Writing Romance is Easy. Right?

There’s a trend these days to hire ghost writers with the hopes of cranking out romance stories for profit. Sounds great! Romance is the most popular and profitable genre in the industry. Who wouldn’t want to jump on board this obvious gravy train?

Unfortunately, I’ve had the opportunity as a freelance editor to review and try to edit many of these ‘stories’. When I talk to my clients about the low quality of these submissions, they assure me the writer must be good, because that person ‘has read a lot of them’.

Wow! What a low effing bar. And how insulting to the genre, in general. Can I just say that just because a person has read romance, it doesn’t qualify them to write it? Seems obvious to me, but perhaps not. I think this is a common misconception, and it's unfortunate. As if romance is so easy to write, you don't have to be a real writer to master it.

This misconception infuriates me. Anyone who has tried their hand at this particular craft knows that if you hope to build a brand on romance writing, you must have a decent product. While romance is one of the most popular genres, it’s not necessarily the easiest to write. You can’t just type a random so-called ‘story’ where two people have attraction, throw some sex in it, and call it a romance. Romance writing is no different than any other literary writing. Good storytelling is at the heart of it. All the rules of good story telling apply to romance. Readers will accept nothing less. Just because you can grammatically string sentences together does not mean you can tell a story. These are two separate things.

Most of these on-the-fly, ghost-written stories I've edited are disheartening and insulting. They're easily identified as amateurish. The characters are one dimensional. Their actions are unbelievable and motivation for these actions are non-existent. The main characters are often the epitome of victimhood—helpless, clueless, defenseless. The prose is a circular round and round of the same thoughts, regurgitated in different words. There's no real story development, no relationship building (there must be more than sexual attraction), no character arcs, and the ‘plots” are thin and unrealistic. The writing is lazy and fails to delve into anything deeper than a surface allusion. Finally, over-emotive prose and melodramatic reactions do not make a good story.

Romance is no different than other literature, despite its reputation. Many say that romance is formulated. If you know anything about story structure, you know that ALL fiction is formulated.

Readers will be insulted if an author assumes their reader is stupid and doesn’t know good writing from bad. Anyone who wants to write romance needs to research romance reader demographics first. Romance readers are smart and extremely discerning. Romance readers want good writing, compelling characters, smart plots, and much more. Readers want strong heroes and heroines, who forge their way and battle in the face of impossible odds—not characters who whine about all the things going wrong.

If you are considering being a romance writer, either as an author under your own name or as a ghost writer, please know that it’s not an easy, get-rich-quick path. Writing well is a lot of work. And then some more work. And then a great deal more. In fact, unless you completely give up on being a writer, working at being better at it never ends. Romance writers spend many years perfecting their craft. Writing romance well requires understanding so many facets of the art. Furthermore, writing in general requires that you love it. A writer writes because they can’t not do it; it's who they are. Romance writers write romance because they love to write. They love their characters. They love the story. They are passionate about and deeply understand what makes good romance. If you're trying to make money writing without loving writing, without knowing the rules of the romance genre, without understanding what makes a good story…

Well, if you figure out how to make a profit doing that, please let me know.