I'm teaching a new class beginning Feb. 1, 2021, so I thought I'd share a sample in case other writers would like to sign up. I've been teaching online classes for fifteen years or so now, but this one is brand new, so it's completely new material. I'm really excited about it.
You can sign up here. Here are some reviews of my classes.
Designing the Perfect Romance Cast
By Angela Knight
I want to thank you for taking my class on designing the perfect romance cast. It’s my objective with this class to give you the tools that can help you become a successful romance writer. The first step is to understand what romance readers are looking for — which is the key to becoming an autobuy.
As someone who made the New York Times list a few times, I’ve given this some thought.
Success for a romance novelist isn't a matter of poetic descriptions of sunsets, great costumes, witty dialogue, pulse-pounding fight scenes, or even toe-curling sex. What matters to romance readers is the answer to one question: “will these two people get their Happy-Ever-After?” The HEA needs to be seriously in doubt all the way through the book. The deck has to be stacked against the couple from page one.
Maybe he's a demon hunter and his seductive lover is a demon. Maybe he’s a widower Earl with four kids and not enough of the ready to maintain his estate, and she’s his penniless governess.
But the problem that ultimately drives the book can't be some purely external problem like money or social status. After all, people married their governesses all the time, so there must be more to it than that.
The real problem must come from inside the characters — their fears and emotional scars. Maybe the demon believes that despite everything good he does to win the hero's love, he's basically evil, and he can literally never be good enough. His hero knows demons are born deceivers who can never really be trusted.
Perhaps the governess heroine has been sexually harassed by prior employers, and trust doesn't come easily for her. Maybe her Earl has been played by social climbers before.
Those are the kinds of problems that make readers wonder how in the world you're going to get to Happily Ever After.
Luckily, your protagonists have a fabulous matchmaker on their side: the villain.
You read that right. More than any matchmaking Regency mama, a good villain is a romance author’s best friend. Every time your protagonists are ready to throw in the towel on their love, your antagonist does something nasty that drives them back together.
That doesn't mean the antagonist has to be out to destroy the world with a snap of his fingers. He can be your hero's deeply religious father, upset that his gay son is "going to hell." Daddy may try various well-meaning thing to make his son see the light. Things which, of course, backfire. Maybe he gets the hero fired, forcing him to move in with the secondary hero to save money.
Or if things are going well between the couple, Daddy can also do things to break the couple up. It all depends on where you are in the plot. The whole idea is to keep the reader wondering, "There’s no way they’re getting a Happy Ever After given this mess."
And it’s not just the antagonist, either. Every character, from protagonist to walk-on, must serve one of four purposes in every scene in your book:
1. Increase the stress on the romance by posing either a physical or psychological threat to the relationship.
2. Make one of the two protagonists more sympathetic through their interaction with them. That can be as dramatic as the protagonist saving the character, or as subtle as the protagonist's showing kindness or affection toward them. (We care about people who care about people.)
3. Make the protagonist seem more realistic. It's hard to get worked up about the fate of cardboard people. If the character has no parents, boss, friends, or coworkers, the protagonist doesn't seem as real.
Even if the parents are dead, they must at least be mentioned. This is true even in a short story where space is at a premium. The mention of them doesn't have to be detailed, but you need at least a sentence or two about them.
4. The character can act as a sounding board for the protagonist. Long periods of protagonist introspection are boring. If the protagonist argues their options with their best friend, it a lot more interesting. Especially if said friend thinks the protagonist's plan is nuts and they're going to end up dead.
In the next month, I'll elaborate on these ideas in lessons I'll post on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays, you're invited to send me up to 2000 words in a Word file from your current work in progress. That can be scenes, raw ideas, or ideas that you're toying with. I'll give you my feedback in comments in the document. Email it to me and I'll respond privately.
Lessons will include:
1. Introduction – How a good romance cast functions as a unit.
2. What’s the big idea? – What kind of story do you want to tell? How do you make sure it would make a good book? Is it novel or novella, and how can you tell?
3. From Rom-coms to Game of Thrones: What’s the subgenre for this kind of book, and why does it matter? What’s the audience for that subgenre, and what are they looking for?
4. Brave New Worlds – Designing the story world, even a contemporary.
5. Imperfect for Each Other -- Creating a heroic couple who’ll drive each other crazy… in and out of bed.
6. A Match Made in Hell – Creating an antagonist to make your couple’s lives miserable … and keep readers up all night turning pages.
7. Sidekicks – Supporting characters who bring your protagonists to life and make them question what the hell they’re doing.
8. Henchmen – The importance of a good flunky with bad intentions.
9. Perfect Pitch – How to give each character a realistic “voice.”
10. Snark, Sarcasm and malice – Using humor to make readers laugh … or scare the daylights out of them.
11. A Good Row – Writing a knock-down-drag-argument without making your characters sound like jerks.
12. All Together Now – How to put everybody through their paces on the page.
I'm really looking forward to this class. I always learn a lot from teaching, and I find it helps my own writing. I hope it will help yours too.
Now, are there any questions?
Angela Knight
No comments:
Post a Comment