Stop building characters, start building their psychology

A Romance novel is only as good as its characters. Full stop. 

So why are so many popular romances these days falling short in the character department? 

The answer is simple: authors aren't doing the work to create the keys to unlock their characters psychological life. 

Without these 4 keys, romance falls flat and becomes tropey goop rather than transformative emotional fiction. 

Bring your messy characters to life with motivations rooted within them. 

Textbook for this lesson - https://amzn.to/4eSzE0a

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Transcript

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Five, six, seven, eight. Contrary to popular belief, romance is not a plot-driven genre. There is this distinction within the publishing industry that literary fiction is character-driven. It's character studies, deep like uh meditations on character psychology, while commercial fiction, which romance falls under, is more plot-driven. And while it might be true that there are plot constraints that actually make something a romance, a romance is only as strong as its characters. Too often I pick up a romance and I find myself wondering why I should care about these characters, other than the fact that they're falling in love. It's not enough just for two characters to show up in a story and want to fall in love. They need that deep character psychology to prove to the reader why this HEA and why this person means so much to them in the end and why their life is fundamentally changed, not just because of falling in love, but because they have faced their character psychology, waded through a lot of the muck and the mire, and gone for what they wanted at the end of the day. Welcome to the romance room. I'm Marjorie Muller. This is your place for everything romance, craft, and culture. You are always welcome here. There's a seat for you. Let's get started. So today I'm going to take you through the four keys of creating great characters. These four keys you might have heard before, but we're going to take it up a level and talk about what it means to really go there, raising the stakes and creating a deep character psychology that will elevate your romance to the level of being that character-driven, deep character study that belongs in the literary fiction category. Yes, I believe a lot of romance is actually literary fiction, sue me. I'm going to be using Kate Claiborne's The Paris Matches Our Example text today, fantastic book that just came out, and we are going to be using the female main character, Layla Bailey, to really go through all these four keys and elements of creating a great character and how Kate Claiborne really just went for it when it comes to character psychology. And at the end, I'm going to wrap up talking about the challenges of dual POV, the most popular POV in romance today, why it often falls flat, and how you have to take special care to make sure your characters come alive when you're splitting the perspectives. Are you ready? Let's romance. There are four key elements to creating great characters. Your romance is only going to be as good as its characters, so don't skimp on the keys. You need all four keys to unlock the door, okay? And let's talk about this first key. Your character needs to have a desire, otherwise known as a want. Your character needs to want something. Something they want more than anything. Unattached to the romance or the love interest. It is rarely very interesting to walk into a romance where a character's biggest desire is to fall in love. It can work, but I would honestly very much steer away from it unless it is integral to the premise and you are really willing to go there in a more complicated way, then I just really want to be in love. But having a desire is not quite enough. No, no, no, no, no. We need to modulate this. Bring out the adjectives. Your character needs an overwhelming desire. Something they want more than anything that they would go to extreme lengths to get. That means often sacrificing pieces of themselves that they shouldn't sacrifice. It means going for exactly what they want because it will be life-changing. Oftentimes, this desire that they start the story with might not actually align with who they are. It might be what they think they should desire. But through the story, through the action of falling in love and finding how love illuminates different parts of themselves, how another person brings out different parts of themselves, makes them vulnerable, peels back the layers, they might find that their desire is actually something else. But it still needs to be that deep, overwhelming desire. The second thing your character needs in order to push back against this desire is a fear. What does your character fear more than anything? This should directly push back against the desire and keep them from getting that desire. Oh, but fear is definitely not strong enough when the desire is overwhelming. So bring out the adjectives. A crushing fear. This crushing fear is at odds with this overwhelming desire, so crushing that it keeps them from going for the desire in a full way. This fear is not always a direct response to the desire, but it often is rooted in a deep place that will prevent the character from getting that desire. Now let's talk about our character study, Layla Bailey. Pull out your example text if you have it. Layla Bailey is a doctor. She is put together. She has everything that she wants, except she now has to attend the wedding of her ex-sister-in-law. That's right, her ex-husband's sister, who is like her own sister. And she wants to belong more than anything. She wants to belong to this family she no longer is a part of more than anything. You find out more about that later, and we'll get to that. But the way that she does this is by being a helper. Look to the helpers, it's Layla Bailey. She is supporting her ex-sister-in-law