How to Plot a Romance Novel

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner, and right now, we're going to talk about how to plot a romance novel, so obviously, you've already started with your novel, and you've started to figure out who the characters are, and all the certain things, where the world, the world that you're living in, is going to be set. Whether it's a fantasy world, or the real world, and now you need to know how to move the novel forward. My best advice for constructing the plot of the novel, is to treat each chapter as it's own individual story. Create the chapters with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and on that note, create a chapter that hooks into the next chapter, because you're going to have a long string of forty, fifty chapters, if it's a long romance novel. You're going to have lots of little episodes, that all tie together, and the most important thing, whenever you pick up a book and you start to read, is that you want to continue to the next chapter, to see what happens next, so don't conclude your chapters with a finite end. Leave us hanging. Give us an actual hook, or a ford, into the next scene or chapter, so keep us tense, as it were. Number two, always make your world full of conflict in action. You really need to keep the romantic tension between the heroes up, and you need to keep that antagonist, sort of driving your plot. Make sure that your novel is dramatic, and of course, the one thing you really need to pay attention to, which is going to be my final point actually, because there are so many different ways that you can plot a romance novel, depending on what your story is, where you need to go. Figure out what your ending is, and I would say for a novel, you could almost plot your outline backwards. You could say, I want Loretta to get together with Antonio, at the end of the novel, and so you say, how am I going to get there? so what you'll do, is you'll have that as your ending, and you'll go back through each chapter, to try to figure out, what the best way to plot this action, is going to be for you. That way, you don't get caught up in a lot of time, trying to figure out what's going to happen next, but as we all know with writing, you can go off on tangents and figure out where to go in the story, but always keep that ending in sight, and that's my best advice, for plotting a romance novel."