Notting Hill. 10 Things I Hate About You. No Strings Attached. The Proposal. Pick any romantic comedy made in the last 40 years and tell me what they all have in common: Two people who can’t be together fall in love, drama ensues, and they figure it all out in the end. That’s right, folks. From our favourite feel good romances to the cheesiest straight-to-TV movies, rom-coms all share one thing in common: one of the most well known story structures around.

While every genre brings with it reader (and viewer) expectations— fantasy nerds expect a little magic, sci-fi nuts expect some futuristic technology and possibly a few aliens— when it comes to rom-coms, the need for a believable romantic storyline centred around characters we actually care about has created a very clear repeating formula that you’ll find in nine out of every ten tales with rom-com in the title. And if you look hard enough at that tenth one, you’ll probably find it hiding somewhere under the surface, too.

The structure is simple. It’s basic, it’s easy, and it works. And when you’re trying to write a heartfelt romance that hooks your readers and has them crying out for your protagonists to “just goddamn kiss already”, it’s a brilliant place to start.

And it goes a little something like this:

---

When spelt out like this, this structure feels laughable in its simplicity. It sounds cliche because it is cliche. It’s the literal definition of a cliche. But the more you think about it, the more you dissect it, the more it works. It’s clean and simple. Rinse and repeat. And much like any formula, if you take out any of the steps, it starts to fall apart.

If your character’s goals align from the start, the story lacks the conflict it needs to drive the plot forward. If you remove the ‘What If’ moment that builds the romantic tension, the turning point intimacy feels forced, like it comes out of nowhere, and your characters are just falling in bed together because they can. If you take out the third-act crisis, the betrayal just after your characters have finally started to trust each other, the romance becomes too easy, like a fairytale. Your characters get what they want without having to work for it. And if you let your darlings fall in love from the Meet Cute, then the story becomes pointless, straight to the happily ever after. The end.

Without the ebb and flow of drama that this simple structure brings, the story loses its emotion, its heart, and, most importantly, its payoff, and you end up with characters that lie flat on the page and a love story no one’s invested in.

So now that we know the structure, let’s take it apart, have a look under the surface, and find out why it works, why it’s so well known, why it can struggle and why it can fail, and how we can use it to write the kind of stories we want to write.

---

Conflict at its heart

So before we delve into why this structure provides the perfect amount of push and pull to give our romantic storyline the crescendo we’re looking for, let’s take a look at why we need that conflict there in the first place. Why does romance without drama feel fake? And why do we find it so hard to read a love story where everything just goes right?

As we all know, conflict is the driving force of story. Without it, we just skip to the happily ever after before anything’s even happened. But when it comes to romance, when your story is centered around two people falling in love, if you have too many saccharine moments and heart-shaped eyes, too many rose-tinted glasses and declarations of eternal love, your story tips off the scales of acceptable disbelief and becomes make believe. In short, when everything goes right, it simply doesn’t feel real.

And we’re not talking magic and dragons not real. I mean real people and real lives don’t work that way. In reality, people have emotions, and emotions are messy. Feelings get hurt, wires get crossed, miscommunications happen. It doesn’t have to be big, relationship-ending stuff, but intentionally or unintentionally, that’s what real relationships are. Two people trying to figure each other out and sometimes failing.

Stories can (and arguably should) always have elements of extraordinary people doing extraordinary things, making decisions we wouldn’t, living lives we could only dream of, but those elements can only hook the reader and hold our attention if something about the characters rings true. We need to believe in their life and their world, or the story simply falls apart. And when the characters stop being real, we stop caring what happens to them.

---

No tension, no payoff

The reason this structure is so powerful at building the romantic tension we’re aiming for, is becasue it threads that much-needed conflict into the heart of the story, into who the characters are, from the very beginning, so when our characters finally fall into each other’s arms, it feels hard-won, it feels cathartic, and it gives the reader the payoff they’ve been waiting for.

Let’s take a look at a little example:

“Daniel is strolling along the sidewalk on the way to work and bumps into Alex. Their eyes lock. There’s an instant spark. He’s never felt this way before. They exchange numbers, and Alex asks Daniel out. They’re both single and free that night, so they go on a date. It’s perfect. The food is perfect, the music is perfect, and they walk home hand in hand and kiss on Daniel’s doorstep. It’s everything he’s ever dreamed of. They fall in love, spend every night together and have never been happier. They move in together after a few months and get married the next summer. Everyone cries. It’s beautiful. The end.”

