When I wrote purely hetero (or menage) romances, I never had to ask myself what sexual orientation each story was. Now - not so easy….
I find myself pondering over each story idea to try to decide whether that story would be better as a hetero or a gay romance. Some stories are immediately apparent because some aspect of the story revolves around that fact. Sometimes the story is clearly hetero for the same reasons.
But some stories can go either way. The last time I had one of those ideas, I must have run through the various different options in my mind for several hours, trying to decide which orientation made sense. Around and around spun the options, until I was almost dizzy.
Finally I stepped back and returned to one of the roots of my writing method. Deciding who the characters were. Once I did that, it seemed obvious what their sexual orientation was. Finally!
It does make me wonder what other people who write both hetero and gay romances do to make this decision. Is it already made by them? Do they have a method?
So- do you?
Written by Maura Anderson
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Jet Mykles wrote,
As one who writes both, it’s mostly the characters who decide. But, so far, I’ve only had one story that started out with a woman and ended up with two men. The story ended up better, methinks (Tech Support)
Link | February 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 am