Welcome to Writing Riveting Romantasy with Madeline Te Whiu

Hello all! Welcome to this course about all things romantasy; creating characters your readers will love and relationships they will swoon over, while making sure the rest of the plot can hold its own.

Writing a slow burn romance is one of my favourite parts of romantasy; the tension! The yearning! As a reader, I jump all along the scale; from closed-door YA romance, to super spicy (explicit) dark romantasy and everything in between. If it’s romantasy, my interest is piqued.

Balancing the romance and fantasy elements in a romantasy can be tricky, but once we get it right, oh, is it right.

But romance is only part of the story and, while it is a very important part, we need to be conscious of not leaving everything else behind in favour of our ‘ship’. I found myself struggling with this in the first draft of The Soul Thief (and trust me, it made for a lot of edits), but once I got the hang of that balancing act, the story really came together in the most amazing way.

Now all those hurdles have become lessons, and I have been able to apply them to all the books that came after (it makes for slightly fewer edits, but alas, I’ll never be one of those authors who can polish a book in 3 rounds of edits).

In this course, we’ll cover:

• Fantasy vs romantasy vs romance. What are the differences?
• Things to consider when deciding if you are writing a Young Adult, New Adult, or Adult romantasy (or maybe something else!).
• Writing fleshed-out ‘3D’ characters and using these details to create believable relationships with depth.
• Love languages! Your character will have one- what is it?
• Why worldbuilding is still an important aspect of your romantasy.
• How to balance the romance against the plot.
• Building tension/creating chemistry between your characters.
  

Over this course, you’ll come across some exercises within the lessons. I encourage you to give them a go, so you can put what you learn in these lessons into practice. 

I use a lot of terminology that you may not all be familiar with, so I have created a little shortcut for you below, just in case: