Romance Series World Building

You might hear “world building” and immediately think of science fiction or fantasy genres, not necessarily romance. But romance writing takes place in made-up worlds just like horrors, mysteries, and other kinds of fiction. The major difference between those other worlds and your romance world is where the focus lies. 

In a romance novel, your reader's attention is always on the growing love and intimacy between the main characters, as well as the hurdles standing between them and their happily ever after. If you can create a foundation for multiple stories to take place in a single context, you have the beginnings of a series that you can tap into for years to come. Being able to revisit something you’ve built without having to describe it in detail in every single book saves you time and effort in the long run. But first, how do you do it? 

Creating a world doesn’t always mean coming up with an entirely new galaxy with fictional planets, stars, and lifeforms. World building can also mean developing a smaller, make-believe environment where your characters meet and fall in love. This could be a big, bustling city or a quaint fishing village. In this sense, the word “world” just means the general location where most of your stories in your series (or a segment of a series) are going to take place (e.g., Fraser’s Ridge, Pemberly, Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, etc.). 

Your new literary world can be almost identical to the one you live in now, if you so choose. Doing this can cut down on the time it takes to craft something from scratch. However, you can still benefit from creating a version of the real world that suits your plot and your characters using the tips below. Making assumptions regarding what people know about a particular place just because it’s real can leave readers inaccurately filling in gaps (what if someone has never been to New York or never heard of Louisville, Kentucky?). 

Consider the kind of romances that you like reading the most. Where do they usually take place? Fast-paced metropolises a thousand years in the future? Swampy backwoods in the South 400 years ago? 

Writing a series in the kind of environments and time periods that you love reading about will make your job as an author a lot easier. Your passion for stories that take place in those settings will come through in your writing. If you love reading books set in small, Midwestern towns, trying to write a manuscript that happens in a sprawling seaside city on the West Coast may be more of an uphill battle for you. Stick with what you love and your love books will be stronger for it! 

In general, the more details you know about your location, the better. How is water supplied to the residents? How does their government work? Who picks up the trash and when? Knowing these things about a place you and your readers will be coming to repeatedly is key. You never know when an installment of your series will need to use this kind of information, and it’ll need to be consistent throughout the collection. 

For instance, imagine you write book one of your series. In it, you note that the main character is a lifelong resident of an island community that’s only accessible by boat. If you write in book three that this character is afraid of water, you’ll leave your readers scratching their heads (“Wait. Didn’t they grow up on the island?”).

You likely won’t write every single one of these pieces of information into every book in the series. But if you can clearly form a picture in your mind of what this place is like–as if you’ve lived there all your life–you’ll be able to write about it more vividly. Your love tales don’t happen in a vacuum. Your setting is an important aspect of the overall plot. 

Things to consider about your location include: 

• When it was founded and by whom.
• What kind of climate it has and how that changes throughout the year.
• Which major cities, landmarks, borders, or bodies of water are nearby.
• What kind of transportation people regularly use.
• Where various groups live within the area (poorer parts of town, retirement communities, university student housing clusters, etc.)
• Who runs the city or town and what kind of job they’re doing.
• What most of the commercial and residential architecture looks like.
• What the biggest holidays or events are in the area (i.e., Founders Day, Memorial Day, Harvest Festival).

Though this list is by no means exhaustive, it should give you an idea of what to start with. By knowing your setting inside and out, you can write your love stories in a way that makes the setting feel like a real place to the reader. This only serves to enhance the reading experience and make them adore your writing even more. 

List, diagram, or sketch what your location of choice looks like and how it functions on a day-to-day basis. This can be anything from a few paragraphs of text to a detailed, computer-generated map. You don’t have to spend multiple weeks or months on this. Even a few hours or a day or two would suffice. The general idea is that you don’t want to walk into the series with zero idea of the backdrop for your romances. If you do, you risk writing a setting that seems shallow and amorphous. Relevant details will probably change from scene-to-scene, let alone book-to-book, because you haven’t nailed the world down in your head. This can jar readers out of the story and damage their trust in your abilities as a writer. 

