Bri CastelliniMarch 12, 2026

Start Your Romance Novel the Right Way. The Starter Docs Guide.

So you’re writing a romance novel. Congratulations! But you aren’t sure where to start. You might only have the items on your writer’s wish list to go off of, or a vague description of your two (or more, you cheeky thing!) lovers, and while you’re absolutely within your rights to start writing from there… it’s helpful to have a bit more to go on.

For a full-throttle breakdown guide and workbook of starting documents for romances of all kinds (including distinct world-building suggestions for historical, romantasy, and contemporary books), we’ve got the link below. Our paid subscribers on Substack get them automatically. For a great starting point, though, read on!

My must-have documents when planning a romance novel

  1. The dump doc. This is the starting point of everything- the kernel of an idea, the item that sparked joy from my writer’s wish list, the brain dump of things that interest me about this story. Once the dumping starts to organize itself (usually, when I name a character), I’ll spread out to the rest of the documents (see below), but until the shape emerges from the granite slab, I don’t put pressure on myself to stay in one lane or the other. There is no inherent structure- whether I’m starting with a character idea, a trope, a line of dialogue, or a scenario, there is no judgement in the dump doc. There is only sincere excitement and unfettered creativity.
  2. Character templates. At LEAST for my two love interests, but also occasionally for important secondary characters or antagonists. You can find a lot of great character interviews online, or use the one Scrivener has pre-built for you; the point is, you must know your people before you torture them incessantly make them fall in love.
    1. Sub-document: GMC grids. I find doing a GMC grid for each primary love interest to be extra helpful when developing balanced characters, so that I can ensure their internal and external conflicts are aligned thematically, even if they’re on different ends of the spectrum. Ex: both characters have parental baggage, but one reacted by overworking herself, and the other reacted by fully giving up, therefore the book is about them finding balance together. If, in doing my initial grids, I find that their goals or motivations have no overlapping words or concepts at all, I know I’ve either got the wrong love interest, or one of them needs some redeveloping. GMC grids explained in more detail here.
    2. Sub-document: Character names. I can’t be the only one who used to scroll through 50+ pages to see if I’ve named my protagonists’ pet chicken already or not. So now, before I ever start writing, I make myself a CHARACTER NAMES document, and when I name someone (a best friend, a parent, a pet chicken, etc), and especially if I imbue them with a unique, important description (ponytail guy? Rat face? Big red eyes?), I can easily jot them down for reference later in the story for continuity and reader recognition.
  3. Timeline. Similar to the character names doc, if your story is set during a strict timeline (“before Christmas”, “1 week total”, etc) and you need to keep track of what freaking day it is… as you write, a pre-made timeline doc (perhaps with days of the month already laid out) allows you to record how time is naturally passing… and advise on how much time can pass between chapters or scenes when you need SOME time to pass, but aren’t sure how much you’re allotted so the next scene falls on a weekend, or the week before a major national holiday.
  4. Epistolary elements. I wrote my senior thesis for my BA in Creative Writing on epistolary novels, so maybe this is just me, but I have yet to write a novel that doesn’t include primary source documents at some point, at least not a novel I’m proud of having written. And even if they don’t make it into the book, proper, I’ve found brainstorming in an epistolary format to be a really great brainstorming mechanism for characters. This can include:
    1. Emails and social media
    2. Journals/diaries
    3. Texts to friends and family
    4. Work communication (how do they talk to their boss? Their coworkers?)
    5. Lists (grocery, to-do, bucket, etc)
    6. Letterbox/Goodreads (what are they watching/reading)
    7. Articles about them by other people (especially if the character is famous to some degree)
  5. Questions I Need Answered. This is a kind of dump doc, but one for when I’m deeper into the process, where I ask myself questions about my concept/story that I don’t yet have an answer to but will need to eventually. This is things like- “why doesn’t Ivy agree to an interview if it will make her life easier?” or “Can fated mates on the planet Q’rris get divorced, and if so, what does that entail?” Sometimes, I’ll finish the full manuscript draft before these questions get answered, but it’s a good way for me to keep track of these questions, and then use them as prompts during writer’s group feedback sessions, or as a place to begin when I start revising. It’s also something I’ll work on when I’m experiencing writer’s block, because often the concrete question prompts are easier to ruminate on than conjuring full scenes.

