On Writing Romance (13 page)

Another type of weak short-term problem is one in which there simply aren't enough honest differences of opinion or conflicting goals to keep the readers interested. Misunderstandings that can be solved with a few minutes of honest conversation fall into this category.

In Beth Cornelison's long contemporary
In Protective Custody
, her hero, Max, is faced with his short-term problem when his injured sister asks him to hide her infant son from the grandparents who are trying to kidnap him.

This short-term conflict is important, it's emotional, and it has very high stakes. Add to it that Max knows nothing about babies, and you have a built-in role for the heroine — who happens to work in a day care center and can't stand to see a child in danger of being mistreated or neglected.

The long-term problem is something about the characters' personalities or pasts that makes it seem impossible for them to reach a happy ending together. It's often called the internal conflict because it's usually something inside the character — a character flaw or a reaction to a past experience — that makes it difficult for her to make a lifelong commitment to the other.

Here's where lack of trust and reluctance to face unpleasant truths belong. With long-term conflicts as well as short-term ones, however, the more concrete the problem, the easier it will be to write the book. Rather than just saying that your character's problem is an inability to trust, look for the reason she can't trust.

A guy who's been jilted will have trust issues. So will one who was abandoned as a child. But the effects of those two situations will be different, so the actions and attitudes of those two men will be different even though they share a basic problem.

The long-term problem may be something that makes the character reluctant to fall in love at all:

• She caught her previous fiancé in bed with another woman.
  

• His parents experienced a bitter divorce and he doesn't want to risk having it happen to him.
  

• Everyone she's ever loved has died and she's afraid to try again.
  

Or it may be something that makes the character reluctant to fall in love with this particular individual:

• She's terrified of heights, and he's a mountain-climbing instructor.
  

• She grew up in poverty because her father was a compulsive gambler, and the hero makes his living running a casino.
  

• He rejected her once before, so she's afraid he'll do it again.
  

Often the long-term problems aren't shared with the readers until fairly late in the story. Frequently that's because the character herself doesn't recognize her character flaw until the pain of the current situation forces her to reassess the choices she's made in the past and the impact those choices continue to have on her life.

The readers may know right away that the heroine has been widowed but not find out until the last chapter that she's reluctant to love again, not because she adored her late husband, but because he was unfaithful to her.

Even if the details aren't shared with the readers up front, however, the long-term problem will affect all of that character's actions. The hero may not talk about his parents' tragic marriage, but his experience will affect how he acts toward the heroine.

Sometimes, in developing long-term problems for your characters, it's useful to ask, “Why are these people wrong for each other? Why is he the worst possible guy for her to fall in love with? Why is she the absolutely wrong woman for him?”

If the heroine's ex-husband was a crooked cop, then the worst possible person for her to fall in love with is probably another cop. If the hero's parents tried to control his life, then the worst possible person for him to fall in love with may be a woman whose family members are always minding each other's business.

Of course, in the long run these people aren't actually bad for each other, because the second cop isn't dishonest and the heroine's family isn't controlling. But it's only logical that, at first, the pairing appears to be a very bad combination; and it's also logical that it takes a while for the characters to figure out that things are different this time around.

In Beth Cornelison's
In Protective Custody
, Max and the heroine, Laura, are on the run to protect Max's newborn nephew. But each of them has an internal reason why playing house, pretending to be a family, and falling in love are all very bad ideas. Max is still recuperating from a marriage that failed because he couldn't father children:

Meanwhile, Laura — the product of a long series of foster homes — wants nothing more than a family of her own.

Is there anyone who could be worse for a woman who's longing for a family than a guy who can't give her a baby? Is there anyone who could be worse for a man with a shaky sense of masculinity than a woman who's skittish about trusting men at all?

A character's short-term and long-term problems need to be closely related, because the short-term problem focuses a spotlight on the long-term one. The immediate, life-altering threat or challenge (the short-term problem) is what forces the character to own up to and deal with the character flaw or the troublesome past experience (the long-term problem).

The long-term problem is the reason a character finds a particular short-term problem so hard to face. When Beth Cornelison saddles her hero-who-can't-be-a-father and her heroine-who-wants-to-be-a-mom with an infant, it's like holding a magnifying glass on their long-term problems. A different sort of short-term problem would have had much less emotional appeal.

When the immediate difficulty (the short-term problem or external conflict) the hero and heroine face is complicated by the kind of people they are (the character flaw or past experience that is the long-term problem or internal conflict), then you have the potential for a deeply emotional story that the readers can never forget.

