There are certain details romance writers return to again and again without even realising it. Eyes, of course.Voices.The way someone laughs. But hands appear in romance fiction far more often than you’d expect. Once you start noticing it, you can’t stop. A character notices how someone holds a glass.How they drum their fingers on a…

I used to think chemistry meant big gestures. The kind of heat that shows up in italics or the scene everyone skips to. But the longer I write, the more I think chemistry lives in the quiet. Two people standing in a doorway, both pretending they’re fine. A while back I opened an old draft…

I cut a breakup scene last week that used to run three pages. I left one line, a squeezed hand, and the sound of a chair not pushed fully back. The scene started breathing. The relationship felt older, more private, more inevitable. That’s the thing about subtext. It lets the reader do half the work…

I used to rush them. Not the drafts, exactly — I could spend months on a sentence if it suited me — but the people inside them. The characters. I rushed them into confessions. Into bed. Into longing that hadn’t had time to ache properly. I mistook pacing for indulgence, and tension for delay. I…

There’s a file on my laptop called “Draft 7 Scene 4 Unusable Maybe” — and inside it, a single line of dialogue that still makes my chest tighten. Not because it’s good. Not because it’s clever or raw or award-worthy. But because it took me three weeks to write. Three weeks to land on a…

There’s a particular corner in Seville — just past where Calle Mateos Gago spills into the orange-tree square — where I once sat with a notebook, a paper cup of vermut, and the kind of stubborn heartbreak that wouldn’t quit politely. I wasn’t writing romance that day. I was writing a fight scene, actually —…

I used to think a romance novel ended when the couple kissed. Or admitted it. Or forgave each other over a clumsy apology in the rain. That was the win, right? Love, secured. Conflict, resolved. Fade to black. But then I grew up. Or maybe I just rewrote the same scene too many times and…

Writing romance isn’t about tossing two attractive people into a plot and waiting for sparks. If it were, every novel would end at chapter two with a shared sandwich and a mortgage application. No, romance needs a scaffold. A rhythm. A rising hum. Something that builds and cracks and bends but doesn’t break. I think…

There are three types of people in a foreign country: the confident ones who throw words around with wild abandon and hope for the best, the silent ones who nod a lot and pray not to be spoken to, and the ones who think they’re in category one until they ask a waiter for a…

There are two kinds of romantic tension: the kind you write, and the kind that sneaks up behind you while you’re trying to act normal and suddenly you’re ten seconds from kissing someone in a Lidl car park. My job? Capture both. Without sounding like I’ve been possessed by a 2014 Buzzfeed headline or the…

I have a confession: I judge books by their characters. Not their covers, not their plot twists, not even their settings (though an atmospheric backdrop never hurts). If a character feels flat, robotic, or worse—like they exist purely to deliver witty one-liners and nothing else—I’m out. Because here’s the thing: romance isn’t about grand gestures…