When you start writing a Romance novel, it may be tough to come up with some great ideas. One of the first ideas you need to come up with is how your characters are going to meet each other. When you're writing a romance novel, you know that the characters are going to meet each other and fall in love.
The two main characters of a romance, whether a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and a man, need to fall in love and live happily ever after.
This is what romance readers expect, so it's your job as the author to make it happen. But bringing together two people in a story can be difficult. How can you write the story so it is unique and interesting?
When writing a romance novel, you should always try to push the boundaries a bit, especially when it comes to how your characters meet. Readers of romance already expect they're going to be happy when the story ends, so you essentially have the ending of the book planned out already. The challenge is really in regards to how they meet and how they overcome their obstacles so they can be happy.
A crime is a crime – or is it?
When you think about romance novels, you may not be thinking about the law, and you may not be thinking about crimes or even people who commit them. To the average reader, there's nothing appealing about finding a lover who has a criminal past, who could potentially become a criminal or get arrested again. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't use the law to inspire you when it comes to your story. Most of us have made some mistakes with the law, even if it's just a parking ticket. The law can definitely be on your side when it comes to staging such a meeting.
Of course, the Parking Ticket is one way for your characters to meet. She could be running late to a meeting and park her car in the wrong spot.
She could come out to find an officer writing her a ticket, and the two meet - perhaps even laughing at how ridiculous the whole scene is. While she isn't necessarily a criminal, she could be breaking a by-law.
Keep the crime soft
While true love may happen in real life for people who have committed serious crimes, it may not be something that your readers want to read about. It's possible that readers will distance themselves from your writing if you spend a lot of time building up your characters to be killers, robbers, or frauds. That's not to say that people don't deserve a second chance, but your readers may be looking for the perfect romance that could take them out of their own situations in life, and not introduce them to a criminal who is begging for a second chance.
What do you think about these ideas? Do you think you can use the law to write a perfect romance novel?