Writing A “Seasoned Romance” With My Writing Group
Getting Started
Background
After reading Stella Fosse’s book Write & Sell A Well-Seasoned Romance, I thought, What a great idea for our writing group.
There are seven of us in the group, so I ran the idea past them.
Yay, they liked it!
The Challenge
Four of our group have health issues and various on-going appointments, meaning they will miss the occasional fortnightly writing session.
The Solution
As with most volunteer programs, one or two individuals initiate and/or undertake most of the work. Thus, Michelle (who has previously written seven books), Tess (a radio host and master of ‘The Twist’), and I (contributing online research and technical support) met separately and concluded that the solution was for us to be the core writers while inviting others to contribute their input at the writing group's fortnightly meetings, whenever they were able to attend.
The three of us would meet every other fortnight to discuss ideas, which we would then write up and present to the group.
Our intention was to make it easy for everyone to participate and be inclusive, even if some could not always be there. Of course, we got it backwards. We should have made the decision with everyone first rather than between the three of us. We apologised!
Substack Newsletter
The Writing Group members gave me the okay to post our writing process on Substack.
Numerous newsletters on Substack advise how to write posts and books, so I thought it would be far more interesting to write a series documenting our writing process as ‘sixties and beyond’ authors. Actually, Tess is 90, I’m 83, and Michelle is 74!
Perfect Timing - Kind Of!
There are three reasons why it’s good timing for our little venture:
‘Seasoned Romance’ is now a popular sub-genre in publishing.
Older women are far more likely to read fiction than men.
Older women want to read about women in their age group.
After doing a keyword search, I discovered that while a ‘seasoned romance’ is big now, a ‘well-seasoned romance’ – well, not so much.
It turns out that a ‘seasoned romance’ usually involves women in their forties or even thirties (I know, right!). A ‘well-seasoned’ romance is about women and men in their fifties, sixties and beyond.
So we’ve decided to hedge our bets and have our main female character be 49 and our main male character be 51—on the cusp of being seasoned and well-seasoned!
Some Stats
Our potential readership:
In the United States, in 2023, 34.5% of women were aged 30-39 and 16.5% were aged 40-44, from a total of 169.03 million females.
Thousands of people in the United States turn 65 daily
Over half (53%) of Australians 65 and older are women.
Keywords
I used the Publisher Rocket software to perform the keyword search and confirm we were on the right track.
Here are a few of the keyword phrases I came up with:
Second-chance romance
Second-chance romance small town
Romance in older age
Age gap romance older man
Enemies to lovers romance
‘Age gap romance’ got the most online monthly searches in the USA (2,698), followed by searches for ‘second-chance romance’ (2,266).
In our second-chance romance, the action will be set in a small town, and our two main characters become enemies before ending up as lovers. That should cover all bases!
Our Categories
Something else we had to identify at the beginning. Our categories are as follows:
Late-In-Life Women’s Fiction
Women’s Fiction
Contemporary Women’s Fiction
Contemporary Romance
Our Guides
Even though our story only borders on a ‘well’ seasoned romance, we will still use Stella’s book to guide us through the process.
In addition, I have an article by Michael Hauge titled “The Five Key Turning Points Of All Successful Movie Scripts.” The five key plot turning points define six basic stages. The opening 10 percent of the screenplay must reveal the female character's everyday life, making her sympathetic, threatened, likeable, funny, and/or powerful. This is a great resource.
My Next Post
I’m currently weaving together the five key turning points of a film script with the three acts of a romance. In my next post, I will share our Act 1 outline and a YouTube video that covers Michael Hauge’s 5 Key Turning Points in detail. Why not aim from the start for our romance book to have the potential to be adapted into a film? 😂
I’ll also share the following:
Our Writing Group process. Our primary aim is to have this be a collaborative process and for everybody to be included, even if it has to be via email.
Our writing process. It’s vital that we be organised for this writing exercise, and I’ll share details of how we are doing this.
The four questions that must be answered before starting to write a Romance Story. These are absolute winners, and I’m so glad I found them through Reedsy. I will share details and links in the next post.
Our two main characters, A & B – names, roles, story locations.
This is going to be fun!
If you’d like to sample my first novel, you can read the initial three chapters and then choose whether to purchase the book! Book2Look
