This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm here today to talk about romance. Romance is a hot-selling genre, both in the independent space and the traditional publishing space. It's been keeping the lights on in traditional publishing for many years, and it arguably built indie publishing. It was one of the biggest genres when self-publishing first became really big after the 2000s.
Every single romance has a love story, so how do you stand out in what's becoming an incredibly competitive marketplace with a lot of really great writers in it?
I thought it would be kind of awful of me to come here today and tell you, “Hey, just have better ideas! Have really unique ideas that nobody's ever thought of before and then your book's going to sell!” That would probably make a great presentation, but it wouldn't help you out that much.
A Quick Overview
I wanted to come here today and give you three concrete strategies for how to think about having an idea that's going to be different from what everybody else is doing.
These are going to be really flexible techniques that you can apply to something as big as a book idea or as small as a scene. You can apply them to your characters. They're really flexible, so you can use them in any part of the book.
I'm also going to give you one secret formula to marketing success as we go through here, and I'm laughing at myself even saying that because I always warn people away from those presentations where they tell you, like, the one way to make a billion dollars at books.
But I do actually have something that's really helpful in terms of how to think about marketing your book and how to think about designing your books so that it can be well-marketed and it makes that side easier for you.
To do that, we're going to go over seven different principles of romance. I'm going to talk more about that in a minute, but with those we're going to take a deeper look at why each one of them works so that you can use them more effectively in your writing.
And then we're also going to apply those three core principles of standing out to each one of the seven principles of romance so that you can see how that would look on the ground instead of me just telling you, “Here's a principle, go off and apply it yourself.”
To help us do that — because I know a lot of people learn from examples — I brought one book that we can use for our examples today: The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez.
And this isn't so much a class on how to write a book like this, even though this book is awesome and we would all love to write a book like this. It's more that when I read this book, I found that it was a really good example of all the stuff that I'm already talking about in this class, so we can look to one place to get all of our examples.
Romance Elements
So, the romance elements that we're going to be talking about — these aren't rules. I wanted to get that straight, so you're not going to see these in every single romance novel.
Every single romance novel needs a happily ever after, and it needs a climax — hopefully, of both kinds — but you don't necessarily have to have all of these things in every romance novel.
But you will see them really commonly in a lot of romance novels, so I'll go over each one in turn as we go through the presentation.
Three Ways to Stand Out
But before we get to those, I want to give you our three core principles to standing out. For each thing, you want to make it personal, you want to make it specific, and you want to make it visual.
So, for instance, making something personal — you want to make it personal to your character. Do they like fountain pens? Do they hate socks?
Making it specific is a little bit different than that. It doesn't necessarily have to be tied to your character and their backstory and their preferences, but you do want to go specific rather than generic or general in any way possible.
So for instance, think fly-fishing, not dinner date. Think yellow paper clip, not red roses. That's a big way that you can stand out, is by starting to think about how to make things more specific.
And it's also a little bit more approachable, like, if I tell you, “Make something more unique,” that can feel a little bit intimidating, but with “Make it specific” — we all know what specific means.
The visual part — this is really important because we all know books are made of words, right? Books are made of words, but even when you have a thing that's made of words, what really sticks in readers’ heads is visuals and images. Symbolism. There's a reason that metaphors are so useful in your writing. That kind of stuff sticks in people's heads better than a concept or a conversation.
Meet Cute
So the first romance principle I want to talk about is a meet cute. And like I said, not every book has to have a meet cute. Your characters do have to meet, but a meet cute is specifically when they meet in an especially cute or memorable way.
So, in real life, a lot of people meet on dating apps or they meet because their friends introduce them. One of the first ways to stand out is to make your characters meet in a fun and interesting way that tells us something different about them.
For instance, my husband and I met on a rock-climbing trip, and so just from knowing that, you know something about us as a couple, and it paints a picture in your head.
I did a dating app meet cute in one of my books, but in order to make it stand out, I added a twist so he matches with a girl on a dating app whose credit card he stole, and so there's a twist, there's intrinsic contrast, it's not just every other guy that you've ever met on a dating app.
With your meet cute, that's where we want to go back to making it personal, making it specific, making it visual.
You want to think about something that you could see in your mind's eye, so if they just meet and have a conversation, that's one thing, but if he crashes his hot air balloon into her concert, that would be something really visual and memorable. It tells you something about both of them right from the get-go, that they were doing those things to start with.