to the nth degree, sometimes sacrificing herself in the process. She says over and over again that the breakup was amicable, etc., because her desire more than anything is to belong to this family that was hers for so long. However, the crushing fear that pushes back against this desire is the fear that she will look out of place, that people can see right through her, that they will see that she doesn't have it all together, that she's not fine. The crushing fear of Layla Bailey is at odds with the overwhelming desire because, in an effort to belong, her fear is actually overwhelming her ability to belong. Everybody's tiptoeing around her, everybody isn't sure what to say. Everybody is like, oh my gosh, you're the outsider here, but you're also a member of the family. The bride wants you here, you're here to support the bride. She's like a little sister to you, like being the operative word there, because she isn't actually a member of the family. And this fear of being seen as othered is at direct odds with her desire to belong and to be that helper that people can look to and uplift and value. What's so wonderful about this desire and fear combination is that Kate Claiborne has designed something that's very subtle yet very relatable. While it isn't the desire that's going to impact her entire life like she wants a new career or she wants to drop everything and move to Paris or XYZ thing, it is a desire that is so deeply human. That desire to belong and that fear of not belonging, you know, feeling like you're outside the friend group on the playground that carries into adulthood, no matter what, even if it feels like it shouldn't. These two things are interplaying in such a gorgeous way that it really makes you relate to Layla, and it also really makes you see why a romance with somebody who sees her and is willing to hold her vulnerability and be a safe space for her is so valuable. And that's what makes the happily ever after so well earned. But a desire and a fear do not work alone, and a fear has to be born of something. The next key to creating great characters in romance is a misbelief. A misbelief is a truth that a character has adopted about themselves earlier in their life that isn't true or it isn't true any longer. But just misbelieving something about themselves really isn't strong enough, so bring in the adjectives. Your character needs a paralyzing misbelief. This paralyzing misbelief is so strong that it keeps them from overcoming the crushing fear. The paralyzing misbelief keeps them trapped in their fear. They cannot overcome it. You might also think of a misbelief as a coping mechanism that kept them safe at another point in their life and they no longer need. I mean, come on, almost everybody can point to something that is a habit of theirs that they don't like that if they really delve into it, they realize kept them safe at another point in their life. Now, before we talk about Layla Bailey's misbelief, I want to get to the fourth key of creating a great character because a misbelief is so firmly rooted in the past that it makes sense to talk about the fourth key, history. Every character has a history. This is sometimes called background damage, although I find that to be a little bit melodramatic. The history of a character shaped who they are, shapes who they are in this moment, shaped who they were in this moment when they received that misbelief that they thought was helping them or was something they thought they needed to believe about themselves. And this history is something that will inevitably come up as a character is having to mind their vulnerability to see if they are ready to take this next step to falling in love. Now, one of these things is not like the other. Yes. Adjective! This history is not just a fun little book that a character carries around with them. No, no, this history must be consequential. This consequential history adds up to a paralyzing misbelief. This paralyzing misbelief keeps a character trapped in their crushing fear, which keeps them from achieving the overwhelming desire or seeing what the true overwhelming desire of their heart is. Let's take it back to Layla Bailey. The reason I wanted to talk about history and the misbelief is because Layla's history is extremely important. Now we know that she is divorced from the brother of the bride, who she considers a little sister. That's deep history. So as the story is playing out, you're learning about their relationship, what it wasn't valuable to it, what was, and it takes a long time to find out the truths of it. You're kind of following the truth along with the main male character. But it's not just that. You learn deeper into the book, and I guess this is a little bit into spoiler territory, that Layla's mother died when she was only two years old in a car accident. Her father was very distant and very cold, and her father had a son from a previous marriage who was about 10 years older than Layla. So there is a distant but fond question mark relationship there. All of this adds up to a person who doesn't feel like they belong anywhere. That reminds you of something, doesn't it? That desire to belong, the fact that she had something that she belonged to, her ex-husband, Jamie's family, and now here she is at a wedding of her ex-sister-in-law, somebody she still considers a sister. She wants to be valuable to this family, to her sister's experience. And of course, all of that hinges on a history of not belonging. Now let's talk about her misbelief. This misbelief is often born of the history. Or in this case, you could call it a little bit of background damage. Layla's misbelief is that she's fine, that everything is fine, that the breakup was amicable, that she does belong here, that it's not too weird, right? Her misbelief is that if she can pretend she's fine, everybody will think she's fine. Feeling like she's fine, this paralyzing misbelief keeps her from engaging