Now. Who enjoyed that story? I can tell you the answer is no one.

Why? Well, there’s a long list of reasons, but one of the main ones, one of the big glaring obvious problems with Daniel’s little story, is that it’s boring! Something happens, sure: Daniel falls in love, but why would anyone care? There’s no building romantic tension. There’s no building tension at all. And without tension, you can’t have the payoff.

---

Keeping the killer masked

Let’s switch gears for a moment and consider another juicy, cliche-filled genre: teen slasher movies. Yes, I know, it’s not exactly what we’re writing here, but I promise, there is a method to my madness.

When you watch a slasher flick, be it rowdy college kids being dismembred in the woods or knife wielding killers terrorizing babysitters in suburbia, think how long it takes to find out who the killer really is. We spend the first 70% of the movie jumping at shadows and watching the bodies pile up so that when the mad axe murderer is finally unmasked to reveal the sweet best friend we secretly suspected all along, it’s a cathartic release of over an hour’s worth of tension building to that pivotal moment.

Now imagine how differently that movie would play out if you found out who the killer was in the second scene. The rest of the film, running from open doorways and watching the cast slowly dwindles to your final girl, loses so much of the tension that was keeping us hooked in the first place. We’ve lost the suspense, and now we’re just watching someone run around and be chased by their best friend in a Ghostface mask.

Yes, of course there are brilliant films that flip this notion on its head, but the structure, the rule, this pivotal third-act reveal, has become a staple of the genre for a reason. Without the suspense, we lose the release. Without the slow build, we lose the payoff.

And the same is true when we’re writing romance, only it usually comes with less blood and guts, and our supporting cast tends to survive to the end.

The push-pull, will they won’t they, what if moment followed by a harsh reality wake-up call, is the rom-com version of keeping your killer masked. Not making things too easy, not giving the audience what they want as soon as they realize they want it. Making your characters struggle with themselves, making them say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, mess things up and then have to fix it, these elements get your reader invested in the story, make them care when something goes wrong, celebrate when something goes right, and eventually feel satisfied when they get to the happily ever after.

---

Now comes the fun part

But all is not lost for Daniel’s little story. All we need is some conflict, a little push and pull, to get the reader back on our side. To help Daniel step off the page and feel alive. To give him a story, a heart, a struggle that we can buy into so we can start rooting for him, start caring, start wanting him to get his happily ever after.

And with our seven-point structure safely in hand, we know exactly how to introduce it.

So, we already have our Meet Cute planned out: Daniel and Alex bump into each other on the street. Casual, simple, easy. But let’s decide on some internal or external goals that we can lead to our first complication.

Perhaps Daniel isn’t free when Alex asks him out because he has to work late. Perhaps he always has to work late. He’s a struggling journalist who is never not working, and his busy schedule is going to stand in the way of any relationship he tries to have.

Or perhaps Alex isn’t single, and Daniel has to pine from afar while watching Alex continue in a doomed relationship while he stands on the sidelines. Maybe that relationship is with Daniel’s best friend? Or better yet, his boss, the one that treats him terribly at the job he’s always working late for.

Or maybe Daniel and Alex have the perfect meet cute, the perfect date, the perfect kiss, only for Daniel to come into work the next day and find out Alex has been sent by the CEO of his struggling paper to downsize Daniel’s department? A new corporate takeover, a large media conglomerate buying up a rundown newspaper, and Daniel is forced to work alongside Alex, who’s technically now his boss, while Alex is tasked with assessing which of Daniel’s colleagues, and perhaps Daniel himself, are going to get fired.

Yes. I think that one will work nicely.

Daniel’s original goals are simple: He wants to keep his job. He wants his friends to keep ther jobs. And he hates that Alex is coming in, all big business and bottom line, and destroying the paper he’s been building for years with no care for the people he’s hurting.

As for Alex, he wants to pull Daniel’s failing paper out of the gutter, stop the corporate heads from shutting it down completely, and make the ruthless decision to downsize the team in order to save the business overall.

And just like that, the rest of the pieces start to fall into place. Yes, this is all still very predictable. And yes, I can see Hallmark written all over it, but we now have a set of clearly defined conflicting goals for our two main protagonists that we can easily flesh out to follow the rest of our classic structure. We have the conflict, we have the threads pulling our characters apart, and now all we need to do is follow the formula and watch the drama unfold.

