This question is crucial because the core challenge in writing romantic suspense is maintaining a gripping, suspenseful narrative while simultaneously developing a believable and engaging romantic storyline. My Readers and Aspiring writers are often curious about how I manage this balance, ensuring that both elements coexist and enhance each other rather than feeling like separate parts.
How do you balance the development of the romantic relationship with the suspenseful plot in your stories without compromising one for the other?
In a romantic relationship, I’m always focused on two people who shouldn’t be together but need to be together. There is a deep, soulful connection between them that they don’t realize until they open their heart to each other.
The plot is a separate story but intricate in these two, making themselves vulnerable to the other to see that their love story must come together for the plot to work.
I keep it separate until the SHTF moment, where everything is realized and comes to the surface; sometimes, in a life or death situation or let’s blow it all up in the bedroom, it will depend on how I feel. At this point, I’m weaving the plot and romance so tightly that one cannot move without the other.
In my first book, Dreams of Reality, the SHTF was in the bedroom, while in my second release, Stone’s Revenge, we did the courtroom scene.
By book forty, Wicked Chances, I think it was a living room with all the cast in one place. Somewhere in the fifty-ish book Her Substitute Husband; His Boss, I think we were on the edge of Detroit about to be thrown in a river.
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After sixty stories, I don’t think there is a template to my writing, and each story comes with a different punch.
I’m a born and bred discovery writer, and I love that part of me because it’s constantly keeping me on my toes, which I hope it also does to the reader.
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