Vaid‘s Verdict: This writing guide has little nuggets of helpful advice for the aspiring romance writer but you have to dig through tedious excerpts and some outdated advice to get to it.

In its 3rd edition, Writing Romance is considered one of the best guides to starting your career as a romance novelist. The author, Vanessa Grant, uses excerpts from her 30 different romance novels to demonstrate successful writing in the field. The first thing to understand about romance novels is that they are inherently formulaic. Boy meets Girl. Boy wants Girl. Girl and Boy fight. Girl and Boy miss each other. Girl and Boy kiss/make out/make love in steamy scene. Girl and Boy live happily ever after. The End. Once you cross this mental hurdle, it gets a little easier to accept that the advice in this book is actually useful to aspiring writers of romance. But ONLY to writers of romance…if you used this flow chart approach to writing fiction, you’d be booted out of writing class.

Writing Romance really is the fool-proof guide to writing romance novels. Grant will tell you which publishers to research, how much money you can expect to make, what a literary agent does, why you can’t have an omnipotent storyteller, and the difference between showing a reader what’s going on and simply telling them. There are parts in this guide that are well thought out, insightful and will help you be better organized and understand the process of writing. The endearing aspect of Grant’s advice is that she seems to want to share everything she knows. She adds a CD to the book that includes writing templates, character sketches, a correctly formatted manuscript and a trial version of a software application called MuseNames. The application has over 40,000 names and their meanings and even adds the numerological reading for each name so you can couple your character’s traits with the right name.

From heroes with rambling effeminate speeches to the succinct grunts of a ‘real’ man, Grant shows how her writing has evolved and improved over the course of her career. The problem with this form of teaching is that most of the book is filled with excerpts from her novels and it becomes rather repetitive. So unless you’ve actually read The Moon Lady’s Lover or Dance of Seduction, you’re not going to care about the character’s motivation or why she named her heroine ‘Misty’ instead of ‘Dixie.’ The excerpts, when used solely to demonstrate differences in style, dialogue etc can be helpful but in Writing Romance, it’s more like a memoir of her life’s work than an instructive guide on writing romance novels.

What’s worse is that quite a few chapters are absolutely filler. There’s an entire section on why you should have your own computer, what a word processing application (like Microsoft Word) is and a sub-chapter entitled “Software and the Internet help gather information.” If this were the 1990’s, I’d understand. If this were a book being targetted to 50+ year old women in the 1990’s, I’d understand. But it’s the 21st Century people – even my 50 year old mother knows how to use Word and go on the big bad internet. It’s chapters like that that ruined the guide for me. If half of the excerpts and outdated advice were taken out, this guide would be 150 pages instead of 300…and it would have been a lot more successful in inspiring writers of every genre to try their hand at romance.

And why would you want to? Well, according to Grant, a first time novelist can make between $5k and $50k over the print life of the book, and established authors are able to reach $50k for a series romance title (like Mills and Boon/Harlequin). If you sell a single title romance (independent of the chains like Harlequin), you’re looking at a range between $5k – $10k for your first novel, and as you start to build a readership you can do much better. Some famous romance novelists have been known to make more than a million dollars on one book.

To get a taste of what to expect from Writing Romance, here’s an excerpt from the book:

Telling Versus Showing

Look at the following tell/show pairs and notice your response to the words. Which evokes the most graphic mental picture in your mind? Which invites more curiosity and questions into your mind? Which feels more exciting?

Tell: He kissed her softly. She trembled and felt breathless.

Show: The softest touch of hard, full lips against hers. She shivered and the touch returned, brushing, caressing, light, not demanding. She tried to breathe and she could not. She tried to step back, but he had her trapped with only those teasing lips. (from The Touch of Love)

Tell: Carrie was panic stricken when she woke up in bed with Charles.

Show: Carrie lay very still. Around her, silently, the night shattered. Panic spun through her darkness. Silence here, but in the dream…
Soft, slow breath against her shoulder. And sensations. An echo of the dream, that warm heaviness on her hip. Deep inside her own sleep drugged body she felt the slow shadow of heat from the place she had been. A man. Breathing. Holding her close. What had she done? (from After All This Time)

Tell: Julie felt sick at the depth of her jealousy of David’s dead wife.

Show: “If you touch me, take me, into that room, that bed, I’ll know it’s really her you want, that I’m only – you’re…wishing I were her…” She swallowed, hearing the echo of her own words. “I don’t believe I said that,” she whispered, “But it’s true. That’s how I feel.” (from When Love Returns)