Hi Reader!

How do you feel about tropes?

(Asking for a friend. 😁 Just kidding, I'm actually asking for me. Because...)

I LOVE tropes. What I DREAD is stereotypes. 😮‍💨

Tropes are what attract us to the stories we love most. 🥰 They're the reason we choose those specific books.

Like Friends To Lovers in romance. 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 It's supposed to feel familiar. That's part of the promise, and I want every second of that forbidden longing as our heroes realize just how right they are for one another.

✋ What I dread is when I could swap out these same lovers for a completely different pair of best friends... and the book would still follow the same stale plot arc.

Because that ☝️ means that the trope is doing all of the plot work. And the character arcs play out in isolation (if at all).

Which usually means the author didn't weave the characters' individual wants, fears, and needs into the fabric of the story itself.

🔎 And the biggest clue that you're reading (or have written) a story suffering from this problem is:

🚫 The heroes' self-protection behaviors 🛡️ aren't an essential part of the scene flow.

One of the things that can trip writers up about writing romance is how to 🧵 weave plot and character into the same story framework.

Your romance book needs an external plot of some kind—and some romantic fiction niches ⚔️🧚 are more plot-dominant than others—but the purpose of those external scenes is to 🌱 progress the heroes' growth arcs.

But tropes don't just exist in a vacuum on the page either. Because those plot scenes should also tap into 🔨 your story's primary tropes.

For example, in a friends-to-lovers story, the two romantic leads start off as good friends. ❣️ So there has to be a damn good reason that they're not already lovers. (And the reader has to understand why they're still just-friends.)

In an enemies-to-lovers story, 😠 our leads despise one another. So, just like with FTL, they too need a reason to refuse to be together.

Those two tropes feel like complete opposite reading experiences. And they are, at the start of the book. But they also share a common thread:

Whether your heroes start as friends or enemies, 🤝 they're gonna end up as not just lovers, but life partners.

That's ☝️ what the trope (and the genre) promises.

And setting that up in your manuscript is 😰 FAR from simple.

You can't just line up all the romance and trope beats, slot them into the plot events, and hope for the best.

👀👉 All of the story's external moments MUST be tailored to the heroes and their unique psychological journeys.

If you just stick your heroes in a snow storm ❄️ so they'll be forced to spend time (and space) being miserable together, that might fit the rest of the plot...

But does it agitate a 🔪 wound or fear 👻 for at least one of the heroes?

❣️ In romantic fiction, the plot serves the heroes. Always.

And when it doesn't, readers can feel the disconnect. 💔

They don't usually understand why, 😩 and that makes it so hard to troubleshoot story feedback like "it was just okay".

So if your readers are praising your romance books, then complaining that the ending was "too predictable", they're not mad about HOW it ended.

💡 They're disappointed in how the story got to that happy ending. 💔

And there are three ways you can set up your lovers' romance arc to protect AGAINST a predictable how. 🖱️👇

🎧👇 Listen to Episode 19: The Friends-To-Lovers Fix

🎧🤩 LISTEN NOW!

Listen to this one even if you aren't writing (or don't write) the friends-to-lovers trope. Because I share tips that can work for nearly any romantic relationship arc in our genre.

In this 30-minute episode, I take you inside a published romance book (👀👨‍❤️‍👨 Hot Axe by May Archer) and show you how two people managed to stay just friends for more than a decade while everybody around them could tell how much they loved one another.

Then I break down WHAT has to change ⚡ inside each of them before they're willing to risk that friendship.

And at the end, 💡 I give you two questions that will help you start building a stronger romance-plot connection in your own story.

🎧⚡👇

​​Listen here​!

☝️💡❣️

⚡📆 Listen (or re-listen!) to Episode 19: The Friends-To-Lovers Fix when you sit down to do your September module. Inside the Protection Pattern, you'll explore what your hero is protecting themself from and what it's costing them. And in the podcast episode, I give three different examples of how those self-protections create romantic conflict.