Romance is one of the highest-grossing genres of all time, consistently pulling in literal billions of dollars in book sales every year. According to this article, romance has never fallen out of the top 5 bestselling book genres. But romance subplots are also found in virtually every other genre, and for good reason. They draw on emotions and experiences that are almost universally relatable, are easy to get a reader emotionally invested in, and are highly effective at driving home certain themes. They also provide access to a side of your characters that readers may not otherwise get to see, which might be crucial for your story. We don’t just include this stuff for the feels, people – character relationships are at the heart of most storytelling, and romance is simply a convenient and highly intense type of character relationship, which can come in handy in a lot of circumstances.
One thing it took me an extremely long time to figure out is that there are particular things you need to do/think about differently if you are including romance in a book where that is not the primary genre. In this situation, you don’t just need the romance to work on its own. It needs to serve a more robust purpose in the story in order to truly resonate the way you want it to. Subplots work when they enrich the main storyline, and romance arcs are not exempt from this.
Let’s take a look at some practical, actionable ways to set yourself up for success in writing a romance subplot. We’ll start with how to craft the relationship itself, and then consider how to connect it to the rest of the plot in a way that unlocks the full potential of this massively useful storytelling device.
Plain dialogue chemistry tests
Like with any other plot thread, readers are only going to root for success if it feels worthwhile, and the key to that here is chemistry. You’ve got to convince your audience that these two made-up people not only are in love, but should be. Your key tool for doing this is dialogue. If that chemistry doesn’t come out in the way these characters talk, it doesn’t matter how good your descriptions of their fluttering hearts are – I’m just going to think they have a medical condition.
The interesting thing about this is that in a non-romance book, this may not be something you can totally control. You may need these characters to be certain people for the sake of other elements of the story that need to take precedence over the romance subplot. If Character A needs to make a decision to move the plot forward that is totally out of whack with whatever personality they’d need in order to have convincing chemistry with Character B, you’ll need to either be willing to allow there to be trouble in paradise, drop the subplot altogether, or formulate the romance subplot using different characters. The point is, if the romance subplot is not equivalent to the main plot thread, then you don’t have nearly as much wiggle room as you otherwise would to make this work.
My favorite way of hashing this out is what I call a chemistry test, which is a scene of plain, unformatted, untagged dialogue between two characters. No description, no “he said” or “she asked,” just 200-300 words or so of:
“Blah blah blah?”
“Blah blah blah blah blah.”
“Ha! Blah blah blah blah.”
Ideally, this is kind of like a freewriting exercise. Focus on the tone you want their relationship to have, or the source of the chemistry you’re trying to generate, and just let the words come out. (Side note: this scene will not be good. It shouldn’t be. That’s not its purpose. Sometime I’ll do a post on the benefits of freewriting, but for now, just release yourself from the need to make it good, resolve to burn it when you’re done, and keep writing.)
An important note here is that this scene does not have to be from the actual story, or even have anything to do with it. In fact, I’ve tended to get better results when the chemistry test is something neutral and totally disconnected from the main plot. Maybe they’re musing over whether they left the stove on, or trading opinions on a movie they just saw, or bickering over how to assemble IKEA furniture. This is true for the same reason we want to strip out all the description and dialogue tags. We want to hone in on how these characters interact, without anything else going on to distract us.
Now, look over what you just wrote and ask yourself this question: are these characters the same versions of themselves you want or need them to be in the actual story? If the answer is no, that’s telling you that in order to make this subplot work, you’re going to need to change something about one or both of these characters that may hinder you in other areas of your story. If you’re lucky it might actually help you, but do try to approach this with a healthy dose of pessimism. Because like with any relationship, it’s far easier to call it quits on something that isn’t working on date #1 than it is on date #100. And by the way, it really helps to have a relatively fleshed-out character profile at this point, if you’re into that. Once you’ve pinpointed the differences between these two versions of your characters, you’ll need to decide if you’re okay with keeping whatever changes you find and making them consistent across the rest of your story (understanding how that may affect the believability of decisions or actions you will require from them) or whether it’s just not meant to be.
“Why are they in love?” should be a two-part question
For most relationship arcs, there are two distinct phases to consider, and they need to be just as convincing in isolation as they are as a whole: the crush phase, and the deeper love phase. So you’ll need to answer two different versions of “Why are they in love?” in order to really nail this. For each character in the relationship, ask yourself the following two questions:
- What was it about [partner] that was initially attractive to them?
