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.

In the last few years, I’ve read well over a thousand romance novels. I started with contemporary, then moved on to Regency and other English stories. Then I got into other historicals. My faves are Western and Scottish historicals. I don’t claim to be an expert on romance novels, but I have formed opinions based on my extensive reading.

I’ve read so many books—typically a book a day—that I have to keep a list of what I’ve read. There are only so many plots, and I can’t always be sure I’ve already read a book if I read it several years ago, so I check it against the list, which is now 117 pages long. I list books by author. A number of those authors I’ve tagged as “NO MORE.” I’ve reached my tolerance level on those. I may have added comments on a particular author’s books such as “stupid woman,” “stupid, stupid, annoying woman” or “world’s stupidest woman.” My particular pet peeve. (Yes, and I realize that’s arrogant; I can only imagine what people would write about my books.)

Other comments include “too slow, “enh,” “not feeling it” and “didn’t like the characters.” I’ve also found books boring, too dependent on misunderstandings and too similar to previous books by the same author. Sometimes books are too technical or too historical for my taste. At this stage of the game, I don’t want to have to slog through I book. I’m reading for pleasure now.

I read romance novels at three different speeds—normal, speed read and super speed read. Originally I read every word of every sex scene, but there’s only so many ways you can do it, and I found myself flipping through 10-page sex scenes, skimming the pages. That’s my speed read mode. Super speed read is when I read 50 or 100 pages and am just not into it, yet I’d like to know how it ends. So I skip to the last 20 or 30 pages.

Now that you know how many books I don’t like, you should know that the majority of the romance novels I read do give me pleasure. Including mine, but what do I know?

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.

Romance novels are formulaic, which doesn’t mean they can’t be interesting, charming or insightful. The basic formula is boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. A variation might be: boy previously dumped girl, now girl hates boy, boy works to get girl back. The reader knows at the beginning of a romance novel who the boy and girl are and that they’ll get together by the end of the story. It’s just a matter of how they get there.

Within the formula, there are recurring themes. One is the unexpected baby or child. If romance novels were true life, about 10,000 ranchers, and quite a few members of the British peerage, have/had children they didn’t know they conceived. For British or Scottish stories, there’s always the unexpected elevation to the peerage. It’s usually a rake, a soldier, or a guy who was raised in the slums. If it happens to a woman, she was a wallflower, country bumpkin or a girl who was raised in the slums.

Then you have the convenient marriage that turns to love. These unions happen in the English and Scottish stories but also in historical westerns, where you’ll find not just mail-order arrangements but matches based on business or other concerns. My least favorite themes are the ones that involve an old flame returning to town. Yawn! I like fresh blood, not recycled romances.

And within the mail-order bride genre are subsets of themes. There’s the mail-order bride who arrives at her destination to discover her groom is dead or AWOL. And the mail-order bride who’s not who she says she is. Most likely she’s a saloon girl who took the identity of a mail-order bride who died. And the sister/friend/cousin who comes in the mail-order bride’s place because the original intended bride is an awful person who has run off with another man.

So there are only so many stories to tell. Romance novels are indeed formulaic, but how you tell the story is what will make all the difference. Add your own twists and turns in the voice that is uniquely yours.