Meet cutes are one of the best places to put your energy in terms of if you're trying to stand out or think of something unique. It's a really good place to put your energy because it helps you sell your book. It comes really early in the book and it can help hook readers, and then it can also make for a splashier premise that hooks editors if you're going for a book deal.
So, for instance, something that happens midway through the book might not help you as much even if it's really unique and interesting, while a really splashy and interesting meet cute can help you sell your book, and so it's a good place to start.
“Something’s Missing”
One more element I wanted to talk about with meet cutes before we move forward is, I call it the “Something's Missing.”
So, it's great to fall in love at any time in your life, right? It's nice to fall in love, but you get more tension out of it in a book if there's a specific reason why right now your character needs to fall in love or really feels lonely or feels like there's something missing in their life.
One time, I was stumped for how to start another romance novel and I started flipping through a bunch of my favorites. I noticed that every single one of them actually started with the “Something's Missing.”
So, it starts with showing you why you should want that character to find love right now, and so one way to have a really good meet cute is to roll that “Something’s Missing” into your meet cute so we see why they need to find love, and then we find it in an interesting and fun way right after that.
In fact, The Happy Ever After Playlist by Abby Jimenez has a really good example of this where she rolls them together and she has a three-level meet cute. So, the first part of it is the girl is driving down the road going to — I'm sorry for all of you who haven't read this book, I'm going to spoil it to death for you, but it's a wonderful book, you can still read it and enjoy it — she's driving down the road going to visit her husband's grave and so we see that she's heartbroken.
It's been some time, she's not moving on, she's talking to her friend on the phone about how she doesn't go out and date, hasn't made friends, so we see that something's missing.
And then a dog runs in front of her, she slams on her brakes, but instead of running away, he jumps up onto her hood and in through her sunroof, which is such a memorable and visual thing, like, how often does a dog jump through your sunroof? Plus, it's a cute dog.
So then the second part of the meet cute is, she's texting with the dog's owner to figure out why the dog’s loose, how to get it back to him, and so we get two levels of meet cute. We get the cute dog meeting, we get the “Something's Missing,” and then we get her flirt-texting with this guy about how to get his dog back to him.
And we also have a fated mates sort of thing where before they ever met, he was reading her blog that’s about how to cook wild game — very specific, very personal — and she was listening to his albums when she was trying to get over her husband's death. So they kind of knew about each other, even before they met, so it feels like fate, and it feels more interesting.
So that's a really good example of a fantastic meet cute on multiple levels. Also, I like it because you have something else held back for tension because they meet on text, but then you still get the in-person meeting to give later, so there's something to look forward to.
Demonstration of Value
The next romance principle I want to talk about is the demonstration of value. Again, not all books have this, but this is a really good way to stand out and to hook your readers.
A demonstration of value is when you show, don't tell, something about the love interest that makes them attractive or desirable in Act 1.
Okay, so if you've ever heard the old screenwriting technique “Save the Cat!” — it’s a demonstration of value. It's a person saving a vulnerable creature, and so it makes them more likable to the audience.
So you want to think about what are things that are personal to your character that you can show off to demonstrate to the audience that they're hot and interesting and desirable. Are they smart? Are they rich? Are they generous? Are they competent? Do they have special skills? Are they famous?
When I'm talking about male love interests, sometimes I break this down to the shorthand of having them lift something, fix something, or save somebody, because those are all things that we tend to find sexy in men.
It's most important to do this for your love interest character, so whether you're writing queer romance or straight romance, it's most important to do this for your love interest character. But you can also do it for your main character.
It's a really good way to hook your audience into liking your characters with both, but like, if you pick a really cute and interesting demonstration of value, that will immediately make people like and remember your book, which is in fact one of the very first things that hooked me on The Happy Ever After Playlist, was that he has a perfect triple demonstration of value where he's a rock star — a literal rock star — who loves his dog and can fix plumbing… that is my dream man.
How to Stand Out… in the Right Way
Now we've gone over two romance principles. At this point, you're kind of starting to notice that everything about how to stand out requires you to really understand what people are coming for in the first place and why things work, and then how to give it to them differently.
You need to know what people expect and know what they want out of a romance before you can change it because you need to find a way to change it that's different but still delivers the same emotional payoff. That's really, really key.
