Every year I look forward to the Hallmark Christmas movies, though I must admit I bail on quite a few. Sometimes I’m just not interested in the topic. Other times the male lead character isn’t doing it for me. But mostly it’s because I can’t get into the story. The beginning is too much blather and not enough substance. I know, easy for me to say. So I’m saying it.

The beginning of your play is not just important; it’s crucial. It sets the scene for everything that follows. You don’t have to impart earth-shattering information in the opening or start with an explosion, but you grab your audience’s attention and not bore them to tears. My one-act play A Moving Experience takes place in the first apartment a young man is moving into, and his mother is frantic. It opens thusly:

Donna: What are you doing, Gordon? Cut it out.

Gordon: What?

Donna: Don’t bring any attention to the bed.

It’s not Shakespeare, but it conveys the woman’s anxiety and might bring a chuckle. In another one-act play, Sofa, two college roommate care about each other but bicker. Here’s the opening:

Beck: Where’s my deodorant?

Then he whaps Josh on the head with a towel as he walks past.

It’s such a guy thing to do and sets the stage for their relationship.

I left out the stage directions for both these plays, which, of course, help to set the scenes. With the dialogue, the idea is to get the tension and conflict out there as soon as possible.

A recent teleplay began in an office, where the female executive’s assistant rattled off her meeting schedule and other duties, and they walked down the hall talking about things I didn’t care about and that were ultimately not germane to the story. Click. That was the sound of me changing the channel. You can do better with your openings.

If you absolutely have to make a living and you need to do it right now, writing romance novels or anything else may not be a good career choice. You may actually need a day job while you toil away on your masterpiece in your off-hours. If you feel you’re a writer stuck in the body of an administrative assistant, you can set aside time each day to write.

Do you want to write in your spare time but find yourself putting it off? I’m as good a procrastinator as anyone. Probably better than most. I can always think of things to do to avoid writing. Dumb things, like reorganizing a drawer or polishing silver that I’m never going to use. It took me an embarrassing number of years to figure out a way around that. I made a promise to myself that I would write 1,000 words a day. It’s surprisingly easy, for me, at least. At just 1,000 words a day, I could write a novella in a month and a novel or a screenplay in a few months.

Do you kind of feel like you might want to be a writer? It’s probably never going to happen because it takes tenacity, unless you’re going to be the only person to read your writing. And you’ll need to grow a thick skin. All of us in the creative arts—writing, music, acting—face a lot of rejection. At best, it’s somewhat encouraging although a turndown. At worse, rejections can be indifferent or even nasty.

But writers today have advantages over scribes of days gone by. Think about what it was like to write romance novels before the Internet. Research now is at your fingertips, shortening the process immensely. Research? You mean you can’t just use your imagination to write a book? You can if you know what people wore in the 1500s and what they ate. And what the roads were made of, and who the important people were and what holidays they celebrated and where they bought their shoes.

Good writing takes time. But you can’t just sit there and wait for inspiration. If it can’t be your 9 to 5 job, think of it as your second job. And it helps if you feel compelled to do it.

One day I fully expect to come across a romance novel entitled “The Unexpected Runaway Heiress’s Christmas Fireman Rancher.” Have you ever noticed that sometimes the titles of romance novels have very little to do with their content? There’s a disconnect between the story and the title. When the story is really well written and the title is lame, it’s fairly obvious to me that the writer did not conjure up the title.

I find that sad. It must be a contractual thing with traditional publishing. Otherwise why would a talented writer come up with such a poorly written title? The above fictional title includes many of the key words in titles I suspect weren’t author-written. For Regency and other English and Scottish romance novels, the key title words include “accidental” as in “The Accidental Duchess,” “The Accidental Marriage,” “The Accidental Kidnapping,” etc. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Other key words in those genres are heiress, runaway, rake, governess, highlander, warrior, etc. So one day we’ll likely see “The Runaway Heiress Governess Meets the Accidental Highland Warrior.”

I don’t claim to be an expert in writing titles. Far from it. But at least I recognize the connection between the title and the story, and I don’t think readers feel cheated when they read a book based on its title and find meaning there. It’s a simple thing, really, isn’t it? Or is it?

I strive for perfection when I write a romance novel or anything else, which includes making the title as good as I can make it. Do I ever reach perfection? Not hardly. But you’ll never find a romance novel or other book with my name on it that has a meaningless or impossibly stupid title, if I have a breath left in me.