romance_skill

Overview

This skill provides romance-writing conventions, pacing guidelines, and emotional beats tailored for relationship-focused narratives. It helps map story percentiles to key romantic events and ensures emotional arcs and obstacles lead to satisfying HEA or HFN endings. Use it to align chapter planning, character arcs, and intimate scene timing with genre expectations.

How this skill works

The skill inspects mentions of romance, love story, or relationship-focused narrative and suggests a convention-aware structure: first meeting, tension build, conflict escalation, dark moment, and finale. It translates those beats into percent-based pacing, recommends timing for the first kiss (slow-burn vs fast-burn), and checks that internal and external obstacles require real growth. It also integrates with story commands to annotate chapter plans, dialogue techniques, and arc verification.

When to use it

• When you’re planning a romance or a relationship-driven subplot.
• When you need pacing benchmarks for first meeting, kiss, dark moment, and finale.
• When checking that conflicts require character growth rather than cheap misunderstandings.
• When mapping emotional beats to chapters or outlining subgenre-specific rules.
• When you want to ensure both protagonists have agency and satisfying arcs.

Best practices

• Establish chemistry early (within ~10% of the story) through action, not exposition.
• Give both leads clear internal baggage that must be resolved alongside external obstacles.
• Avoid ‘misunderstanding-only’ conflicts; make barriers credible and gradually escalating.
• Time physical intimacy to follow emotional trust—slow-burn ~50–60%, fast-burn ~20–30%.
• Keep protagonists active: show them pursuing goals outside the relationship.
• Deliver an ending that resolves internal and external threads (HEA or HFN).

Example use cases

• Outline: Map a 20-chapter novel to percentiles and place the first meeting, midpoint kiss, and dark moment.
• Revision: Analyze a draft to confirm both characters have arcs and obstacles grow logically.
• Subgenre tweak: Adjust conventions for historical, paranormal, or suspense romances.
• Chapter planning: Insert forced-intimacy or separation scenes at moments that heighten emotional stakes.
• Writing support: Generate dialogue and actions that reveal chemistry instead of telling it.