Now is the best time to start curating these docs. And the second best time is during our Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST. The full calendar of dates is on our Community page.  Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind. We’re stoked to be building routine and community with YOU.

Want the video version of this post? Look no further!

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Kelly ChastainMarch 5, 2026

The 5-Minute Set Up That Makes Your Writing Sessions a Million Times More Productive

Today we kick off our first Writing Community Hour over at The Rogue MFA YouTube channel. We gather every other Thursday at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST. The complete schedule is listed on our community page.

Bri put together a great post called 5 Ways to Write When you’re Not Writing, because sometimes you’re motivated, but maybe not necessarily inspired. We can also help you get unstuck. If you want to join, but you don’t know what to do in the hour this graphic can help.

No matter where you’re at, we can’t wait to hang out with you and get some writing done together. Here are a few more ways to approach it.

If You Want to Finish Something

There’s nothing quite like the dopamine rush of checking a box or crossing something off a list.

  • Write a character’s backstory that outlines their internal conflicts, their trauma responses, and why they’re just so darn stubborn/independent/brazen/nihilistic
  • Clean up that one scene that you know isn’t quite working, and that you’ve been avoiding, because you think it’s going to take way more time or work than it actually will
  • Write a list of the worst things that could happen to your characters, followed by a list of scenarios that will bring the worst to life, followed by a list of ways each character might each handle the scenario. (Hello, nascent plot outline)
  • Read the articles you’ve been saving in your “research file” instead of just squirreling them away like a bushy-tailed archivist
  • Write the pivotal emotional moment for your characters that you’ve been avoiding. This could be anger, a confession, declarations of love, grief, etc…

If You Want to Figure Something Out

When things stop being inspiring, or you know that something’s just off, here are some questions you can ask to help get you back on track.

  • Do my characters make choices or do things just happen to them? OR if they’re making choices, do they actually have consequences? If your character didn’t get what they wanted, and would be fine after a nap and a snack, the stakes aren’t high enough. Let them make a decision that could fuck their whole life up.
  • What character could I remove entirely without it impacting the plot? Who’s not earning their keep here, or which characters are doing the same work in the story? Sometimes we run out of steam because we’re writing the same scenario, relationship, or problem with two separate side characters when one would be far more potent. Redundancy can make your work drag.
  • What promise did I make in the first chapter and am I delivering on it? This helps you to identify where your B plot may have taken over to the point where the whole book has shifted. It’ll shed light on where you’ve gone off course in the story, and how to get yourself back on track.
  • What would happen if I cut my favorite scene? Oh, this one’s a heart breaker. Especially when you love it and it’s the most beautiful writing in the whole book. A beautifully written scene that doesn’t belong will run your story off the rails and not in a good way. You can always paste the language into a new doc and use it in a later project, so it’s not gone forever. But the key is to get honest about whether or not it’s serving your story. If not, give it the boot.
  • What feedback do I keep hearing and also keep dismissing? Sometimes it’s not the feedback itself, but the mountain of work required to fix the issues. Once we dig into it, we often find it’s not nearly as hard as we made ourselves believe it would be. Sometimes, we dismiss feedback because it isn’t immediately obvious to us how to fix the issue. You have an hour to brainstorm ideas.

If You Want to Improve Your Writing

Choose one scene where something important happens and:

  • Focus on your character’s interiority. Instead of focusing only on what they do, dig into what they think, feel, and fear in that moment. What connections and conclusions have they drawn? What do they believe, know, or understand that they didn’t before this scene started? Help your readers see the change.
  • Focus on your character’s movement. Sometimes, you’ve created a rich inner world, but the characters themselves feel like they’re floating in space or the conversation reads like talking heads in a room. Get into their movements, mannerisms, and body language that supports or belies their inner state.
  • Ratchet up the sensory details. We understand the world through our senses, and when you add sensory detail to your story, your world and characters feel more real to us. Rely less on sight, and see how you can incorporate smell, sounds, taste, and touch, particularly texture. If you want guidance, grab the free mini course, and use that as your structure for the community writing hour.
  • Sharpen your dialogue. Cut it by 30% and you’ll make it faster, less monologue-y, and it will sound more like real people talking. Let them cut each other off, stammer, change the subject, and tell each other no.

