On Romance Novel Beat Sheets

From Gwen Hayes and Jami Gold.

Hello friends!

I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I want to try writing a romance novel.

Have I ever read a romance novel? In fact I have not! Not unless you count Twilight when I was sixteen. I’m currently slogging my way through Fourth Wing, which I have been given to understand is really a romance novel in a fantasy skin, so maybe that counts? I’ve, uh, watched some Hallmark movies. I put a Bridgerton book on hold at the library?

All of this is to say, I am probably the wrong person to write romance! I have very little exposure to it. (The genre, not, you know, the real-life phenomenon.) But I don’t want to make the mistake of suggesting that just because I don’t historically like something, it’s bad. Tons of people like romance a lot. Even most non-romance stories have romance subplots. I have definitely read somewhere that romance is the top-bestselling fiction genre, although tbh I wasn’t able to find a reliable statistic to back that up. Still.

So, what is it in romance that people dig so much? What’s here that I can replicate and use? I am trying to find out.

News

• My short story “St. Thomas Aquinas Administers the Turing Test” will be published in Diabolical Plots in 2024.

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Romance Novel Beat Sheets

You might say that if I want to write a romance novel, I should start by reading a romance novel. I did not do that.

Instead, I started with beat sheets.

A beat sheet is like a bullet point structure of how a plot should unfold. I’ve written about them before, with the Save the Cat! Writes a Novel beat sheet. Obviously there’s room for flexibility in a beat sheet — I personally don’t like when things are too predictable, which might be part of my problem with romance, lol — but I do find beat sheets a comfortable and consistent starting point when I’m mapping or analyzing a story. And when I’m outlining something new, a beat sheet makes it easy to plug in the information I already have about a story and fill in the gaps until I have something complete. A beat sheet gives me a way to set up the tentpoles so that I can stretch out the tent, so to speak.

There are two holy grails of romance beat sheets: Gwen Hayes’s Romancing the Beat beat sheet, and Jami Gold’s Romance Beat Sheet.

Gwen Hayes’s “Romancing the Beat” Beat Sheet

Romancing the Beat is Gwen Hayes’s how-to-write-romance book, which I have not yet read (are you sensing a trend here?), but which I do plan to cover in a future newsletter. Subscribe if you want to hear about that: 👇👇👇

The beat sheet is the basic template of Hayes’s how-to-write-romance method.

Hayes’s beat sheet maps quite closely to Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Essentially, she takes romance plot points (e.g. a meet-cute, a breakup) and overlays them on top of the Save the Cat! beats (e.g. Setup, Dark Night of the Soul). (Go back and reread my Save the Cat! newsletter if you don’t know what I’m talking about!)

Save the Cat! is quite common, so if you’re already familiar with that framework, Hayes’s beat sheet is easy to parse and use.

You can find a free copy of Hayes’s beat sheet by subscribing to her newsletter. (She didn’t pay me to say that; it’s just the best way to get your hands on it.) And if you use the writing software Scrivener, which I do, Hayes also offers the beat sheet in a Scrivener template.

Jami Gold’s Romance Beat Sheet

Jami Gold’s beat sheet looks a little more specific to me, though — a little less Save the Cat!, which might be either a good thing or a bad thing for you. As Gold writes:

In a romance, we have the external (plot) arc, at least two internal (character) arcs for the two (or more) protagonists, and the Romance Arc—the growth of the relationship over the course of the story. That’s a lot of arcs and plot points to juggle on a standard beat sheet. By focusing strictly on the romance arc, and how the relationship develops between the characters, we can see our romance stories on a deeper level. 

Gold’s beat sheet still maps to a standard three-act structure, but I find I like it a little better than the Romancing the Beat structure so far. As someone who’s not familiar with romance, Gold’s beat sheet makes it easier for me to see what’s different and specific about romance as a genre — for example, the alignment between external relationship arcs, where the characters are acting out how they feel about each other, and internal relationship arcs, where they grapple with those feelings. And because it strips the other plot elements away from the romance, Gold’s beat sheet also seems easier to line up with the beats of other genres, making it easier to outline something like romantic fantasy or romantic sci-fi or romantic, I don’t know, horror.

Gold’s beat sheet can be downloaded in Excel or a Scrivener template (I guess all romance writers use Scrivener?), without subscribing to a newsletter.

A Question for You…

As we’ve established, this is new and fresh to me! What resources do you know of for writing romance? Or, even better — what romance novel recs do you have? Write me back or comment and let me know!