with the crushing fear that she doesn't actually belong. Because of this, she skips over this fear and keeps her eyes focused on this desire. But by not focusing on the fear, by not actually engaging with the fact that she fears she doesn't belong, she doesn't get to the heart of what that fear is and that misbelief that she's fine. If she decided she wasn't fine, if she realized she wasn't fine, maybe she would realize she doesn't really belong. And maybe she'd realize her desire isn't actually to belong, but to find a place of belonging that she makes for herself rather than other people make for her. Layla Bailey's character breakdown, these four keys to her character, are extremely nuanced. They're extremely human. At the end of the day, she wants to belong to a family she feels like she doesn't belong to. But if she can believe she's fine, she will be fine. And there's a reason why belonging matters so much to her, and why having that belonging and now losing it makes her double down on the fact that she needs to believe that she is fine having belonged. All of these things connect to one another. But if you are not sure how to conceptualize these things, there is an order of operations. Desire most often leads to fear, most often leads to misbelief and history. Or if you started with fear, fear has a counter of misbelief, which then is born of history, which then you can find the desire. If you start with the misbelief, which kudos to you, finding out where that misbelief comes from is going to be uber important, and then fear and desire can sort of be born from that. What is the most powerful choice to work against this misbelief in history? What is so beautiful about history is that it's like, oh blood, it's the universal donor. You can go anywhere from history. If, let's take Layla, you knew from the beginning she doesn't have a very strong home life. She was like her mother passed away, her father wasn't very present, she has a sibling that she isn't very close to. Oh, okay, well, she wants to belong. Or you could go from that and say, oh, she fears that she doesn't belong anywhere, or that nobody cares enough to have her belong. Or you can go to, okay, if that is the case, her misbelief could be she's fine not belonging. All this is to say the four keys to great characters all need to be present in a character because they all work together to create character psychology. And this is why I believe romance is a character-driven genre. You can tell when a character doesn't have all of this. You can tell when the author hasn't thought about this, you can tell when a character's only purpose in the story is to fall in love. And we're here to elevate romance, baby. The best romances do more than that. They're about finding oneself through the act of falling in love. Because if you can't love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love anybody else? I mean, RuPaul said it. Now this brings me to the point of dual POV. We love dual POV, we love to see it. Oh my gosh, we love insight into both characters, we love their backstory, and that's actually the problem is that we are seeing a story through two characters' eyes, which means you have two versions of this character psychology you need to not only break down but show the reader. Oftentimes, one character is a little bit less fleshed out than the other because that was the character that the author started with. I can attest to this as somebody who is currently going through the second draft of my rockstar romance and realizing that my female main character is really not as fleshed out as my main male character. I know what kind of feminist am I? The point is, dual POV isn't just a trend and it's not just something fun to do. You have to put the work in to create the characters who are going to uplift the reason why you need to tell the story from both sides. If one character is just there for your fun, it is very clear that there isn't a reason for them to be there. What journey are both characters going on? And while this is an extra challenge, it can also be something very fun for you as a writer because you know that each character has four keys. You have eight keys altogether. What if you made choices that meant that some of their keys, their desires, their fears, were playing upon one another's? For instance, in the Paris match, Griff, the male main character, believes he doesn't belong anywhere. And he's fine. He's fine with that. Meanwhile, Layla thinks she's fine because she believes at some level she belongs compared to him. That is a direct contrast that adds tension to the relationship and also shows why they might be able to give or add to one another's lives. And at the end of the day, deep character psychology isn't meant to be wholly separate from the romance. It is meant to elevate the romance, to show why the romance with this person at this moment makes sense with who this person is. If we want a happily ever after, a forever, then we have to see that these characters know themselves insofar as to be able to process through all of their inner sh to meet each other at a place that they can say, I want all your too. And that they actually make each other's better. I mean, how is that not love? How is that not the pinnacle of romance? So write great characters in your romances. Please do not let them be at the behest of the romance. That is just not what storytelling in the romance genre is really about. Let it be character driven. Don't let the publishing industry tell you what commercial fiction is versus literary fiction. Just go for it. Let's stay connected. You can find me at Ides of Marge on TikTok and Instagram. You can find the romance room at margerymuller.substack.com. And if you want to work with me and flesh out your characters once and for all, you can reach me at margerymuller.com. Thanks so much for visiting the romance room. You always have a seat here. Can't wait to see you next. Take care.