We can’t wait to see you at The Rogue Community Writing Hour!

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Bri CastelliniFebruary 26, 2026

5 Ways To Write When You’re Not Writing

So you want to build routine, you want to be more productive, perhaps you want to join us next week for our first weekly Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening starting March 5th 4pm PST/ 7pm EST?! But you might not have an active work in progress, or perhaps you’ve got that dastardly writer’s block, or you just don’t have the energy to pull stories out onto a page, even if, in theory, you’re available and want to be creative.

Great news! As I mentioned in last week’s post, there are plenty of aspects of the creative process that aren’t strictly words-on-page. In fact, some of the most important aspects of writing have nothing to do with hitting a word or page count goal.

So today, we’re talking about the 5 ways to write… even when you aren’t technically writing.

  1. Start/continue your writer’s wish list. This concept comes from a book that my friend read and then told me about; alas, I remember the friend, but not the book of origin. The concept is pretty simple: a writer’s wish list is a list of everything you want to write someday, in as much or little detail as you have, just to keep track of all those fragments until you’re ready to commit to piecing them together. Some items off my wish list, as an example: “food service superhero,” the line of dialog “I’m not old faithful!”, “Something in a car” (that one’s a script idea, specifically), and “couple rebuilding a house in a hurricane while breaking up.”
    1. There’s a version of this I learned in my UCLA Extension Romance Writing course called the “Id List” by Jennifer Lynn Barnes which also may resonate- the difference is that the Id List focuses more on tropes and scenarios within stories that may get repeated, for you to look through when you’re stuck or feeling uninspired by your scene to give you a shot of adrenaline. My Id list includes: “One syllable androgynous names for female characters,” “epistolary elements,” and “malicious compliance.”
  2. Interview your characters, either by filling out one of the million character building templates online (perhaps we’ll need to make our own soon…) or by literally demanding answers from them yourself. Seriously, I have been known to fill 10+ pages of a conversation between myself and a character or two who are giving me trouble. Since I got into scriptwriting, that’s been a faster way of switching voices on page, but I’ve often found it to be a cathartic way of unblocking myself and treating my characters like full people, rather than just convenient vehicles for theme and trauma. And because it’s a conversation, it doesn’t really FEEL like writing so much as it feels like transcribing.
  3. Do the boring admin stuff you’ve been avoiding. This can include, per the usual QueryManager fields:
    1. Writing a 1-2 sentence logline for your latest project
    2. Writing a 2 page synopsis
    3. Writing your query letter
    4. Writing a list of comps
    5. Writing your author bio
    6. Writing an artist statement for fellowships/contests
    7. Organizing all this stuff into a singular place for easy access/editing
  4. Do a tarot reading. My friend Christine introduced this idea to me; when she’s stuck or still figuring things out in the outlining phase, she’ll sometimes do a tarot reading for her characters. She knows the questions they have, because they’re her questions too, and often doing a tarot reading unlocks aspects of where to go next she wouldn’t have considered before.
    1. Our guide to getting unstuck can aid you on what the best questions to ask are
  5. Read a chapter of a craft book/read a craft article. I don’t know about you, but I’ve confessed to Kelly previously the completely irrational primal fear of Story Genius by Lisa Cron, a book Kelly recommended to me six years ago (if not more). Why? Because I’m not in school so it’s not precisely homework, and I can’t take time out of my day ordinarily to read as if it were work, but after work, when I’m reading, I want it to be fun reading. Like time-traveling Robin Hood smut, you know? So it’s become thing source of shame and guilt despite knowing it will be good for me to dedicate time to. Now if only I had a not-quite-work, not-quite-play series of accountability sessions where I could fit in at least half an hour of reading from this book on a regular basis…

The best writing process is one where you show up. Even if showing up doesn’t add to your total word count.

Great news- you don’t have to do it alone! Join the Rogue Writing Community Hour over on The Rogue MFA YouTube channel every other Thursday evening at 4pm PST/ 7pm EST starting March 5th. We’ll be building routine and community with YOU! Subscribe to get notified, and if you’re even a little bit interested, please fill out our quick survey so we can expand these in the future with you in mind!

“Read” this post as a YouTube video instead, if you’re so inclined!

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