Tuesday 13 December 2016

Romancing the Beat by Gwen Hayes.

Rating   ¶¶¶¶ê


As a writer I love books on writing, especially books on plotting. One of my favourites is Save the Cat by Blake Snyder. Yet as useful as I have found this book I always felt it came up short when applied to writing romance.

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I understand the writing convention of romances; the getting to know you, the falling in love, etc. but these conventions don't fully match up to the Blake Snyder's beat sheet.

Then I read Romancing the Beats by Gwen Hayes. It's short and concise, which I like as it doesn't eat into too much of my writing time. The writing style is friendly and Gwen likes to emphasise her points with pop culture quotes and song titles.



She breaks the romantic beats down into the four sections of the three act structure (the second act being split in two) and each of these four sections have five beats which forms the structure of the romance between the hero and heroine.

Now I like to use Blake Snyder's beat sheet to help me outline and roughly plot out my books. Blake Snyder's beat sheet has 15 beats. Romancing the beat has 20. So you can see this fills in the gaps where the previous method came up short, especially in the romance stakes.

But equally this doesn't mean you end up with 35 beats as some of the romance beats fit into Blake Snyder's beats quite naturally. For example:- Blake Snyder's 'setup' beat would include Gwen Hayes 'introduce hero 1' beat, and Blake's 'inciting incident' beat could include Gwen's 'meet cute' romance beat.

As there are 20 romance beats against the 15 Save the Cat structural beats you will automatically have scenes dedicated to the blossoming romance which will now follow a logical progression.

Both these books also have a beat called 'Dark Night of the Soul' but as Gwen says you may end up with two of these beats, one involving the external plot and the other being the character's reaction to it.

So for my last book I used the Blake Snyder beat sheet as my starting point and then incorporated Gwen's romance beats. This meant that wherever I was in the external plot I could see which romance beat I needed to ensure my characters experienced next to make the romance have its own natural arc.

I also keep a list of the beats on a post-it note on the wall of my writing room so if I get lost or feel the romance is not taking the right course, I just look up and can instantly see what beat needs to come next.

My favourite part is her recommendation of using the romance beats as a checklist, either before, during or after you have written the book.

Plus I found that by using the conjoined method of Blake's structural beats and Gwen's romance beats I ended up with a two-page structural outline which I can then use to form the basis of my synopsis. Making this book immensely useful at all stages of the writing process.

I've given it four stars as whilst it is short and to the point I found some of the explanations for the beats to be too vague. But it definitely gets five stars for versatility.




     



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