For instance, in a romance, people are expecting happily ever after, so sometimes people think, “Oh, it's going to be fresh and different if you give them a sad ending and the people don't get together, right?”
Wrong. Absolutely wrong. You need to give them what they came for in a new and interesting way. So the couple still wants to get together at the end because that's what people come to romance for — they want to see it work out, but they don't want it to be predictable. That's the kiss of death word — they don't want to know everything that's going to happen exactly as it happens.
So, every time you want to do something to stand out, you want to take a really good look at why it's working first before you decide what to change about it, so that you don't break what attracts people to it in the first place.
One really good example of this is the Cinderella Trope where an extraordinary guy falls for an ordinary girl, or vice versa, gender-swapped. And so you think, “Okay, well, maybe we'll make them both extraordinary, that will be different.”
But that breaks the draw of the trope, which is feeling like an ordinary person that's just nobody and invisible and having somebody big and splashy and amazing fall in love with you, like a prince or a rock star.
If you change it so that they're both extraordinary or they're both ordinary, it's different, but it doesn't carry the same emotional payoff. So, you need to really keep your eye on what that emotional payoff is before you change it.
The Secret Formula to Marketing Success
This brings me to my secret formula to marketing success. You can apply this to everything — it's a combination of familiarity + novelty.
You'll see this in maybe one of the most annoying phrases in publishing, it’s very commonly used: They want something fresh.
But they also want it to appeal to existing tropes, existing audiences. So, you need that combination of familiarity and novelty. It's something that you want, and you've come to expect it but in a new way that you didn't see coming.
Anytime you can deliver that, you're gonna have a winning strategy.
Tropes versus Clichés
In order to do that, we need to talk about the difference between tropes and clichés. I see these words used interchangeably a lot, and they're really not the same at all. In order to stand out effectively and not step on your own toes, you need to know the difference.
A trope is something that has universal appeal. It's a story type that can be applied in new and creative ways. Examples are Enemies to Lovers and Friends to Lovers. Those are common romance pairings.
Chosen One, you can use that in fantasy, you can use it in romance. You can see that Harry Potter is a Chosen One. He's got to save the world, but then Twilight also has a Chosen One in a way where Bella’s chosen by the extraordinary guy, right? And Amateur Detective is a trope that's really popular in mysteries.
So, you see these in all genres, they're not just romance, but it's story types that have universal appeal where people come back to them over and over. Rags to Riches, Small Town Romance, all that stuff, like, there are fans of those types of stories.
Meanwhile, a cliché is just something that's overused enough to where it's predictable. It doesn't necessarily have universal appeal, it's not necessarily a story type, it's just commonly used.
There's a little bit of crossover with these two, so it can get confusing, but always go back to: Does it have universal appeal and fans of that specific thing? Or is it just something that’s been done to death?
So for instance, Love Triangles. It is a trope, it absolutely has universal appeal, it has fans, it's a useful story type. But it started to feel like a cliché for a while in the early 2000s after Twilight because a lot of YA romance did it to death.
With clichés, notice that they don't have anything new or unique to add. It's kind of lazy writing. “The blonde cheerleader is the mean villain” is a really common clichê that I see, like, as soon as she puts on lipstick, you know she's going to be the villain in the YA novel. The scene where the outgoing friend drags the bookish friend to a party, like, none of those are story types that have universal appeal.
And it can go as small as phrases, like, “hard as a rock,” “cold as ice” — you've seen it said that way a million times, and you can think of a way to say that same thing but just in a new and different way. And that's where you really want to be, is doing something that has appealed to people but in a new way that they haven't seen a thousand times.
So in The Happy Ever After Playlist, the author uses tropes. There's several tropes in this book, you do want to include tropes in your book — including tropes is a desirable thing — whereas including clichés is not necessarily a desirable thing.
If you have the right trope and you know how to play to your audience about that trope, that's a really good marketing strategy to make sure you bring the right readers to your book.
The Happy Ever After Playlist has rock star falls for ordinary girl, so it's kind of a rock star trope and Cinderella trope combined. They have an epistolary love story, so instead of through letters, it's through texts arguing over the dog. They have the fated mate thing that I mentioned earlier, they have a long-distance love story.
All of those things have universal appeal and fans of that story type, and you can see that the author uses a lot of them in this book, which means she has a lot of audiences to appeal to, and each one plays out in a way that's specific and personal to the character.
