Story Beats in Your Queer Romance: When “Romancing the Beat” Isn’t Enough
Despite being the top-selling genre, romance novels continue to catch a bad name. The word “formulaic” is bandied about as though every story ever written doesn’t follow a formula of one kind or another. Within romance, categories abound, especially in the queer romance arena. And whether authors realize it or not, readers look for certain queer romance story beats with every new book they buy or borrow.
Gwen Hayes’ “Romancing the Beat” structural framework works as a great starting point for new queer romance authors. It’s a framework that lets you get your feet wet in the queer romance writing world in terms of organizing your tale.
That being said, it’s true that, yes, we’re all working from the same puzzle box of expectations, tropes, and conventions. Readers know what they want in a book more than ever. With so many options available to them, it’s hard to believe you bring anything to the literary table they haven’t already seen or heard. Still, your unique lived experiences, skills, and interests make your stories worth telling. Shruthi Nair says as much.
Representing diverse experiences, backgrounds, and identities in romance stories enriches the genre and allows more readers to see themselves reflected in the narratives.
Thus, the question newer authors ask most often centers on how to put a fresh spin on the tale as old as time. Today’s blog covers using different story beats at different points to create your own unique tale, at both the narrative and character arc levels. Finally, I follow that up with when to consider adding tension in a seamless and natural way, whether before, during, or after those beats.
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Queer Romance Story Beats: Narrative Arc
The narrative arc, or how your plot develops, is how readers experience the progress of your protagonists’ relationship. In romance, the external conflict serves more as a subplot. Despite that, the antagonistic force that pushes against the relationship must be powerful and realistic. Readers have to see it as a viable threat to the protagonists’ relationship.
The particular beats you use depend a lot on your story’s target word count. Your readers plop directly into the inciting incident through an in media res beginning. Another option is to introduce one or both of your characters in their normal life prior to the inciting incident.
Research comp titles before you start to draft. Stories written within the category your story will be listed in give you the base understanding of what readers expect, what beats get used most often, whether in a 55,000-word novella or 100,000-plus-word novel.
The target word count directly correlates to your pacing. The slow-burn story beats, for example, work best when you want readers to relish in the building of the relationship. Consider the following scenarios if you’re struggling with particular slow-burn narrative beats to use.
- Character flaws, traits, or mindsets keep your characters from falling in love. Emotional or physical wounds, whether small-t or big-T trauma, hold them back from confronting an external conflict.
- Your characters outright refuse to acknowledge those wounds. This results in an external failure that sets the relationship back.
- In time, offer them an opportunity to change. Put the characters in a mirrored situation where they opt to acknowledge and move past that wound. This brings their relationship to a higher level. The characters move closer to each other, and firm up their relationship’s foundation.
Queer Romance Story Beats: Character Arc
Rayne Hall says,
Relationships—at least the kind of relationship worthy of commitment—take weeks, months, or years to develop, as the partners get to know and trust each other and work out compromises. Falling in love may happen fast, but building a relationship takes time.
Character arc story beats are all about establishing chemistry between protagonists. In Shakespeare’s words, the catalysts sometimes “in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss consume.”
To put it another way, the previously mentioned emotional wounds are too powerful and too painful to confront in the beginning. Characters would rather self-sabotage than do the work to heal themselves. It takes feeling such positivity toward the other protagonist that they pass through denial into acceptance.
Character arcs should mostly follow the same ebb and flow as the narrative arc. Know when you’re going to deny your character what they want in their relationship. This comes from understanding their inner conflict to a point that it’s second nature to you as the author. You know what led to the protagonist being in this emotional confrontation.
Their layered backstories, the original causes of their inner conflicts, may never completely make it onto the page. In fact, avoid the infodump as much as possible. Instead, readers should see the effects of that backstory in the decisions your characters make at specific points, through specific story beats.
Add Tension and Mix Well
I’ve mentioned before that humor can be both a way to ease tension within or to make things worse for your protagonists’ relationship. Those moments of tension are prime times for the ebb and flow of your queer romance story.
- What’s not being said? Dialogue choices include internal and external monologues. Double entendres that a character misses but that are obvious to the reader are a good option to experiment with.
- What’s not being done? Body language says a lot about a character’s mindset. It says more about their approach to conflicts that threaten their relationship.
Queer romance story beats allow characters to acknowledge their physical attraction, yes. More importantly, though, they provide a chance to emotionally accept that they want to spend the (foreseeable) future with each other.
Subtextual story beats play one of the biggest roles in queer romance. Subtle actions, gestures, and cues add depth and breadth to your characters’ relationship specifically and to the narrative as a whole. Those unspoken feelings draw your readers in and make them want to shake sense into both protagonists. Book coach Stuart Wakefield teaches that
Romantic tension is about the future. It’s about getting it right this time. It’s the ‘do-I-want-you-in-my-future-forever?’ For the reader, it’s will they or won’t they get into a relationship. [. . .] There’s tension in your characters not knowing whether things will work out.
People in love deny that they’re in love for as long as they can, especially in those faster-paced stories. Even without planning it from the beginning, as your writing craft and storytelling abilities mature, you find the tension-filled peaks and relief-laden valleys of your story more naturally as the story develops. You identify story beats that have the most emotional impact on your characters and readers alike.
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To Sum It All Up
It may not seem like it, but I love the Romancing the Beat structural framework. I frequently reference the book when I’m stuck on a scene in terms of where it might fit in my WIP. Simultaneously, my story is mine to create as my characters determine what is best for them. Your choice of frameworks is just that. Keep in mind that your readers expect story beats at certain moments in the story, but all of those beats still center around a few primary storytelling principles.
You need well-rounded, realistic, and personable protagonists with unique personalities that draw readers in. Your protagonists must have palpable chemistry, physically and emotionally. Readers need to want to see them end up together because their draw to each other is so powerful.
The conflicts, that antagonistic force I mentioned above, must test the relationship externally and the characters’ individual selves internally. Their journey to what Hayes calls “Whole-Hearted”? Readers enjoy story beats that allow them to empathize with and invest in the protagonists’ journeys.
Lastly, no matter the particular story beats you choose, or where you choose to place them? Give your readers the Happily Ever After or Happy For Now ending they opened your book to get to. The ending has to offer a realistic sense of closure. It shows your readers the power of love, the necessity of human connection, and the joy of finding one’s Person in the last person they expected.
Tug at your reader’s heartstrings on every page, before, during, and after those story beats. Your readers will thank you for it, right after they finish swooning over your characters’ ride into the sunset and wiping those hearts from their eyes.
Reflecting On Your Story One Word At A Time!
