Battling Clichés & Tired, Old Tropes: Hate-at-First-Sight Love Stories

It’s an age-old writers’ question: What do I do about clichés and well-worn tropes? This month, we’ve asked authors about the clichés and tropes they find themselves falling back on, and how they fix, invert, or embrace them. Today, Susan Dennard, author of the Something Strange and Deadly series, asks you to keep three things in mind when writing this type of romance:

CLICHÉ: Hate-at-first-sight-then-fall-in-love romances

Confession: I’m a huge fan of the hate-at-first-sight-then-fall-in-love romances, so it always saddens me to hear people calling them a trope or a cliché. I mean, as the saying goes: “There are no new stories, only new ways of telling them.”

And therein lies the problem—the reason why I think hate-at-first-sight romances can so easily annoy rather than excite: we aren’t finding new ways of telling that tried-and-true story. We’re falling back on an old formula without actually studying what’s underneath.

In fact, I would even go so far as to say that we aren’t telling real hate-at-first-sight love stories at all. Let me explain.

For example, I might craft two characters who bicker for no apparent reason and eventually get together… for no apparent reason. On the surface, that’s a hate-at-first-sight love story, yet as far as a reader can tell, the entire conflict was false. Nothing was actually keeping the characters apart except their own need to argue.

Worse, there’s no tension in all that bickering, and if there’s no tension, then there’s no pressure forcing my character to grow and change. Remember: good romance is all about character growth. The romance pushes our protagonists to change (for better or for worse), and this in turn changes the trajectory of the plot. (I actually have an entire tutorial on that starting here.)

So how do we keep our hate-at-first-sight love stories from feeling empty?

Our lovers must have a good reason for hating each other.

In the first season of the TV show Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls is a bad person. Period. Veronica hates him because he’s self-destructive, cruel, and has gone out of his way to make Veronica’s life miserable. As far as the the viewers know, this guy has zero redeeming qualities. Thus, when Veronica and Logan are onscreen together, there’s no false conflict in sight. Veronica and Logan genuinely hate each other and with good reason.

Our lovers have strengths and flaws that force the other to grow.

When Logan and Veronica are forced to work together, we see that Logan might have a few good qualities underneath all that bad—qualities that Veronica can ultimately learn from and rely on. And of course, there are plenty of things Logan can learn from Veronica. As the series progresses, we see both characters changing for the better. By the time that first kiss comes around, we’re totally rooting for it.

We must actually feel that spark and romantic tension.

This applies to any romance you write (or any scene you write): if you aren’t “feeling it”, then don’t write it. Find a romance, cast of characters, or plot that does make you desperate to write. Otherwise, your readers are going to be as unmoved as you were while you drafted.

But you tell me: what do you think a good hate-at-first-sight love story needs?

Susan Dennard is a reader, writer, lover of animals, and eater of (now gluten-free) cookies. You can learn more about her crazy thoughts and crippling cookie-addiction on her blog, Twitter, or Pinterest. Her Something Strange and Deadly series is now available from HarperTeen, and the Truthwitch series will launch from Tor in fall 2015. She loves helping aspiring authors and published writers alike (any excuse to talk shop, really), and she has loads of resources available on her For Writers page.