A reader asked how we’d place the 12 Stages on Intimacy on a beat sheet for the best pacing. Can we mesh the 12 Stages with romance beats in a story?

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Romance Beats vs. 12 Stages of Intimacy

In our story, something makes our protagonist change and progress in their internal journey. But what’s that something? What triggers them to grow?

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How Is Our Protagonist Challenged to Improve? (& a Worksheet!)

Whether we want to know for real-life purposes or for our writing, Bran’s post today helps us identify elements of healthy romances. Authors need to be careful of sending readers the wrong message. Everyone deserves to be in a healthy, loving relationship—including our characters.

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How to Develop and Show a Healthy Romance — Guest: Bran L. Ayres

One of my most popular posts is for my Romance Beat Sheet, but one of my readers asked if I could create a Scrivener template to go along with the Romance Beat Sheet. Yes! If you’re a romance author and use Scrivener for drafting your stories, today’s post is for you.

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Romance Writers: New Scrivener Template!

One way we develop our characters is by figuring out their false belief: What lie do they tell themselves? Now the fun thing is to think about how that idea applies in the real world. Just like our characters, we tend to hold false beliefs and lie to ourselves as well.

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What’s the Biggest Lie You Tell Yourself?

One of my commenters asked a great question last week that gets to the heart of the balancing game we have to play when writing romance. The characters have to be perfect enough for each other to make a believable couple, but there also has to be enough conflict between them to sustain a story.

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Balancing Conflict in Romance Stories

I’m a big fan of Michael Hauge’s approach to characters. His insights helped me figure out how to match a character’s internal journey to the external plot. This is often tricky, though, so let’s go deeper into how characters change.

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How Can We Show a Character’s Internal Journey?