Part #4 of our interview with author Amy T. Matthews! LUV: What is the best thing about being a romance writer? What is the most challenging thing about being a romance writer? Amy: There is nothing more fun than writing romance. If you want a hit of warmth on a cold day, if you want sunlit spangles in a drab winter, if you want to feel loved when you’re lonely – romance has your back. Life has a lot of hard, sharp angles to it, and there is grief and sadness, fear and failure, heartbreak and horrors; but there is also softness and comfort, friendship and fun, meaning and hope. And romance puts the hope and comfort, the better side of humanity, on the page. Smack bang center of the page. Romance is about being seen and valued for who you are – the belief that one human can look at another, with all their flaws, and accept them. Not just accept them but treasure them and commit to supporting them through life. And when people accuse romance of being unrealistic, my head explodes. Because I used to be a wedding coordinator in a past life and I worked more than 350 weddings, and, believe me, love and romance are real. People fall in love every single day, and when they fall in love, the lyrics of love songs really do make sense. So, I love all of that about romance. It’s about treasuring other people. And learning to be treasured ourselves. The most challenging thing about romance is also one of the best things about it: it’s character focused. In order to write a successful romance, you have to get the characters right. There’s no hiding behind plot. You have to create two complex, convincing people, with motivated and sympathetic emotional baggage, and they have to drive the story. They have to screw themselves over in believable ways – and then learn over the course of the story how not to screw themselves over. It’s one of the hardest things to do, to have a novel where the characters unflinchingly carry the plot. But although it’s hard, it’s also enormously fun to do.

Posted by LUV Team at 2023-05-25 14:00:00 UTC