Tips for Writing Romantic Suspense

Romantic suspense is a genre where bullets and butterflies collide. And making that blend feel seamless takes finesse. You must deftly juggle danger, attraction, and pacing throughout the novel. If you want to be that juggler, or if you’re asking: “How can I get published by Love Inspired Suspense?” you’re in the right place. Today’s post features my top tips for writing romantic suspense that blends heart-pounding danger with genuine emotional stakes.

These are the key insights I gained through the hard-won lessons that catapulted me from aspiring writer to an award-winning romantic suspense novelist with Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense imprint.

These are my best suggestions for tweaking your romantic suspense before you submit it for publication.

How to Start Your Romantic Suspense

1. Read lots of romantic suspense. It’s a great way to get an intuitive feel for how the stories are crafted. And if you take the time to dissect the stories that really grip you, you’ll gain plenty more insights.
2. Strive to write a novel that is both 100% romance and 100% suspense. Romantic suspense is not simply a romance with a suspense thread or vice versa. Readers want both a satisfying romantic story and a suspense plot that can’t be figured out easily. You absolutely don’t want it so obvious that your readers get annoyed with your characters when they don’t see it.
3. My Love Inspired Suspense editors want the danger to be evident from the start. Ideally, the danger starts from the first line, or paragraph, definitely before the end of the first page.
4. Introduce both your hero and heroine early. For Love Inspired Suspense titles, both characters should be introduced in the first chapter. For trade back titles, the introductions can span two chapters, with their paths crossing by the third.

I personally prefer to see both the hero and heroine introduced, and if possible, meet, in the first chapter.

Sandra Orchard

Tips for Crafting the Suspense Plot

3. No matter how you pace your hero and heroine introductions, jumping right into the suspense is key. Too much time spent on set-up and/or romance, will lose your suspense readers.
4. Although not essential, I also like to keep the bad guy a mystery to both my reader and my hero and heroine. That means, I rarely include scenes in the villain’s pov (point of view) unless they are anonymous or ambiguous and invite more questions than they answer. To me, keeping the villain a mystery adds more interest and tension to the plot. Since the reader only see things unfold from the hero and heroine’s viewpoint, she’ll share their emotional reactions to what’s happening on the page. Moreover, it keeps the romantic tension centre stage, which is good because…
5. Editors want to see the hero and heroine together on the page. Or at least grappling with a crisis one has brought into the other’s life–whether emotional or physical.
6. The heroine should ideally be in jeopardy throughout the novel. And both the hero and heroine need to have a stake in the outcome. Let me repeat that another way.
7. The suspense plot shouldn’t be something the hero and heroine simply stumble into, which thereby puts them in danger, until they find a way out. It shouldn’t be a situation with which they have no personal connection other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Not that writing such a plot can’t make an engrossing story.

Readers, agents and editors who awarded the Daphne DuMaurier Award to one of my early manuscripts, clearly thought it was a compelling read. But publishers turned it down precisely because the hero and heroine had no personal stake in the outcome of the jeopardy they happened into…well, no personal stake aside from getting out alive.  😃

There was tons of romance. There was lots of suspense of the “oh, no, what’s going to happen next?” variety. And the two were tightly intertwined. But aside from survival, the outcome of the suspense plot had no personal consequences to either of them.

Do you understand the difference? Once I did, I updated that story and Annie’s Attic published it as Dangerous Prospects.)

Tips on Crafting Your Ending

10. Another important thing to keep in mind as you devise your suspense plot is to play fair with your reader. You can’t pull a convenient explanation or twist out of the blue; you have to set it up first.
11. Details are the key to setting up suspense and having fun with the reader. As a writer you leave all kinds of toys on the floor in a scene, use them. But remember that you can’t slow down for many home and apple pie romance scenes or deep spiritual introspection or discussions in the middle of a fast-paced suspense. They’re fine in a straight romance. But need to be utilized sparingly in romantic suspense.
12. A mantra I write by to keep my suspense stories moving at a fast clip is: Start late, leave early. In other words, enter the scene in the middle of the action, and then leave the scene while the tension is still high.
13. Lastly, don’t wrap up your suspense plot too early and leave the reader with only the romance to support the end of the book. Or vice versa. Both plots should be intertwined to the end like a fine cord. And for inspirational fiction, in particular, think of it as a three-stranded cord, because inspy readers want to see a satisfying spiritual growth or realization in the characters, too.
    

Basically, being forced together via the suspense plot, forges positive change in the hero’s and heroine’s characters. And this is the growth that must take place before they can have their happy ending.

Read that last paragraph again.

It is the bare bones blueprint of how to craft a romantic suspense plot.

Your Turn: I hope my suggestions have given you a better grasp of areas of your story that might need some attention. Feel free to ask questions. I’ll be happy to try to answer them.

If you want to hone your writing skills further, be sure to check out my Extras for Writers, and other blog posts on writing craft. If you aspire to write for Love Inspired Suspense, reviewing the deleted scenes and editor’s comments in my Bonus Features could also prove helpful.