They're not just writing random letters to each other — they're flirting over who's going to take care of this dog and what music they like, and talking about hunting. Again, very specific, very personal to the characters.
Flipping Stereotypes and Genre Shortcuts
The next thing you need to do when you're thinking about how to stand out in the right way is start thinking about stereotypes and genre shortcuts.
When you go to plan your book, think about what people are expecting from that type of character. Think about any stereotypes that you need to avoid, especially anything racial or class-based.
Just think about people who have portrayed characters like this in X way, and think, “I'm definitely not going to do X way, I'm definitely going to do Y way and that will help me stand out.”
Genre shortcuts is a little bit more complicated than just stereotypes. A genre shortcut is any kind of common character or scene type you've seen a lot in romance.
So, Boy Crazy Best Friend — there's a really good reason why we need this but sometimes it gets to be overdone a little bit, so you want to make sure to do it in a new and fresh way. Evil Ex-girlfriend — again, there's good reasons for that. You need an antagonist sometimes, but sometimes that can get a little cliché. You don't want to see it done the way it's always been done.
And so once you know that people are expecting certain things, you want to think about how you can do it differently and in a fresh way without breaking what drew them to that in the first place.
For instance, with Small Town Romance, one of the things about that trope is people are expecting them to get tighter relationships and enjoy a slower pace of life, and you don't necessarily want to change all of that at once if you still want to appeal to Small Town Romance fans.
But it is important that you know what people are coming to that trope for, so read in your genre if you're going to write, for example, a Friends to Lovers book. Go out and read five Friends to Lovers books and see what's been done so many times.
I remember with one of my clients, I mentioned the coffee spill meet cute is really overdone, and she was super surprised. She was like, “I don't remember ever seeing two people spill coffee on each other when they meet in a romance.” And after I told her that, she saw it everywhere, she saw it all the time. But if you haven't seen that overdone, you don't necessarily know that it's become a cliché, right?
In The Happy Ever After Playlist, the author does a really clever use of these genre shortcuts to get some extra reversals. A reversal is anytime you take what your reader expects and change it to what they didn't expect — you can use their expectations to lead them down a path and then flip it so that they're excited and they get kind of, like, the reader equivalent of a jump scare. And then they're woken back up and re-engaged in your text.
For The Happy Ever After Playlist, we see Jason has a stalker. She looks like the evil ex-girlfriend that's going to come between the couple, and it's going to be super sad and you know we're going to see two girls fight over the guy. That's a little bit cliché, and it's a little bit unfeminist too.
So then when it actually happens it turns out she's not evil. She's not going to come between the two of them — she's a whole person in her own right with flaws and stuff that she's struggling with, and so she gets humanized in a way we weren't expecting from that clichéd portrayal of the ex-girlfriend. This makes the book feel really fresh and new.
The next reversal that the author gives us with genre shortcuts is the Cheating Misunderstanding — that’s a really common thing you see in romance where one person will see their partner with somebody else and assume they were cheating, but oops! They actually weren't cheating, and then it was a misunderstanding. And it's a little bit of a weak conflict because there's nothing actually wrong with the relationship for them to overcome — they just need to have a conversation and be like, “Oh, you weren't actually cheating in the end.”
In The Happy Ever After Playlist, I thought we were going to get a cheap Cheating Misunderstanding because Sloan comes to Jason’s hotel room to visit him on tour and he's got another girl in his hotel room. It totally looks like he was cheating, and Sloan gets mad.She leaves, she thinks, “Oh, he was cheating on me.”
But then she thinks, “Wait, no, I trust him. He would actually never do that.” And so she goes back to talk to him, which is great because first of all, it shows they have a healthy relationship and they actually have trust between them, which is important in a romance novel.
But when she goes back, he realizes it's really unhealthy for her to be on the road with him, and she's never going to leave and go home because she wants to be with him, and so she's just going to stay even though it's harming her health and her art and her job.
And so, he tells her, “No, I really was cheating on you” and lies to her for her own good. Which — it's not good to lie, that was not a great choice of his — he does it for a good reason. So, we get to see the use of the Cheating Misunderstanding, but it's not actually playing out the way you expect. It goes in an unpredictable direction.
