Writing Romance for Non-Romance Readers

When writing a love story for the masses, you need to get intimate with your story’s central question.

There are readers who profess to hate romance but adore Jane Austen’s novels. They groan at a Harlequin Love Inspired story but gush over another book in which people fall in love. What’s with that? Is it bias against the romance genre? Does it come down to literary vs. commercial writing? Explicit vs. non-explicit content?

No.

It’s something much more subtle but entirely fundamental: if the central question of the novel is “will they get together?”, only romance fans will enjoy it.

Now, let me be clear: there’s nothing wrong with being a romance fan. People like the tropes they like, and that’s how genres get born. I’m personally a sucker for the not-so-healthy fantasy “whomp” trope in which a character (focused on protecting others) does not disclose a serious injury until they collapse. But I recognize that there are plenty of genres in which that convention would be frustrating for readers. Likewise, a “will they, won’t they” romance plot driven by miscommunication and reactive emotions will have many non-romance readers throwing their hands in the air and the book against a wall.

So what do you do if you are writing outside of the romance genre but you do want to include a central romantic plot? You craft a central story question that will catch the interest of a wider audience.

Let’s look at some examples:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Can Lizzie and her sisters achieve the lives they each want and security for the whole family?

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: Will Jane’s search for independent selfhood end in happiness?

The Shadow & Bone trilogy by Leigh Bardugo: Can Alina ever achieve the quiet life she has always wanted, free from war?

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna: Can Mika find the courage to take a chance at belonging?

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir: Will Gideon escape the hated life that’s been forced on her?

Of course, these characters’ romantic interests are tangled up in the answers to those story questions, but the questions themselves are concerned with personal happiness, security, courage, and comfort—things that everyone can relate to.

If you’re writing a romance-containing novel, ask yourself what the central question of your story is. Then ask yourself how your romantic interest relates to it. If they are completely separate from it, your readers might feel like the romantic subplot has been shoehorned in and isn’t necessary to the novel. If, on the other hand, the question revolves around them completely, that may not be satisfying for all readers in your genre. Find a happy medium and you’ll have some happy readers!

Here’s a second disclaimer: some romance novels do have a central question that is not “will they get together?” When I dip into the genre, those are the ones I enjoy, like the delightfully ridiculous Behooved by M. Stevenson, which revolves around the question of whether Bianca can save the kingdom while navigating a chronic illness and a new royal husband who has been turned into a horse. What makes that book a romance novel, then, and not a fantasy with romantic elements? To be honest, the borders between genres are getting blurred these days, but I would say that the difference is the liberal use of other romance-novel tropes (“There was only one bed!”) and a focus on the characters’ deepening relationship that is equal to or greater than the focus on other plot events.