I hope everybody had a nice Easter holiday! I’m ecstatic because I’m off from my day job this entire week, and I’ll be at home, working on a manuscript to submit to an agent. This manuscript is a women’s fiction project with strong romantic elements.
I’m also a judge in ACFW’s (American Christian Fiction Writers) Genesis contest for unpublished writers. As I read through the submissions, I notice the authors are making the same mistakes in each entry, so I thought I’d discuss some things that new writers need to be aware of when submitting to the romance genre.
One of the issues I had with the submissions was that I’m reading the first few chapters of the manuscript, and the hero and heroine have not yet met. In a romance, you’ll need to have the man and woman to meet within the first few PAGES of the manuscript, if you don’t, it’s not a romance. I realize there are books out there advertised as romance where this does NOT happen, however, those are the exceptions to this rule.
Another issue I see is, which is related to the first issue, is that the author will spend the first few chapters focusing on internal thoughts or backstory for the main characters. Usually, the reader is not interested in seeing backstory or internal thoughts for the first twenty pages of a book! They want to see something to happen between the hero and heroine (if it’s a romance). Have them to meet in an exciting way, or in a major conflicting way! Does he appear at her office, trying to steal her job, her major sense of security! You need make something exciting to happen within that first page, that’ll hook the reader as well as the editor!
If your manuscript is not a romance, you don’t have to have the love interests to meet early in the story, but you still need to make those initial scenes exciting, and not bogged down with backstory and internal thoughts. You’ll need to make something exciting to happen that will capture your reader’s interest and hold it throughout the manuscript! All backstory is not bad, though. You’ll want the reader to know some things about your character’s background, however, this knowledge should be sprinkled throughout the manuscript in bits and pieces, not a huge informational dump at the beginning of the book! Believe me, with few exceptions, such dumps prove to be boring, making your reader want to fall asleep or put your book down.
If there is a major event that happens in the past that the reader needs to be aware of, then use a prologue, just be sure the prologue isn’t very long. The same rules apply to the prologue: make it exciting!
