Sucking the Juicy Good Bits Out Of...

Romancing The Beat

Because I am a lazy girl (and more to the point, believe in immediate feedback), the first question I asked myself when finishing the Index of books was which of my books was the smallest and easiest to summarize. That one, I would do first.

There was some competition in this category, but I landed on Gwen Hayes' Romancing the Beat, because I am a romance (well, erotica) author, and I feel it's good to have an understanding of a genre's formula if you're going to tackle it. Romancing the Beat sets out to describe that formula, following in the footsteps of Save the Cat Writes A Novel.

Gwen Hayes is writing this book because she sees a structural gap in the advice given to other writers - that most of the advice for plot beats is not structured for romance, which has two leads, not one, and which has a formula, but not one described by Save the Cat. She's here to fill that specific little hole in the advice.

Going into chapter 2, Gwen says that as a romance writer, your theme is already picked out for you and that it's specifically "Love conquers all." This is because of the internal genre expectation that romances end in a Happily Ever After or Happy For Now - these are technical terms used by the commercial romance writer's community, but they're pretty much what they sound like. If you write a romance where the leads aren't happy at the end, you have not written a romance according to current commercial genre expectations.

She says that to write a good romance, both protagonists have to change - which in my mind, calls back to the "exchange of masks" concept discussed by Eliezer in his closing remarks on HPMOR. From the beginning of the book to the end, the protagonists both go from missing something in their lives to having it. That connection and change is the romance of the story. And whatever is keeping your protagonists from achieving love is the central conflict, the thing the work is about.

She goes on to say that the external plot (the one happening in the physical world, as opposed to the central character arc happening in the characters' minds) is best set up such that your romantic leads want mutually incompatible things. This makes sense if you want a book with a juicy conflict, but also takes you into more tropey territory - it's the land of werewolf/vampire, vampire/hunter, businesswoman foreclosing on a farm/farmer just trying to get by. You can get a better and less tired conflict in this arena, but a lot of the easy material has been mined out already. And for someone like me who wants to write polyamorous romances, it gets even more complicated because you have to get three people with all mutually incompatible goals.

Then she goes into the actual formula. This is more extensive, but the goals in each section are clear. She says that the steps in a romance are:

Introduction:

Introduce your two leads
Have them meet
Have them express why they don't want to fall in love with the other romantic lead
Give them a reason why they can't walk away from each other

Falling in Love:

Restate the argument against falling in love
Make the characters stop and think about it; there's some reason they're considering it
Turn the heat level up; make the characters feel erotically drawn to each other
Demonstrate the characters' growing intimacy; sex is a good option here but emotional intimacy can also work
The characters reach a false high - everything is going right and they're having a wonderful time.

Retreating from Love:

… But their issues come back and strike at them again. They're feeling insecure in some way, some part of their damage is getting in the way.
You remind them of their wound or flaw.
This grows into an internal dilemma.
The protagonists become wary of each other and fail to confess their feelings.
Whatever their damage made them fear comes true - perhaps as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And then at least one of the leads gives in to their damage and retreats entirely from being in love. The retreat is based on the moment they choose fear over love.

Fighting for Love:

… But one or another of the leads realizes that they should know better than to do the stupid thing they just did. The emotional weight of the "breakup" hits.
Then they realize that they brought their walls up incorrectly, and have to submit to being truly vulnerable to the other.
They use that vulnerability to make a grand gesture that declares their love for good! This is the clapping and cheering moment.
You mirror the opening of the story, but show how our lead couple have changed and become better over the course of the whole story.
Epilogue; this should still have a little tension to it to feel real, but it's the image of their lives going forward.

And that's it. That's the whole book. You now know everything there is to know about Romancing the Beat. There's a little more detail than this in the actual book, but this is the core of it.

Surprisingly, I think that none of my completed romances quite follow this structure. Things happen out of order, or don't happen at all. Ember Scar of Proper Love Goddess doesn't have sex with Kumi until the very end of her story, in the mirror of the opening. There is a moment of intimacy relatively early in her arc, but it's the offer of food that she can eat comfortably with her filed teeth. Hyacinth of A Housepet's Trade expresses that she loves Liath almost as soon as she meets her - but the rest of the story then goes on to question and pry at her ability to be an equal partner in the resulting relationship when she's still running from the damage of her previous life. And so on. Perhaps this means my structure's malformed, or perhaps it means that the formula doesn't have to be adhered to strictly to create something worth reading. Personally, I feel tired of stories where the romantic leads fight even though they're going to obviously kiss and make up; it matters more to me that their progress feels genuinely earned over the course of the story than that I stick to a formula exactly.

Of course, Gwen Hayes says that I can do this if I want, but that I'll be raked over the coals by an editor for it; I guess we have to agree to disagree on this one, since I doubt that any of my work will see the desk of an editor anytime soon given the kinks that are in it.

Overall, I feel that this is good mostly to keep in mind the expectations of the commercial genre so that you can subvert or build on them in fun ways in your own work. You have to know the rules before you can break them well. This is a very handy reference for knowing the rules of romance, and for that, it deserves a place in my library.