Because the author uses that reversal, and because she knows what you're going to expect, she knows enough to flip it and keep you awake. So, that's a really good use of genre shortcuts to make it feel fresh and interesting to your audience.
Time for Date Night!
Another fantastic place to stand out when you're dealing with romance novels is in fresh and unique dates because that's a lot of what people are coming to romance for, is the vicarious thrill of being on fun and interesting dates that are more, you know, maybe splashier and higher production value than what you've done with your husband the last time you got a babysitter.
I did also want to mention that this can apply to your books even if you're not doing traditional dates. So, if you're doing an Enemies to Lovers where they're not technically dating each other, or if it's a workplace romance where they're pretending to hate each other for a while, you can still have date-like encounters. For instance, The Hating Game by Sally Thorne is an enemies-to-lovers workplace romance, but they had team-building exercises and went paintballing, so you can add fun little activities like that.
And one of the uses for adding date nights is you don't want every scene to be a sitting and talking scene. It's really easy in romance, and I was definitely guilty of it in my early books of, like, so many scenes with people just sitting and talking.
In a book I wrote, I had a tour manager and a bassist character, and so they were on tour together. I ended up with so many tour bus scenes and I wanted to add some date night stuff and them going off and doing other stuff so that we would have a little bit more production value, we wouldn't have so many scenes set on the tour bus.
Something to think about when you're designing a date is, bring it back to your three ways to stand out. You want to make it personal so that it's not just what a great date would be, but what would your character really love in a date.
For instance, don't just go to the movies — you can screen your character's favorite Disney Princess movie on the whiteboard in the basement janitor's office where she used to hide from bullies as a kid. Like, it's going to be personal.
Think about how to be more specific with your date night. Instead of dinner, what about kiteboarding? Going to a thrift store and choosing outfits for each other can be fun — that's one from The Happy Ever After Playlist.
With the visuals, think high production value. Americans really love watching rich people, so think about ways to make it luxurious or rich or interesting. A helicopter ride instead of, you know, a walk in the park. Adding a touch of unexpected events or serendipity is really important.
Anytime you have a hint of the unexpected, it mimics that feeling of first love where you have butterflies in your stomach and you don't know what's going to happen and your world feels really open and fresh and full of possibility. So, when you're adding things to your dates that's unexpected, you get that feeling again, and that's the feeling that people are coming to romance for in the first place.
So, absolutely you want to give them that, but you can give it to them in a few different ways. First of all, not every date has to be planned, so it doesn't have to be: the character says, “Let's meet on Friday” and then they meet on Friday. Anytime where you're getting the unexpected, even if it's that they run into each other or they end up doing something that they weren't expecting, it's less predictable in a small way, but it adds up. It really does help in keeping your reader engaged and reading along.
For instance, with the trope Enemies to Lovers, they're not going to plan dates anyway. It has to have stuff that just happens to them, and you can also get a good scene turn out of this where they might be doing one thing and expecting it to go one way and it actually goes a different way, and they have to deal with it together, right?
Then you have a plot problem, a scene-level goal they have to work on, and you also have a lot more tension, so anytime you can have something go unexpectedly, that’s fun and can help you.
Not having every date be planned is important for books, just to keep readers interested. The date night from The Happy Ever After Playlist is a really great example of this. I really love their first date, and it's another thing that made the book stick in my head and make me want to build a whole class around it.
So, it starts with the unexpected. They do have a planned date, but then it doesn't go as they expected. A flood ruins her apartment and he saves the day with his plumbing skills, which is a demonstration of value. He then buys lottery tickets for them, so you have that whiff of serendipity again where anything could happen. You've got that feeling of possibility, and it's right after she found out that he's not just a musician, he's not just another guy with a guitar, but he's actually her favorite recording artist, and so again, demonstration of value.
And these are early in the book. It’s not right at the beginning, but demonstrations of value all the way through can keep building up your love interest to be sexy and attractive to your reader because you don't just want your character to fall in love with them, you want your reader to fall in love with them too. That's what really makes a successful romance novel.
So, anyway, they're doing lottery tickets on their first date after finding out he's her favorite recording artist in Rainbow Car Wash while eating ice cream, and if you don't know what Rainbow Car Wash is, it's one of those drive-through car washes, only when the soap comes onto your window, it's in, like, three or four different colors, and so your whole car gets enveloped into this beautiful tapestry of color, and then the water comes along and swishes it all around, but it's, like, kind of this magical moment. It feels almost like a fair ride, and I love Rainbow Car Wash, it is a great use of six dollars, it just makes it more fun. I was delighted to see it used in a novel here to just have a different date — you don't see a lot of dates in a car wash.