---

Follow the formula

With the obstacles now clearly in the way of our two fated lovers, the middle 50% of the story becomes about tripping our characters up, keeping them apart and giving them little moments of hope that get cruelly snatched away. Why? Because that’s what writers do. We find out what our characters want and put all our effort into not giving it to them.

So, for Daniel and Alex, our second act could look a little something like this: A What If moment of connection over late night paperwork that is later ruined when Alex fires one of Daniel’s friends. The tension builds while Daniel is forced to work with Alex, while at the same time trying to find a way to get Alex fired so he doesn’t tear apart everything Daniel’s created. For our turning point moment, Daniel overhears Alex arguing on the phone, trying to convince his own boss that the paper deserves to be saved. We find out Alex has been a fan of Daniel’s work for years and volunteered for this particular assignment, knowing it would send him to the other side of the country, to a city he doesn’t know and a room full of people who hate his guts, because he wanted to try and save the paper he used to read as a kid.

And then, as we tumble into our third and final act, we get the crisis! The betrayal! When Alex’s bosses decided to shut down the paper, despite Alex’s hard work, and Alex has to fire everyone, including Daniel. He stabbed them in the back, he destroyed everything, why did Daniel ever think he could trust him?

And for our eventual resolution, Daniel will find out, whilst drunkenly commiserating with his friends, that Alex got fired the night before the big reveal, said he wouldn’t stand by and watch as the people he worked for destroyed something that mattered, and the only reason he was the one to fire them all was because he didn’t want them to hear it from anyone but him. Alex has a heart! He sacrificed his job to try and save Daniel’s. Was Daniel wrong about him all along?

Daniel would then run across town, of course in the rain, stop Alex as he’s about to get into a cab to the airport and finally pull him into a dramatic kiss while the sun sets behind them and little hearts sparkle in their eyes.

And then they can move in together, and get married, and foster an ageing cat named Sybil. Because now, we care.

---

Remove the foundation and it falls apart

If we mix up the order and remove a few of the plot points, we still have a story—a tale of two people falling in love—but the tension is weaker, the characters become thin, and the crescendo we’re building loses some of its punch.

Imagine Daniel and Alex never have their meet cute, their initial perfect date. It would be far less believable for Daniel to be attracted to his arrogant new boss if we hadn’t seen them have that initial moment of connection, and we sneak into the uncomfortable rom-com territory of main characters that stop acting like real people as soon as someone hot walks in the room. If we take out the What If moment, when they’re starting to become closer, the romantic turning point reveal feels like a complete 180 for Daniel’s character, like he’s ignoring the things he’s spent the rest of the story claiming to care about, blinded by love, changing who he is to get his man—another troublesome rom-com cliche.

And if we take out the crisis and let Alex save the day? We still get an ending, arguably a happier one, but we lose that moment of heartbreak when Daniel thinks he’s been betrayed. We lose that sinking feeling when we think everything’s been ruined. And, most importantly, we lose our dramatic romantic gesture, our dash across town and the final kiss in the rain. Which, come on, may be one of the most cliched scenes in the entire genre, but who doesn’t love a good rain-soaked declaration of love?

---

Cliche in, Cliche out

So now onto the big question. How do you take this cliche structure, a structure that most readers will see coming in their sleep, and make it into something worth reading? Surely if you start with something basic and obvious, that’s all you’re going to end up with, right?

Well… not exactly.

There’s a whole list of reasons why some stories fly while others fall short. But there are a few glaring threads that run through almost all of the eye-roll-inducing, teeth-clenching, throw-the-book-away-in-annoyance cliches that have become synonymous with the romance genre as a whole: weak characters, predictable conflict, and uncomfortable stereotypes.

When it comes to trope-filled characters, the romance genre has quite a lot to answer for. The bad boy that treats everyone like shit, but people love him anyway. The MC who’s just so different and dramatic that they defy all logic; Queue the line “I’ve never met anyone like you.” The cold, driven female lead who just needs to learn how to love. Or the frumpy MC who needs a makeover in order to get her guy.

These one-dimensional characters feel so overdone, so nauseatingly cliche, because they stop acting like real people and start behaving like caricatures of one overdone, often insulting trait: The dumb blonde. The loveable good guy. The promiscuous bad boy that needs to be tamed. And when we read a little further between the lines of these stilted and oversimplified protagonists, we find a set of uncomfortable romantic stereotypes that have plagued the genre for decades.

