What’s Your Problem? A Guide to Creating Believable Conflict in Romance
When I was a romance acquisitions editor, I learned that one of the biggest problems writers struggle with is creating a believable conflict, or series of conflicts, that will sustain the novel its entire length. Conflict is the core of any work of fiction – it’s what makes your readers keep turning pages.
The Purpose of Conflict
Conflict drives the plot of any book. The main character wants something, and someone or something thwarts them. In romance, everyone already knows how the book is going to end (happily ever after), so there is no tension over the outcome; the tension (and the page-turning) must come from some other source.
At least some part of the conflict must be between the hero and the heroine. No romance reader wants to read about how the plucky heroine met the strong, sexy hero and they realized they were right for each other and everything was awesome once they got rid of those pesky cattle rustlers. That might be a great suspense novel, but it is not a romance.
A romance must have something (a conflict!) that keeps the hero and the heroine apart. And what keeps the reader turning the pages is wondering how on earth the author is going to get them to overcome that obstacle and reach the HEA.
As a developmental editor, you will often have to help an author figure out how to create believable conflict in a romance. This blog post is mean to help you see how.
Identifying Conflict Problems in a Romance
These 5 questions will help you understand where the conflict is going wrong in a romance manuscript you’re editing.
1. What do the main characters want – what are their internal and external goals? If the author doesn’t make this clear, readers won’t care about it.
I recently read a beautifully written manuscript about a man, let’s call him Joe, who travels to an exotic country and finds out that his former lover, whom he believed dead, is actually alive. And then he sort of meanders around, wondering if he should try to find her, and things happen while he asks a few questions and thinks about it.
No, no, no. This is not a goal and it does not create believable conflict. Joe has to care about achieving a goal. He has to care a lot. That is what makes readers care. And in caring, he will set out to find his lost love, and petty bureaucrats/armed bandits/the jungle will try to thwart him.
However, we need more than Joe-against-the-odds to make a romance. Enter Josephine.
Josephine has to want something, too. Something that will bring her into contact – and into conflict – with Joe. What could that be? Perhaps Josephine doesn’t want the not-dead lover to be found – maybe it’s her sister, and she’s afraid the people who tried to kill her in the first place will succeed if they find out where she is. So she sets out to stop Joe. Their separate goals bring them directly into conflict with each other.
2. What’s at risk if the main characters don’t reach their goals, whether internal or external? It has to matter.
If the author can make the consequence big, like one of MCs will lose their job or their freedom if the goal isn’t reached, readers are more likely to keep turning pages. A character racing to win a twenty-dollar bet doesn’t have much in jeopardy, and failure isn’t devastating.
However, you can help the author see how to tie a smaller external goal into a bigger internal goal – the twenty-dollar bet may just be the external manifestation of something hugely important to the character – for example, proving that she is not a failure. Suppose LouAnn’s awful father says, “I bet you twenty bucks you can’t get a job by the end of summer” and she takes that bet. It’s not the twenty bucks that’s actually at risk.
Because a romance has two main characters trying to reach their goals, their competing goals must be of similar importance. If Anna is trying to reach Nome to get medicine that will save her dying mother’s life, and Joe is trying to reach Nome to have a beer, and they come to blows over who gets the last seat on the dog sled, the author does not have a believable conflict. If Joe doesn’t reach his goal, oh well. Who really cares?
3. Are readers likely to sympathize with the goal? It has to be important and meaningful – saving the ranch, winning the election, bringing the bad guys to justice.
Suppose you encounter a story where the Greek shipping magnate spearheads a hostile takeover of the financially imperiled business that the spunky heroine is trying to save. And we are expected to believe that once the shipping magnate does her out of a job and destroys her dreams she will fall in love with him and have his children. Uh huh.
Now, her goal – saving the business – is important and meaningful and we can sympathize with it – but what about his goal? He has to have a sympathetic goal – a reason for wanting to take over the heroine’s company that readers will understand. One way to accomplish this is for the author to give him a misguided external goal based on an internal goal – for example, suppose all he wants is to make his father proud of him, and so he follows in his father’s footsteps by launching hostile takeovers of vulnerable companies. Readers can sympathize with his internal goal while disliking his external goal. And then the conflict can be resolved when he realizes that his father was proud of him all along, or that his father will never be proud of him but that’s okay, or whatever will serve to help him meet his internal goal.
If the conflict comes from one main character being domineering or mistreating the other, that is plain unsympathetic. Readers won’t be interested in reading the book.
4. Do the main characters act realistically about their goals and their conflict? Do they respond and react in ways that readers will understand? If the main characters, Sam and Axel, meet on page one, and Sam is promising his undying love on page two, and trying to prove it by stalking Axel as he goes about town on page 3, Sam is not going to come across as a roguish charmer readers will root for but as a scary sociopath who needs intense psychotherapy.
When the main characters’ goals are too small, trivial, or contrived, authors often end up making the characters act in unbelievable or unsympathetic ways. We’ve all read some form of conflict along the lines of “I don’t date blue-eyed men and you’re a blue-eyed man.” If the conflict relies on a misunderstood email, or some malicious third party interfering with the couple’s road to happiness, or could be cleared up if the heroine would just ask one nine-word question, it isn’t believable.
Believable conflicts are real problems, serious ones, that the couple must solve before they can unite.
5. How do the main characters’ goals bring them into conflict? If Mickey wants to win the calf-roping competition, and the Lorraine wants to win the barrel-racing competition, and they support each other in their goals, then that is all very nice but it’s a disaster for a romance.
Sometimes writers think they can create conflict by adding in scheming ex-wives, malicious former in-laws, an outlaw biker gang, and a bounty hunter. And the Mafia. And a secret religious organization. Did I mention the bounty hunter? They believe that having all these third parties throwing obstacles in the way of the main characters creates conflict. These obstacles can indeed create problems, but they don’t create romance conflict.
A romance is not a series of “and then this thing happened and then another thing happened.” A romance has motivations, consequences, and plot developments that arise naturally from the characters’ central goals and the conflict(s) these goals create. In other words, “because this thing happened, this other thing happened.”
Because Greta wants to open her shop in the old general store she comes into conflict with Hank, who wants to open his store there. Landlords, nutty city council members, and meddling mothers can all play a role in the story, but they cannot create page-turning tension in and of themselves. The central conflict must do the work.
Winding Things Up: Play Fair
It isn’t enough for an author to set up a believable conflict in their story; they also have to resolve it. A conflict, however believable, is not successful if it does not end in a way that satisfies the reader. In the case of romance, this is happily ever after (or at least happily for now).
That does not mean the resolution should be predictable. The resolution should not rely on divine intervention, the wise third party who sets everyone straight, or the clock striking midnight. The conflict must be resolved by a change that occurs in each character that sets them on the path of mutual love and cooperation.
Think of it like focusing a camera; the characters are muddled, and must reach clarity in order to reach their happily ever after. For example, Hank and Greta can realize that their goals are not mutually exclusive – that they can join forces, and reach their goals together.
By making sure the two main characters have a believable conflict, you’ll help the author create a story that will keep readers turning the pages to the end.