For instance, if an infant were dumped on the hero's doorstep with a note implying that the hero is the father, any heroine would be upset. But for a heroine who was raised in an orphanage and who has struggled with her own issues of abandonment, this situation would be particularly horrible. How could the hero not know about his baby? How could he have turned his back on his child?

If the short-term problem is that your hero has suddenly lost all his money, perhaps the long-term one is that he's always bought whatever he wanted — and that, in his experience, others liked him mostly for what he could give them. Because he's always been able to buy everything, the loss of money is more difficult for him to bear than it would be for someone who was less materialistic to begin with.

If the long-term problem is that the young widow refuses to deal with her loss and go on with her life, perhaps the short-term problem is that she is suddenly forced to move out of the home she shared with her husband. Nobody likes to lose a home, but because she has turned the house into a shrine for her late husband, having to move would be a bigger blow for her than it would be for other people.

In a romance novel, the long-term problem for each character is always, in essence, what tendency or flaw makes it difficult for the couple to end up together. In each story, however, the precise problem is different.

Can Mary overcome the trauma of her family's poverty and accept that John is not really a free-spending gambler like her father?

That's a long-term problem — the effect of her father's gambling on the family is a past experience that colors everything in Mary's life today. If you then establish that John owns the casino where Mary's father gambled, and begin the story with Mary trying to find a way to close it down or to convince John to return enough of her father's losses to allow her mother to get necessary medical treatment, then you have tension-producing short- and long-term problems that are closely related and intolerable for the character.

Meanwhile, John will have a long-term problem of his own. It may be every bit as huge as Mary's (childhood experiences have left him addicted to risk), or it may be smaller (he's inherited the casino and he'd like to simply close it down, but that would throw hundreds of people out of work; he can't in good conscience sell it to another operator, because he's actually opposed to gambling).

Often, if one character's long-term problem is huge, the other's problem is more manageable — but each of them will have a long-term problem, a past experience or character flaw that causes trouble in the present. In the most effective stories, the long-term problems of the two characters put them in opposition to each other, in addition to the complications of their short-term problems.

As you develop your short- and long-term problems, keep in mind that because your two characters have so many reasons to disagree and so many things keeping them apart, they need a really good reason to stick around at all. Under ordinary circumstances, when you're frustrated by someone, you just avoid him — you don't hang around long enough to fall in love. In fact, unless they're family members or co-workers, you might even avoid such annoying people entirely.

Realistic characters will do the same thing — walk away unless they're forced to stay. What requires the hero and heroine to stay in the same space long enough to realize that, despite their differences, they're perfect for each other?

In a romance novel, the situation that makes it impossible for the characters to avoid each other is called
the force
.

Sometimes the force is built in to the short-term problem — maybe your heroine's life is in danger, and the hero is assigned to protect her. But in other cases, you have to look a little deeper. Does your couple need to cooperate in order to succeed? If they're both assigned to a project, perhaps their jobs depend on making it work. Do they desperately need each other's help? Maybe your heroine is in danger, and the hero is the only one who can protect her. Do circumstances force them into close contact? Perhaps they're stranded together by an accident.

For a romance to be successful, it has to have a force in the form of one of these three scenarios:

1. The hero and heroine must need each other so badly they can't just walk away.
   She needs his help as a doctor in order to have the baby she wants, and he needs a wife or he'll lose his job in the medical practice.
   

2. Either the hero or the heroine has a logical and valid reason for forcing the other into the situation.
   He thinks she's cheated a charity and challenges her to prove him wrong or he'll ruin her business.
   

3. Outside influences conspire to keep them in close proximity.
   He's inherited a piece of property and has to do something with it; she's under pressure to acquire the property by any means. Or, they're trapped together by an ice storm in an isolated cabin.
   

The strength of the force required to keep the characters together will depend on the intensity of the conflict. The more painful the circumstances are, the more eager a person will be to escape. So, if the conflict is very intense and very personal, the force will need to be correspondingly strong to make the character stay in that situation. If the conflict is less threatening, then less force is required.

How can you raise the stakes for your hero and heroine so they can't possibly walk away?

In this example from her short contemporary
The Italian's Price
, Diana Hamilton's hero makes it clear that her heroine has no option but to cooperate — or go to jail:

Hamilton chooses the second of the three possibilities for creating force — the hero in this case believes that the heroine is a thief and is forcing her to make good.