Your romance novel’s outline is your story’s skeleton. You don’t want that your romance novel has a hunchback. Nor do you want it to be too straight. Nor do you want it to be too tall or too short. And for sure you want all the joints in the right place so that your story can walk. Or even dance. Learn how to outline and plot your romance novel in less than eighty pages. How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel is a book on writing without any fat — only storytelling muscles.
Writing romance novels is a lucrative but competitive business. Many romance novelists publish a couple of romance novels a year. Romance readers are avid and demanding readers. Romance stories need to be fresh. Romance novels thrive on content and story outline may feel like a necessary evil. If you’re a romance novelist and appreciate a simple but effective story outline method, How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel is the right book for you. It is also the right book for you if you’re a thriller or crime story novelist and want to add a romance subplot to your novel. The chapter about plot alignment will help you with that.
Outlining romance novels differs from outlining action, crime, or fantasy stories. Here is why: in other genres, the antagonist drives the story. The antagonist causes the inciting incident that pulls the rug from under the protagonist’s feet. The antagonist keeps putting spokes in the protagonist’s wheels, and she causes her all-seems-lost moment. Romance stories don’t have overpowering antagonists, instead little antagonists like hinderers. Neither is a romance story subject to overpowering adversity, instead, the lovers deal with many little hardships. Romances are protagonistic stories, and the story mood is excitement seasoned with tension. Last but not least, the inciting incident of a romance is the lovers-meet scene, which is an auspicious moment, and adversity shifts to the second act. For these and other reasons, romance stories call for their own story outline method. This is where How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel comes in.
How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel is the first sequel of the bestselling book The Eight Crafts of Writing.
How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel conveys the technicalities of romance story outlining, teaches you the adversity cycle, the temptation cycle, the story cycle, how to outline and plot, align plots, and integrate romance conventions, obligatory scenes, and tropes into your story outline. For good measure, How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel includes the outline analyses of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. These outline analyses are already worth your money.
You can buy How to Plot and Outline Your Romance Novel here.
