Write a Romance that will Sweep Readers off their Feet
March 3, 2025 | Daphne Strasert
Romance adds a touch of spice to any work of fiction. But creating a sizzling romance while keeping the characters and relationship realistic can be a challenge for even the most seasoned authors. Whether you’re writing a genre romance with the couple at the center of the story, or you’re only including romance as a subplot, there’s plenty you can learn from this article about creating undeniable chemistry that your readers will love.
Romance as a Genre vs. Romance as a Subplot
Just because your characters kiss (or more) doesn’t make your book a genre romance. Genre romance has two non-negotiable requirements: 1) the story centers on a romantic relationship and 2) the novel ends with a Happily Ever After or a Happily For Now.
I say non-negotiable and I do mean that. Romance readers are vicious and unforgiving when it comes to genre expectations. Can you write a book that centers a romantic relationship but ends with the characters parting ways? Absolutely. Just don’t market it as genre romance, unless you want to see a whole bunch of one-star reviews.
Know your (Sub)Genre
Genre romance comes in all kinds of flavors and what subgenre you choose will affect the plotlines, tropes, and character archetypes available to you. Arranged marriages appear mostly in historical romance, while fated mates can only appear in speculative romance. I always recommend reading widely in a genre that you want to write. You’ll develop a familiarity with the style and expectations. You’ll see patterns in the stories available, and you’ll be able to identify gaps in the market that your story can fill.
Choose Compelling Characters
The romance genre is character driven in nature. Steamy sex scenes can only carry your story so far if readers don’t fall in love with your love interests. So how do you create characters who are interesting, dynamic, and relatable?
Your Love Interests
When choosing your main characters, it’s important that they each be individually interesting. When one character is a mafia boss, vampire, or billionaire (or all three!), then they automatically have something intriguing about them. But how do you make an everyman, fish-out-of-water character just as compelling? A unique outlook on life, interesting ability, or secret past can balance them against their partner.
The billionaire mafia vampire obviously has secrets, but his personal assistant/love interest is hiding a secret of their own: the reason they left their small town for the city and why they can never go back.
Chemistry is just as important as each character’s ability to hold the reader’s attention. It may help to think of your pairing in terms of what makes them similar and what makes them different. Treat your couple as a whole, cohesive unit, balanced by their differences and joined by their similarities. You don’t want your characters to be too similar, or their relationship may be boring. And if they’re too different, your readers will wonder why they want to be together at all.
What do your characters have in common? What makes them different? Use the following list for inspiration:
Profession
Hobbies
Values
Outlook on life
Life experiences
Station in society
Goals
Fears
Sexual interests
Friends/Family
The billionaire mafia vampire might be calculating and jaded, while his personal assistant love interest is optimistic and trusting, but their shared love of puzzles and passion for closing real estate deals makes them a great duo.
Remember to leave room for your characters to grow. Give them flaws! Love changes you and it’s satisfying as a reader to see the characters overcome their weaknesses in order to realize their relationship. Again, think about balance. When considering your characters’ weaknesses, think about how loving the other person will help them to overcome those. Check out the following list for inspiration:
Jealous
Timid
Naïve
People-pleasing
Afraid of commitment
Controlling
Toxic friends/family
Workaholic
The characters’ weaknesses shouldn’t only affect their romantic life. Someone who is afraid of commitment might also struggle with going after their professional goals for fear of failure. Someone with control issues might struggle to maintain relationships with friends or family who don’t take their advice. By overcoming these traits, you show how their whole life—not just the romantic aspect—improves by pursuing their relationship.
Secondary Characters
Not only is keeping two characters in isolation unrealistic, it’s boring! Populating your world with friends, family, rivals, and adversaries gives the story flavor. If you plan on making your novel into a series, these secondary characters are where you will find the main characters for subsequent books.
Secondary characters can be used to show the protagonists the many possible outcomes of their decisions. Maybe the billionaire mafia vampire sees their long-time friend die alone and unloved, spurring them to pursue romance where they wouldn’t have before. Maybe the personal assistant sees their friend get divorced after jumping into a committed relationship too early. These relationships can change the characters’ outlooks and affect their decisions throughout the story.
Build Sizzling Tension
Now that you have your main characters, let’s make some sparks fly. Some of the tension between your characters will be based on their differences in personality (strait-laced versus free spirit, jaded versus naïve, etc.), but there’s more to it than that. Here’s how you ramp up the heat.
The Relationship as an Arc
All genre romance ends with a Happily Ever After (or Happy For Now), but how the characters get there is up to you. You want the relationship to develop organically, with the natural ups and downs of learning to love someone new. As you’re writing, it may help to think in terms of percentages. What percent in love are your characters at each point in the novel? Use this as a measuring stick for how they treat each other. At just 10% in love (early on in the story), your characters are unlikely to bare their soul or declare their undying love. But they will start to show some affection and intimacy. Pet names, inside jokes, and shared glances are a great way to convey their growing connection.
