ROMANCE IS very important in any fanfic. Often, it's the driving force behind the story. The lovely thing about romance is that any two people can fall in love, especially people who hate each other, purely based on physical attraction! Just put them alone together in a situation, and let them be sweet at each other. Others should tease them about their attraction to each other, seeing it before they do—especially former loves, who will either move quietly aside or become insanely jealous monsters.

I can already imagine love comes between two characters in an actions story, where the one gets injured and another one tries to save him/her.

First and foremost, if you plan to write romantic story, you really should enjoy reading in that genre. You should have a feel for both romance and suspense, a genuine sense of what it takes to spin a tale about two people destined to be together against all odds, yet struggling with a truly frightening situation or set of circumstances that turns their world upside down.

The opening is arguably the most important part of any story. The story can and often does include the viewpoint of the perpetrator. Even if it doesn't, the reader sometimes knows whodunit at the beginning.

The difficult part in action openings is to resist the temptation to foreshadow too much and reveal things you don't want known until later. This is probably the rule most often broken. The story begins too slowly with too much background setup and the action doesn't start until Page 15 or even Chapter Two. In order to build and maintain suspense, you need to get rid of all but the minimal descriptive passages and keep your sentences short, to keep the action moving and keep the tension high. Background information and character description can be threaded in later.

The is the next most important part of the romantic action story, and it should be an edge-of-the-seat page turner. One way to kill an otherwise acceptable story is to write a long narrative chapter of explanation after the excitement is over. Of course, you have to wrap things up, but never interrupt the action to do so. In romantic suspense, it's vital to bring the conflict to a satisfactory close, then resolve the romantic relationship.

Of course, in romantic action story, it's perfectly acceptable to let your heroine lean a little on the hero. But not too much. We are writing about the 90's independent woman, after all. Nothing irritates a female reader more than to have our hero discover the crime, spot all the clues and blithely solve the puzzle and save the day, while our little heroine stands by alternately wringing her hands and sighing over how y and brilliant he is.

Give her a break. Make her a part of the discovery and a participant in the solution. Women make great detectives. So oppars need to back away for a little ^O^

Pacing is extremely important in writing romantic suspense. From a breathtaking opening on to the startling conclusion, we have to keep the action going and make every word count. Intersperse the romance and let the love affair build. Be brutal in your self-editing and remove anything that doesn't move the story forward or add to our understanding of the character or situation.

That's why God invented the delete key. If the action slows, throw in another complication or problem or predicament for your protagonists. But put them in danger again, throw up a road block, give them a dead end or several red herrings to cope with, or a blowout in the middle of a car chase. The tougher they have it, the more the reader wants to continue clicking next>> to find out just how they'll get out of this one.

Probably one of the cardinal rules in writing anything that involves a mystery is—or at least should be—to never, never, never begin the story without knowing where you're going with the story. Don't have bodies dropping all over the place and hope that by the time you near the end, you'll come up with a likely candidate for whodunit. The villain, his motivations and what his threat to other is, should be a mystery to the reader, but not the writer. That's why, make an Outline.

To summarize, suspense grows out of situation and action, romance out of two people attracted to one another who are often forced to be together by somewhat dangerous circumstances. It's a merger of two popular genres. You need an empathetic hero and heroine who deal with problems by trying the simplest solutions first, just as any of us might, logically trying to find answers. If that doesn't work, they look to other sources and things often get complicated. The villain has to be an even match for these two, and should have qualities the reader can understand if not approve of. The things that happen to your two protagonists alternate between good and bad, testing their ability to cope, and finally wind up with a finish that will satisfy one and all.

An ending that will leave your reader amazed at your cleverness isn't all bad, either.

Taking the basic structure of classic plot lines can give any author several ideas for action romance stories. You can also study favorite books or movies and see how classic plot lines are used. Once you know how to mix and match different settings and genres, the possibilities are endless.