NYT and USAT bestselling author and screenwriter, Cindy Dees, brings her formidable skills as a master storyteller and master writing teacher to this encyclopedic series analyzing the major tropes used in modern commercial fiction. In this volume, Cindy explores 35 iconic external romance tropes, the stories of people, situations, and problems around your hero and heroine that pose obstacles to their happily ever after.

Written by a working writer for working writers, this is a comprehensive reference guide and brainstorming tool to help you quickly generate ideas, create characters and plot, revise and edit, brand and market your story. You’ll write faster, cleaner, and deliver to your audience a story they’ll recognize and love.

If you’re writing a novel, script, play, comic, graphic novel, video game script, or any other story format, this book is for you. If you’re writing a love story specifically, or you’re writing any genre of fiction in which you’d like to include a romantic relationship, this book is for you.

Each trope entry includes:

a detailed definition and analysis

descriptions of all obligatory scenes necessary to structure this trope correctly

lists of additional key scenes important to this trope

an extensive list of questions to think about when writing this trope

an extensive list of traps to avoid when writing this trope

reasons why audiences love this trope

a list of similar tropes

a list of examples of each trope in action taken from television, film, and novels

…every kind of writer in every genre of fiction is going to want these guides in their go-to reference books…

…a tour de force how-to on creating stories audiences adore…

…the books every writer has been waiting for—a comprehensive walk-through by an industry pro of everything to think about when building a story of pretty much any kind…