It’s February, which means Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and I’m gearing up to start writing my next sweet romance for the Mills & Boon True Love line. Love is well and truly in the air. 

 As such, I thought I’d write a little bit about my writing process for developing and creating series romance. I’ll be using a couple of my books as examples, so there may be some small spoilers…

So, this is where I start: I have a contracted book due in, and the first thing I need to do is tell my editor what it’s going to be about. Which means writing a proposal. 

All stories start with a blank page but, as I said above, series romance does come with certain expectations and parameters. These are the contract we make with the reader for picking up a series romance novel. For instance, I know that:

• The book needs to be 45,000-55,000 words long (as stated in my contract)
• The True Love line likes stories to be aspirational (read: billionaires and exotic or city locations) and focussed entirely on the couple and their emotional journeys (no space for sub plots and secondary characters, and no relying on any misunderstandings to keep the couple apart. If they can fix it with a conversation, it’s not a strong enough conflict)
• My hero and heroine will get to live happily ever after – but not until the very end. 
• In this case, I know that the book is due out next Christmas, so another Sophie Pembroke festive romance is on the cards (which is great, because they’re my favourites)

So far, so straightforward. I’m narrowing down my parameters – but I still have a whole world of stories to choose from. 

Next up, comes the real starting point for my story thinking: the hooks.

Series romance is built around hooks, or tropes.

It’s part of the reader expectation. They want to know by the end of the first few chapters – or even after reading the title or seeing the cover – exactly what sort of story they’re going to read. Is it a marriage of convenience? An unplanned pregnancy? A secret baby story? A marriage reunited? Friends to lovers? Enemies to lovers? Fairytale retelling? They want to know. (The trick then, of course, is to find a new way to tell it, or a twist that will blow their minds while still fulfilling their expectations so they go away book-happy.)

I like to start with the hooks – in fact, I play trope bingo. I pick and choose a few at random, and come up with ideas for how I can combine them. It’s a great way to get the creativity flowing. I never stick with my first options though – the best combinations and possibilities only come when I’ve been working at it for a while and the magic starts to happen. So, for example, my novel ROAD TRIP WITH THE BEST MAN began life as the idea of a road trip romance, with a jilted bride, and an enemies to lovers theme. (My April release, CARRYING HER MILLIONAIRE’S BABY, is an accidental pregnancy story with a runaway bride, starting at a luxury resort and involving my friends-to-lovers being stranded on a tropical island. Never knowingly under-troped, that’s me.)

Here’s my trope bingo card. There are masses of others, of course, but I find this a good starting point. 

(And yes, I also find it hilarious that ‘Princess’ comes under relatable heroine. But that’s the point – whoever she is, the reader has to relate to her somehow…)

Next up comes my characters.

Quite often, the tropes I’ve chosen will help inform them. So, if I’ve picked a boss and employee romance, I know that one of them has to be the boss (not always the hero, though). If I’ve gone with royalty, I need a prince or a princess. Friends to lovers tells me a lot about their relationship already. At this point, I don’t want to go into too much detail – I just want a name and anything I already know about them to work with later. 

For ROAD TRIP, I knew that I wanted my heroine, Dawn, to be a serial jilted bride about to be left at the altar once again. Her hero, Cooper, was therefore best man at the wedding, her fiancé’s brother, and a cynical divorcee. That was all I started with. 

For CARRYING HER MILLIONAIRE’S BABY, I knew my heroine Zoey was a notorious runaway bride about to skip out on her latest wedding – with the help of her best friend, Ash, who was the widower of Zoey’s childhood best mate. 

(I promise my July release, PREGNANT ON THE EARL’S DOORSTEP, doesn’t start at a wedding. In fact, it starts with a rubber duck being thrown out of a castle window…)

After this, settings.

Again, this is often informed by the hooks I’ve picked. If it’s a snowbound romance, where are they snowed in? If it’s a honeymooning with the boss story, pick a luxurious international location. 

For ROAD TRIP, I decided I wanted a trip across the United States, from California to New York. (I actually spent a sick day on the sofa plotting out their route via interesting landmarks, in between sneezes and naps.) For Ash and Zoey, I started them off at a luxury resort in the Indian Ocean, so they could get conveniently stranded on a nearby island in a storm. 

Next, is where the real work starts – and where the characters start to truly emerge.

Conflict. 

There are two levels to this. First, I think about the external conflict. In theory, this is quite simple – I just need to answer six questions. In practice, this part often makes me tear my hair out. 

The six questions? 

1. What does my heroine want most in the world?
2. Why does she want it?
3. What is stopping her getting it – and how is the hero involved or responsible for that?
4. What does my hero want most in the world?
5. Why does he want it?
6. What is stopping him getting it – and how is the heroine involved or responsible for that?

It’s the making it all tie up part that causes the most difficulty, but to keep the plot tight and the word count on target, it’s vital that everything is connected. It’s also what will build the most tension between the hero and heroine as they start to fall for each other. 

There’s also a very good chance it will have to change, as I go on to tackle the most important part of the plotting process – the internal, or emotional conflict. If this part isn’t right, everything else falls apart. 

For ROAD TRIP, I knew that Dawn wanted to catch up to her latest absconding fiancé and find out what was so wrong with her that no-one would say I do, so she could move on with her life – except best man Cooper was determined to stop her, and the fiancé had run off with her passport.  Cooper, meanwhile, wanted to protect his brother from a gold digging bride (like the one who caught him) because he is the protective big brother, man of the family type. Except Dawn isn’t the obvious gold digger he expected, and she’s a lot more determined than he reckoned on – especially when she tries to steal his hire car. Once all that was in place, suddenly Cooper and Dawn were road-tripping together and I had the start of a story!

For the emotional conflict I need to know: 

1. What truths do my hero and heroine need to learn about themselves, and the world, in order to move past their limiting beliefs, fall in love and be happy? 
2. How can my hero help my heroine learn her truth, and how can she help him learn his truth?

Two simple questions. So many answers. And I’ll be honest, whatever I figure out at this stage as the answer to the first question (it’s usually something different for each of them) it often changes as I write and revise the book. But I always have to have something as a placeholder for this, even if I expect it to grow and develop and change, because it is so, so central to the story as a whole. 

Looking at ROAD TRIP again, Dawn needs to learn that there’s nothing wrong with her, but that marriage isn’t the way to judge her success either. Cooper needs to learn that someone could love him for more than his money, and that love is worth taking a risk for. So over the course of the story, I needed them to teach each other these truths.

The hard part isn’t coming up with answers or ideas for any of these points – tropes, settings, characters, conflicts and truths. The hard part is finding the right answers – ones that marry up with each other to make a cohesive, deep story. And sometimes the best answers don’t reveal themselves until the writing, or even the editing, is underway. But this is always what I’m aiming for in my proposal for my editor – because it shows her the bones of the story, and lets her poke at it to find the weak spots before I start writing! 

Now, I need to go off and figure out all the answers to these questions for my proposal. Once I have that little lot sorted, I can start the actual plotting and outlining… but that’s all for the next blog!

What questions do you ask yourself when you start writing a story?