From Cinderella to Pretty Woman to Grease, rom-coms have historically told us that it’s ok for your main character to change everything about themselves in order to get their love interest. That love is somehow more important than every other aspect of life. That true love magically makes everyone monogamous. That everyone has a soul mate waiting to fix all their problems, and the ‘bad boy player’ just really needs a ‘good woman’ to tie him down. Combine these thinly veiled sexist tropes with other staple assumptions of the genre – That stalking is romantic. That no really means yes. That women need to be pursued while men need to be left to roam free. That all is forgiven when it’s in the name of true love- And these stereotypes become more than just infuriating cliches.

With their reductive gender roles, questionable power dynamics and far from inclusive cast, these types of characters, these types of stories, have created a warped picture of what ‘real love’ should look like, what healthy sexuality should look like, and more importantly, what a ‘real happy couple’ should look like.

BUT! And this is the crucial point that can save our story and stop you from getting disheartened by the entire genre as a whole: None of these stereotypes specifically mention our seven-point structure.

None of these cliches are born from our set-up, meet cute, turning point or crisis. None of these uncomfortable gender roles are baked into our story arc. The structure is not the problem. The need for conflict is not the problem. Hell, even the happily ever after is not the problem. The characters are the problem. How they change throughout the story is the problem. How they react to each other, and the things they do. The story they’re telling, the values they instil, the assumptions they’re making about what love is and what it needs to be—that’s what leaves a bad taste in our mouths once the credits finally roll. Not our simple, basic structure.

---

Stepping away from the stereotypes

But it doesn’t take much to step away from these cliches. You can still have grand declarations of love, dramatic kisses in the rain, and your happily ever after, but make your characters real, and the stereotypes will fall quickly by the wayside.

A badass boss who needs to soften her edges and become more domestic to win her man?… yeah, not the best place to start. But a badass boss who’s always had soft edges but has never been able to show them until now? Ok, now we’re getting somewhere. Or better yet, the badass boss who has soft edges and is still a badass boss, because, newsflash Hallmark, baking cupcakes and wearing knitted sweaters doesn’t stop you from being a ruthless CEO… and now we’re talking.

When it comes to conflict, the integral framework our whole structure is built around, the type of conflict you choose to put in the way of your characters is crucial in defining the kind of story you end up writing. Unwarranted jealousy. The threat of infidelity. These stories are ten-a-penny in the rom-com world and can quickly lead us down the uncomfortable tropes we’re trying to veer away from. So instead, look for something a little different to throw at your characters to block their inevitable happily ever after.

I’m not saying that you have to reinvent the wheel. Romantic comedies are one of the few genres where readers aren’t expecting a twist. They don’t mind seeing the romance coming from the very start and can accept a few suspensions of disbelief in the name of a good story. But you can still tell a story about love, that checks all the boxes and gives the readers what they want, without needing to rehash old and outdated ideas of what relationships need to be.

So don’t look to other rom-coms for their definition of what love is. Don’t fall into the traps of one-dimensional characters who throw away who they are as soon as someone hot walks into the room. Instead, look around you, at real people in your life, at real people in the world, and create characters with a backbone, with a heart, who are more than just a caricature of some outdated assumption. Write diverse characters. Write real characters. Write characters who have something to say, and you’ll find the cliches quickly fall apart, and you’re left with a story that has (pardon the pun) a beating heart.

---

So now we have our structure, our tried-and-tested building blocks for writing a heartbreaking, drama-filled romance– I hand it to you to put in your toolbox and do with it what you will. Write a rom-com with it (they’re actually kinda fun), thread it into a larger story, pick it apart, and take what you want from it.

And while yes, it does tend to work best in the order it’s in, I’m not saying it can’t be played with, can’t be broken, can’t be thrown out the window and completely ignored. The whole point of this structure is to give us what we want in our story: a believable romance that wrenches your heart out and makes your readers feel something. And of course there are other ways to get there. Other ways to build that tension, different ways to find that conflict. But, like any writing advice or storytelling technique, this simple, easy, arguably too-easy structure is a handy place to start.

A place to work from. A place to begin. A place to go to when that blank page is staring at you menacingly, and your characters are sitting in the corner, not doing what they’re told, waiting for you to read them their lines.

So take it as a guide, as a wireframe from which you can build your ideas, which can be moulded and reformed to fit whatever story you feel like telling. Stretch it out across a trilogy. Condense it into one scene. Play with it, have fun with it, make it your own. And if nothing else, it will give you the bare bones of a tale with conflict at its heart and characters we can start to fall in love with.

---