Book Love: A Guide To Writing Romance

**NEW COURSE 2025**

Sunday Mornings 10am – 12 noon

5 session bi-weekly

Starting 9^th February End 23^rd March

£60 for 5 x 2 hour sessions

Love stories are the beating heart of literature – Cathy and Heathcliff, Dido and Aeneas, Romeo and Juliet, Lizzie and Darcy, Robin and Marion, Gavin and Stacey. On the surface, from the epic tragedy to the summer sizzler this genre seems so formulaic –  enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, ex-lovers to lovers – that they should be easy. But they’re really really not! Why? Because a romance isn’t about the lovers! It’s about the obstacles in the way of their love. Romance is citizen drama, and it pushes hard against the oppressive and prejudiced rules of the communities we belong to. Love, especially forbidden love, breaks the rules and brings about revolutionary change. In this course we will explore how to create the lovers and construct the personal and social obstacles that will divide them. We will write the lovers’ friends, family and confidantes who stand with or against them to uphold the rules of their world. We’ll build the worlds of the lovers, the places they run from, to and build anew. And we’ll discover just what it is that is so transgressive about love stories.

To do this we’ll pop our literary cherry with some chivalric romance, speed date Shakespeare, Austen and Brontës, cavort with Tolstoy, have a brief fling Truman Capote, flirt with the historical romancers like Diana Gabaldon, go steady with Jeanette Winterson, go full fantasy with Sarah J Maas and get crushes on Sally Rooney and David Nicholls.