Mid-Book Reversals
The next thing I want to talk about is the mid-book reversal. A mid-book reversal is when something big changes halfway through the book. This is a really good, very simple way to solve your sagging middle problems.
I've heard other people call it a mid-book climax, and the reason that I don't like to use that terminology is I feel it leads you down the wrong path to making just, like, one splashy scene happen and then everything goes back to normal. You really don't want just one splashy thing to happen at the midpoint — you want something that changes the whole game.
And if you plan your book like this — when I plan a book, I think about where it's going to start, where it's going to end, how we’re going to climax the conflict, and then the mid-book reversal.
Through the whole first half of the book, you're driving toward that mid-book reversal and knowing it's coming. So, the middle part goes really fast and you're not just sitting there thinking about what’s going to happen between when they meet and when they get together. With the mid-book reversal, it organizes it for you, and it also can keep your conflict feeling fresh and authentic instead of feeling too drawn out.
So, there's two main ways that you can do a mid-book reversal, especially in a romance: you can hit a new phase of an existing conflict, or you can introduce an all-new conflict at the halfway point.
For instance, maybe in the first half of your book, you're seeing how a character's specific insecurities are keeping them from accepting a romantic relationship, and maybe at the halfway point, that existing conflict switches so that you see them getting together and now it's about how those insecurities are impacting how they're acting within the relationship.
Sometimes when you introduce a conflict right at the beginning, you can get tired of just mentioning it over and over again. It’s like, you know, the Montagues and Capulets in Romeo and Juliet can’t be together, and then halfway through the story you're still like, the Montagues and Capulets still can't be together, and you're tired of saying it and the audience is tired of hearing it.
So, when you have a mid-book reversal, you have something new to talk about. It doesn't feel contrived. It doesn't feel like they're just waiting for 70% of the story to come up so that they can be together. It feels like they're working on authentic, earned things that are actually holding them apart, that change and move, and it doesn't feel gimmicky, like you're just trying to keep them apart for tension.
The Happy Ever After Playlist has a great demonstration of this. The author switches conflict entirely, so for the first half, the conflict is that the heroine is a widow who isn't sure whether she's ready for love. And then, once she is sure she's ready for love, the guy she’s falling for is a musician who goes on tour and it ends up being a really, really long tour, so now we have a long-distance relationship. Totally different conflict, right?
They have a lot of different things to work on. There's different ways that they can play out, so we don't have the same scene happening over and over again. You see it changing and moving, and you see them developing through totally different phases of their relationship, which is one of my favorite things.
I feel like in a lot of romance, if they don't get together at all until the end, all you're really seeing is the get-together part, but with this, you get a whole life in microcosm where you get to see them slowly growing to know each other and getting together. It changes and grows, which is important.
Grand Gestures
The next thing that is really important for romance principles — this is one of my favorite ones, and it's our last one — you don't have to have a grand gesture, but you can, and it makes your ending a lot more fun.
For instance, if you're just going to have your climax and then they talk and they work it out and then they're together, that's one thing. But maybe they could get back together through a grand gesture — a big, splashy, romantic thing that one character does for the other character.
These are really popular in romance movies, right? You don't have to necessarily have one, but if you do bring in a grand gesture to have your characters make up, it can be a really memorable way to show it instead of just them sitting in a coffee shop being like, "I'm not mad at you anymore, Bob."
And when you're designing these, you really want to think about our three principles again. You want to make it personal to the character. Once, I wrote a grand gesture in one of my books and one of my readers told me, “Oh, this was really cute for the character but it would be my personal hell,” which is totally true about some of the splashy public declaration kind of things.
You want to think about what would be really meaningful to your character because you want to show that at this point in the book, they know each other really well and they want to make each other happy.
You also want to show that it took a lot of time and effort. You don't want it to be, like, they ran by the gas station and they grabbed a rose from by the cash register. You want to show they put a lot of time and energy into this, to show that it's important to them.