- What was it that made them fall madly in love with [partner]?
The answers can really be anything you want, so long as it makes sense within the larger context of your story and who these characters are. But if you’re stuck, I’ll give you a tip. The answers to #1 tend to stem from first impressions. Look at the first scene they’re in together (or imagine the scene where they meet, if they met before the book starts) and ask yourself what shines through about each of these people in that scene.
Meanwhile, the answers to #2 tend to revolve more around the compatibility of personal values. This is where you have Character A turning out to be really, really good with kids and – oh, would you look at that, how convenient – Character B’s been motivated through the entire story by their love for their family. The way a lot of love stories are paced, the scene where this comes out is usually around or slightly after the midpoint; if you’re at a loss, those are the scenes you’ll want to look at and draw on to figure out something believable.
Depending on the progress of the relationship, there might be other phases to consider (for example, for an enemies-to-lovers arc you might have “What was the source of their dislike of [partner], and what changed their mind?” on there too), but these are the big, universal ones. The point is to set yourself up with the tools to show the relationship growing, changing, and developing over time, with the added bonus of making your characters feel more three-dimensional by showcasing different aspects of their wants, needs, and personalities.
Connect the dots
As I’ve already mentioned, no subplot can or should exist in isolation. In order to make this thing resonate with people the way you want it to, you’ll want to tie the romance in with other elements of your story. This goes beyond making the relationship believable. This is about making it cohesive, interesting, and memorable. We are now defining the point of your subplot in the greater context of your story.
The easiest way to do this is to use the things your characters do or don’t have in common, grounding at least some of these commonalities and contrasts in elements of your worldbuilding or themes. There’s a reason “Character A is X and Character B is Y, but they like each other anyway!” is the oldest plot seedling under the sun. It doesn’t just give you some fluffy, good feelings – it gives you information.
Ask yourself if there are any aspects of this relationship – positive or negative – that either help to highlight whatever ideas you want to convey, or are logical outcomes of some aspect of your worldbuilding. As a simple example, that age-old trope of a royal falling in love with a commoner gives you a very cool opportunity to show off how the class system in your world works, which might reasonably prove to be an important thing for the reader to understand elsewhere in the story.
For a phenomenal example of this concept, look at how Suzanne Collins used the love triangle in the Hunger Games as a proxy for the chain of various moral decisions Katniss grapples with throughout the series. This is mostly centered around whether she should take a peaceful, nonviolent approach to conflict, and view the world through a lens of hope (symbolized by the relationship with Peeta) or take a more adversarial, aggressive stance, tinged with pessimism (symbolized by the relationship with Gale). This parallel helps the subplot feel not only relevant, but critical to the main storyline, rather than just added fluff. And it feels that way because it’s communicating something about the worldview of the main character that helps you fully appreciate the rest of the story.
Abuse ain’t cute
I promise this is the last one. I actually almost didn’t put this in, not only because this post is running very long, but also because this has been said approximately five hundred million times. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave it out.
Way, way too many authors romanticize highly abusive relationships in their writing. It’s common to conflate “bad boy” with “jerk who refuses to change”, “protective” with “jealous and possessive”, or any number of other disturbing variations. These are not the same thing, and your readers know it – and plenty are going to be very turned off by it. If you are having trouble differentiating, the great and bountiful internet offers a plenitude of resources on this topic (maybe start here).
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with writing about abusive relationships. Those stories are important and perfectly valid. But it gets icky when writers try to portray the relationship as desirable or aspirational. The moment you do that, it no longer matters how well-written the relationship is, or how much thought you put into chemistry, or why they fell in love, or how the relationship ties in with the rest of your story. Do you really want your readers rooting for a character they care about to end up with someone who treats them like dirt? Do you want your story to convey the message that that kind of relationship is something to strive for? I sure hope not.
In conclusion…
To wrap this up, I want to point out that nothing we’ve talked about here is really all that specific to romantic relationships. With a few tweaks, the concepts in this post apply just as well to friendships, parent/child relationships, mentor/mentee relationships, rivalries, and any other situation you care to name where you’ve got multiple people who have some kind of opinion about one another. The web that connects your characters is one of the most important pieces of your story. Even if no one’s making out, you should still be worrying about chemistry, conveying dynamic change in relationships, and all the rest of this stuff.
Thanks for sticking with me for this one – I know it was long, but I hope it was helpful. Happy writing!