Sandra’s Miscellany

The Bombshell hero is, technically, no hero. Not in the craft sense of the word.

He’s a love interest.

That distinction helps keep me focused on who and what a Bombshell story is actually about. It’s not about the heroine’s relationship with the love interest, though that’s important. And it’s not about whether these two people will end up together in the end after a series of harrowing experiences, though that’s important, too. A Bombshell story is about a woman who faces her fears and demons to achieve a goal. Period.

So what does the love interest do besides offer to watch her back while she’s taking on the Evil Villain(tm)?

From a craft perspective, the love interest can do several things:

• Function as an adversary until both realize he’d be better off as an ally.
• Challenge the heroine’s basic beliefs about herself and the world.
• Goad the heroine into making the decisions she needs to make in order to be achieve her goals.

Patricia Rosemoor once said in an eHarlequin posting that the love interest is part of the heroine’s external conflict. I totally agree. If the love interest doesn’t pose a threat to the heroine in terms of her external conflict, he’s only so much window-dressing.

But I would also argue that the nature of the love interest’s participation in the story is to cause the heroine to change in a significant way. Her choices and attitudes are always driving toward the dark moment — the point at which everything she values may be lost — and if the love interest has been doing his job, he’s provided some of the pressure she’s under during that moment.

A bunch of Bombshell authors and aspiring authors had a conversation on eHarlequin about what changes in the dynamics of the story when there are two or more potential love interests. Some were concerned that the reader might be rooting for one guy, but the other guy ends up being the love interest and that can tick off the reader. My gut writer’s feeling on that is that the man who most challenges the heroine in terms of her personal growth is the most logical choice of love interest.

I mean, let’s face it. Internal conflict between the heroine and someone or something else really draws the reader in. And if Potential Love Interest A is bringing more pressure to bear on that conflict, and challenging her, and causing her to wonder about what she’s doing — then he’s the guy the heroine’s had the most interaction with and who has the reader’s buy-in. Interaction makes us relate to people, because if there’s no interaction going on, there’s nothing for us to latch onto emotionally.

So for me, the love interest is the one person in the book who causes — either by his words or his actions — the heroine to question her motives and her judgment. Rick certainly functioned in that way for Jessie in THE ORCHID HUNTER. But the way the love interest challenges her has to make her stronger and more able to do what she needs to do when she makes her fateful dark moment decision. (More on the dark moment decision in another topic.)

The conflict the love interest provides is two-fold:

• External — they’re fighting over the same object
• Internal — he represents a different idea or attitude that she’s secretly afraid is “true”

It sounds complicated and can be a good bit of work, but then if it were easy it wouldn’t be Bombshell.