And then the third thing you want to do is make it big and visual, so something that we can see and picture in our mind, something really memorable. Also, symbolic — if you can bring in any symbolism from their relationship and stuff they've gone through, or inside jokes from their dates, that's a really good way to make your grand gesture stand out.
For instance, one of my favorites is from a Kelly Siskind book where the girl loved snow globes and he made her a life-size snow globe that she could walk around in and she could make her speech from inside of it, and all of the stuff. That was cool because it had symbolism that tied back to their relationship, but it was big and visual and memorable and it showed that a lot of time and effort went into it.
The other reason that you want to make grand gestures is, like, I remember when I was a kid, the first piece of romantic advice I ever gave to my brother was, “Don't just give a girl flowers. Give a girl flowers at work or at school where other people can see her being adored and see her being special.”
It means so much more than if she would have just gotten them at her house and nobody saw that she got them. Part of what we're coming to romance for is that vicarious thrill of feeling like somebody really special is super into us and would go to the ends of the Earth to make us happy.
So, that's what we're getting with the grand gesture, you know, the escapism and vicarious thrill of the reader thinking about being the person that got a snow globe built for them. You want to give them that larger-than-life, really cool moment to latch onto.
It's also a good way to go out with a bang so that right before they get to the point where they're going to be leaving your book a review, you've given them something that made their little hearts melt. So, a grand gesture is a really good place to put your extra energy in terms of standing out.
The Happy Ever After Playlist, much as I hate to say it, it does have a grand gesture in it, but it's not my favorite grand gesture. If any of the examples from this book are a little bit weak, I would say it's the grand gesture, just because it's been done a little bit often.
The way it happens is the girl shows up unexpectedly to his concert, so you see that element of surprise. He's making a speech about her from the stage, and we know it's from the heart because he doesn't know that she's there, and public declaration is a big thing in a lot of romantic gestures because I think a lot of us want to feel like there's nothing held back, that the love interest loves you so much he's willing to shout it from the rooftops, and so you want to see that they're not embarrassed of you in public.
That's a big part of a lot of grand gestures. Then we see that he wrote a song for her, which is, again, a show of effort — it took time and energy. And then they run to each other through the crowd to show urgency.
In a lot of romance movies, you'll see the running through the airport scene. It's just because it's a quick shorthand to show urgency on film. You don't necessarily have to use running in your book because in a book, we have a whole lot of different techniques that we can lean on to build urgency.
So, just make sure you have that feeling of urgency. We need to feel like they need to make the grand gesture and claim their love now, not like, next Tuesday, so have that feeling of urgency. It doesn't necessarily have to be running. In this case, it kind of does work for the symbolism because they're trying to run to each other through a concert crowd, and it's really his fans that have been in the way of their relationship for a lot of the second half of the book.
There is some symbolism to that, and then when they have a big kiss that's witnessed by all, it solves some of the plot problems with his audience not wanting them to be together because she's not famous. Now that they've seen this big romantic gesture, they do want them to be together because they ship that because it's super cute.
I did want to mention a better example of a romantic gesture in The Happy Ever After Playlist — it's not a grand gesture, but you can use romantic gestures all the way through your book because it's awesome. Earlier in The Happy Ever After, Sloan is taking Jason’s dog to the dog groomer, and he goes out of his way to figure out what dog groomer she's going to go to in the whole city, call around to figure out where she's going to go and at what time she's going to get there, and have a big bouquet of, I think, her favorite flowers showing up there when she gets there because, again, we're seeing it's very specific, right?
Not everybody would think to send flowers to a dog groomer, and it has a little nod to something they have in common, which is their love of this dog, and so it's specific, it's very personal to her. He goes out of his way to make sure it's something that she would want, and it's unexpected.
I mean, it's not flowers on Valentine's Day. You're not expecting flowers when you go to the dog groomer, and because you're not, it feels more romantic. So, I thought that was a good gesture. Even though it's not a grand gesture at the end of the book, it does demonstrate a lot of the principles really well.
Wrapping Up
So, that’s it! Now you know a little bit more about common romance principles and how they work. You can go back to our three principles of how to stand out on each one, or when you’re building your book idea. You always want to make any idea, when you’re stuck on what to do, think about how to make it more personal to your characters, more specific, and make it visual.
And always think back to what is drawing people to that specific moment, that specific trope, that type of book, so that you know how to stand out in a way that’s still going to give them the same emotional payoff.
