I’m in the mood for writing love and romance. It’s springtime here in Northern California, with roses, lilacs, and poppies bursting out. I wanted to celebrate our 36th wedding anniversary by visiting our local rose garden, and it was a truly gorgeous display! We congratulated ourselves on choosing a springtime wedding date. With love in the air, I resumed work on the romance sub-plot in my new time travel novel, Undoing Time. It’s a difficult relationship between two people who are social opposites, making all the wrong assumptions. Slow-burn romance — my favorite kind!
Writing Love Stories
Writing love stories and romantic scenes is challenging work. My magic formula for writing them, gleaned from reading, is to avoid the anatomical descriptions of a kiss and focus instead on feelings with internal monologue. The more lyrical the sentences, the more the feeling comes through.
A great example can be found in the love scenes in Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game. While the plot twists are fairly predictable, those intimate scenes are anything but ordinary. Mix poetry with humor and you have a great scene. Much sexier than body-parts-description.
In most every love story, the emphasis is on the surface events of attraction. That’s like saying you know the depth of the iceberg on seeing the tip above the water. After 36 years of being married, I can tell you that physical appeal isn’t the biggest thing in a relationship. It doesn’t take long to find out the challenges and possibilities are much bugger!
But it’s hard to write about lasting love. It’s hard to write what allows a couple to find deep happiness. One thing always works for me: kindness. When the heroine and hero get past the initial thrill and show kindness to one another, we suspect something great is building. I hope I’ve included kindness in my novels, The Invisibles, The Renaissance Club, and The Time Gatherer.
Jane Friedman has a great article on the power of restraint in writing a love scene. Read it here.
Books of Love (and Time)
My tip for writing love and romance is to keep reading well-written novels that have love as the main plot or major sub-plot. Those aren’t necessarily contemporary romance novels, though there are some very good ones. Many readers I know adore the old-fashioned love stories in Jane Austen’s novelswith lots of sub-plots and side characters. She’s the inventor of modern romance. Her love scenes are usually brief and at the end of the book, after a long series of frustrations for the would-be lovers.
Austen gets the award for longest courtship in Emma, in which Mr. Knightley and Emma have known each other nearly all her life. Through most of the book they’re simply friends, though Jane Austen has managed to alert the reader to their destiny as a pair. The book is an extended meditation on whether or not romantic love can spring from friendship. I think so! My husband and I dated for two years before we got married.
Other novels I’ve enjoyed that feature stories of love and romance:
Time After Time by Lisa Grunwald. Love may not fit into any one timeframe permanently, but is nevertheless deathless.
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim. The book, not the movie, though the film is fabulous too. Humorous, poetic, swoon-worthy love.
The Trail of Time by Jodi Taylor. A time travel series with heart and a long-lasting love story.
Side Trip by Kerry Lonsdale. An unforgettable and breathtaking novel of love, loss, and the unexpected routes that life takes. I loved the characters and their deficiencies. People who became real to me, as is always the case in Kerry’s novels.
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That’s some of what I know about writing love and romance. Do you have methods and ideas for writing them?
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