Remember to make use of both physical and emotional intimacy. In a clean romance, your characters’ emotional intimacy will be established before any physical activity. If you plan on your story getting hot and heavy early on (as many romances do), reserve some of the emotional intimacy for later so readers have some growth to look forward to. Your characters might jump into bed quickly, but readers can still anticipate the moment that they’re ready to share their vulnerabilities.
Look to grow the relationship gradually so the book ends with the characters clearly 100% in love.
Internal vs. External Pressure
Tension in romance is caused by the push and pull of forces on your characters. If there are no obstacles to your characters’ love, then they would get together quickly and live happily ever after. In the case of a trope like Enemies to Lovers, if the characters could just walk away from each other, they would. Then where would we be for the rest of the story?
Consider what is holding your characters together and what is keeping them apart. For a typical romance, what holds the characters together is their attraction and commonalities. This is their internal pressure. Meanwhile outside forces conspire to tear them apart. Disapproving family, societal judgment, sometimes actual physical armies can stand in the way of their love. The characters’ love story hinges on them overcoming these external pressures. See below for some inspiration of external obstacles:
Disapproving family
Distance
Social pressure
Office policy
Business rivalry
Meddling ex
Wealth gap
Health concerns
On the other hand, in a story that features an enemies-to-lovers trope, the characters are held together by the external forces, and their internal differences are the obstacle to their love. What is keeping these characters in proximity to each other? Is it an arranged marriage, common enemy, or actual physical forced proximity? These forces keep the characters in each other’s space so they are forced to see the good in the other and overcome the internal differences that keep them from finding love. See below for some inspiration of internal obstacles:
Traumatic past
Dishonesty
Mistaken identity
Jealousy
Value conflict
Fear of losing control
Fear of commitment
Create Captivating Scenes
Romance is formulaic for a reason. There is comfort in knowing what to expect from the story. That doesn’t mean you have to follow a prescribed pattern, but keep these things in mind as you’re building your story.
The Meet Cute
This first romantic moment is where you lay out the basis of your characters’ attraction.
How do your characters first meet each other? You want your characters to make an impression on each other. In the case of enemies-to-lovers, it doesn’t even have to be a good impression as long as it’s a strong one. Regardless of their feelings for each other, one thing that should be guaranteed is attraction. What draws them to the other person immediately?
But what if your characters already know each other (as is the case of our billionaire mafia vampire and their intrepid assistant)? Then ask yourself, how do they first come to see each other as romantic prospects? What event happens that shifts the balance from neutrality to romantic interest.
Time to Breathe
If you keep the action high for your entire novel, your reader is going to suffer from burnout. Your characters need a little downtime, when things aren’t quite so high stakes, so that they can relax a little and enjoy each other’s company. This is where they will see a bright future together, when they can truly understand what there is to like about the other person. It’s quiet, domestic moments that show the reader glimpses of the happily ever after they’re rooting for.
The Ticking Clock
This is what you can call the stakes of your story. What consequence is hanging over the characters’ heads? This common thread gives your story cohesion. Romance doesn’t often have an explicit villain, but rather a set of circumstances that can ruin the happy ending. This should tie into the outcome of their relationship. What happens to the characters if they get together? If they don’t?
The relationship should be both a help in solving this problem (after all, we want to see that our characters are stronger together) and an obstacle (this gives tension and makes the threat of ending the relationship real). This sets up the final decision point.
The Decision Point
The climax of the book is where your internal and external pressures collide. Your characters have never been more in love and the situation has never been so stacked against them. Everything should be pressuring them to split, but they must decide to be together.
Your characters must choose each other, consequences be damned! Readers want to see that your characters are willing to give up everything else for each other. Does that mean that your characters must face life-ruining consequences? Not necessarily. Romance does have a certain deus ex machina where things tend to work out. But there is also the possibility that your characters discover that what they lost is insignificant compared to what they gained together. Perhaps they discover that things are better now than they could have imagined.
What about the sex?
Erotic scenes are an integral part of the romance genre. Unless you’re writing a clean or closed-door romance, you’ll need to master writing sexual encounters. Unfortunately, that topic is big enough to be its own blog post. I’ll be leading a workshop on this very topic on March 30th, 2025 through Writespace (tickets on Eventbrite). In the meantime, check out my blog post on Heat Levels in romance.
Are you looking for guidance on writing romance? Or do you have a romance manuscript ready for editing? I specialize in editing romance and I’d love to meet with you!