple’s love will help bring peace between the forces keeping them apart.

Friends to Lovers

The story of two friends falling in love. This trope feels like a natural progression and generally makes for pretty wholesome stories. Often the conflict of these types of stories is the idea that falling in love will ruin the friendship. This is romance though, so we know that’s not the case.

An example of this trope is If Beale Street Could Talk. It follows the love of Tish and Fonny. They have known each other since they were children and have been best friends their whole life. The trope is used here to create a feeling of destiny. The two have always been together so they are destined to be in love.

Enemies to Lovers

The foil of friends to lovers. This trope takes two characters who hate each other and have them fall in love. This is a common trope for some romantic comedies because the characters get to insult and make fun of each other which makes for great joke fodder.

How Harry Met Sally is a great example of this trope. Harry and Sally share a car ride at the beginning of the story and get off to a rocky start. Harry pokes fun at Sally and makes joke after joke at her expense. As the story progresses, they run into each other time and time again and slowly become friends before finally falling in love.

This trope goes hand in hand with our next one.

Stuck Together

Two people are planted in an inescapable situation and proceed to fall in love. This is often paired with the Enemies to Lovers trope because it is an easy way to keep two enemies in the same room long enough to fall in love.

The Hating Game is an example of this trope (as well as Enemies to Lovers). In the book, Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are executive assistants to co-CEOs of the same company, and their shared workspace slowly turns their relationship from antagonistic to romantic.

Secret Billionaire

An upper-class gentleman disguises himself and descends to the regular world looking for fun and meets a girl. They fall in love because she is the first person in his life that just sees him as a person.

This trope is often paired with Forbidden Love and explores themes of classism. Society doesn’t like it when people from different social classes fall in love, so the main focus of these plots is often overcoming that class division.

The Prince & Me is a prime example of this. The Prince of Denmark decides that he wants to anonymously attend college in America. Prince Edvard travels to the magical land of Wisconsin where he falls in love with a farm girl. Edvard spends most of the movie with his identity in disguise, but when it is revealed, it starts to cause some problems. Not to mention, the King and Queen don’t particularly enjoy his choice to marry an American commoner…

There are plenty more tropes in romance, but it would take more than a single blog post to explore them all. This website contains tons of resources for exploring the different types of tropes. TVtropes has also assembled a list of romance novel tropes.

Types of Romantic Conflict

In a romance, the driving force of the plot is two people falling in love, and the climax is the moment where the couple “makes it.” They’ve overcome whatever obstacles were in the way of their love.

This means that the writer has to put some kind of division between the two characters to create conflict, and this breaks down into three different categories.

Economic Conflict

This is one of the two types of external conflict that separates characters. The issue is that our two lovers come from different economic classes, which comes with a host of issues. Perhaps the love would cause the richer of the two to be disowned from their family, forcing them to become lower class. Classic. Common tropes associated with this type of conflict are forbidden love and secret billionaire.

Social Conflict

This conflict is similar in nature to economic conflict, and they often go hand in hand. These conflicts involve a love that is frowned on by society. This can be a love between two economic classes, but it also commonly involves two characters who come from warring social groups. Whether their differences are nationality, religious, or racial, society doesn’t want them to be together.

This type of conflict plays out in a similar way to economic conflict and therefore shares a lot of tropes like Forbidden Love. Enemies to Lovers also works well for social conflict. Often the couple will start as enemies, only to transcend their social differences as they fall in love.

Internal Conflict

This type of conflict focuses on the lovers’ feelings rather than external conflicts. Something inside the characters keeps them apart, and they must overcome it to be together. While external conflicts focus on things that separate the couple, internal conflicts are centered on the experience of falling in love.

The love triangle is a great example of this type of conflict since the main character must choose between two potential lovers. There is a focus on emotion and how the main character feels about the other two characters.

Internal conflicts can also be about the change one of the sweethearts must go through to be together. Perhaps past trauma has left a character guarded and reluctant to fall in love.

Mixing and Mashing

Writing romance isn’t just about choosing one trope and type of conflict. Romance stories are usually a blend of tropes and conflicts. The key to writing great romance is blending them in creative and satisfying ways.

Previously, I pointed out how love triangles can often split along social and economic boundaries. That’s a great example of how internal and external conflicts can meld together. Not only is the main character separated by an external barrier, but also the internal conflict of choosing between two lovers.

Providing both internal and external conflict gives the story higher stakes by making love seem more unlikely. A way to accomplish this is by mixing tropes that lean into the different types of conflict.

For example, in The Notebook we have two distinct conflicts, one external and one internal. Allie loves Noah but is engaged to Lon. She loves both of them but in different ways. Lon is a dear friend and provides for her, but Noah fills her with passion.

Allie also comes from high-class society while Noah is a simple laborer. She is expected to marry someone like Lon who is a successful lawyer.

These two conflicts make the plot more interesting when used together. They make it harder for Allie to make a choice between Noah and Lon. Internally, she must choose between her two lovers, and externally, she must choose between social classes.

You don’t always need to have both, but if your story’s stakes feel low, adding another type of conflict is a great way to raise them.

Chemistry, Love Languages, and Needs

I’m sure we’ve all seen the romance movie where all the characters have to do is lock eyes to fall in love, and by this point, we’ve all rolled our eyes at it. While this is a trope of romance, it is a tired one. Characters need a reason to want to be together. Uninspired romances are lazy and boring. Let’s give our characters actual reasons to fall in love.

A great way to do this is by taking a page from the modern relationship theory of love languages.

“Love languages” is a way to describe how people express their love. Everyone has some combination of the five different languages: Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Receiving Gifts, Quality Time, and Physical Touch

These not only describe how people are affectionate, but also what they need in a happy romantic relationship. Some people value words of affirmation over acts of service and vice versa.

Like real people, your characters should have their own love languages. They need to express their love in realistic and consistent ways to make them feel lifelike. Seeing how they do this makes for great characterization.

You can create chemistry between characters by giving them compatible love languages. For example, imagine a girl who was bullied when she was younger. People rarely give her compliments, so her self-esteem is low. If her love interest happens to use “words of affirmation” as one of their love languages, they will have natural chemistry because he will be fulfilling one of her needs.

To have proper chemistry between two characters, it is important to match one character’s needs with what the other provides, and vice versa. Often these needs aren’t obvious to the characters at first, but they will be revealed as they learn and change throughout the story.

Love languages can also be used to create conflict between the characters. Give the companions contrasting love languages so that they don’t communicate perfectly and don’t 100% fulfill each other’s needs. This will force them to change if they want to be together.

You need to be careful though. Your main characters need some kind of reason to fall in love in the first place. You want the audience to be rooting for the character, not left thinking “Why do these characters even like each other?”

With these basics of romance you can start to hit the page, but there is one crucial thing that you can’t forget: the love. It may sound cheesy, but at the end of the day, you want the reader to be filled with butterflies as if they too are in love. Don’t be afraid to get a little cheesy. Real-life love can be just as schlocky as fiction.

Write from your heart, dammit.

TL;DR: Writing romance is a balance of tropes, internal conflicts, external conflicts, and chemistry. Master these things, and you’ll be making readers cry in no time.

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