Beyond how a county or village survives from one day to the next, it’s important to understand how their culture works. What’s considered “normal” behavior in this place, especially as it relates to sex, love, dating, and marriage? Knowing these societal expectations gives you an opportunity to show your reader who your main characters are by which norms they choose to vigorously embrace, passively follow, or completely ignore.

Consider Claire in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series. Being well educated and married to someone so obsessed with history, she had a decent idea of what was expected of her in Jamie’s world. Namely, that she be quiet and obey the men around her. But doing so may have cost Jamie the use of his arm when they first met. Her speaking up–going against the norms–in that moment showed that she was the kind of woman who would say and do what she wanted, even when she was among strangers and in an unfamiliar situation. It also showed the level of compassion that she had. She was willing to risk the possible wrath and ridicule of the unknown warriors around her in order to assist someone who was in need. But if this wasn’t going against the grain (if there were ten other women traveling with the group, and they were all outspoken medical specialists), there would be little in that scene to set Claire apart and make her an interesting character who readers could relate to or root for. 

Seriously review the culture of your series’ world. It’s easy to assume that worlds that are only slightly different from our own don’t need to be thought out. But, while you may not spend quite as much time and effort world building as someone who is crafting a new continent from scratch, it’s still helpful to iron out the romantic culture of your world. This sets reader expectations and lets them know when a certain action, phrase, or event is a good thing (caring for Jamie in spite of the suspicions of his companions), a bad thing (not listening to Jamie and getting herself into trouble), or downright devastating (leaving a lover behind for the sake of a safe pregnancy). Remember that different areas of the world, or even different areas of a particular neighborhood, can have wildly varying norms. For romance manuscripts in particular, you’ll want to think about things like: 

• What age people usually start dating (13, 35, etc.)
• Where people find others to date (for instance, a local diner or a phone app) and what those dates normally look like (i.e., hunting, volunteering, or visiting an art exhibit)
• What, if anything, symbolizes that people are dating (wearing matching outfits, exchanging promise rings, and so on.)
• What the stages of relationships are (for example, friends, then lovers, then exclusive dating partners, then parents, then spouses)
• How people normally deal with heartbreak such as breakups, cheating, or divorce (like revenge pranks, physical violence, rebound relationships, binge-eating, or drug abuse)
• What someone needs to do to propose dating exclusively or getting married (talk to their beloved’s parents, bring a defeated predator to their love interest’s hut, etc.)
• How someone looking for love is “supposed to” dress, look, or behave.
• What roles people are expected to fill when dating or married (i.e., breadwinner or homemaker).
• What people consider “love” in this world, as opposed to “lust,” “friendliness,” or “being polite.”
• The most desired traits for a romantic partner, such as wealth, fitness, power, intelligence, or kindness.

Once you establish the “normal” of your world, you can have fun with writing characters who have desires and preferences that go against those norms. These “outlier” traits also can be a good source of conflict between your central character and their families, co-workers, siblings, and other important people in their lives (including their love interest!). 

After establishing your series world, you can drop in a few recurring characters who will be present throughout the series. Think Simon Basset or the Featheringtons in Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series. Though the series doesn’t focus on them throughout every single book, they have their moments, and their consistent presence helps to provide an immersive sense of place for readers. 

Barata can always be found in the smokehouse. Every Friday night, Kasumi buys a gallon of “Death by Chocolate” ice cream. Tionna burns herself at least once a year while trying to create hydrogen-powered drones in her backyard. Characters like these have a subtle way of making a place feel multifaceted and fully formed. Like the world itself, your reader slowly gets to know these people and comes to have opinions of them. In this way, you’re encouraging your reader to establish various emotional ties to the setting you’ve created. 

These characters also can aid in the exploration of the world. One book centers around the new owner of the butcher shop downtown (so your reader will at least see, if not formally meet, Barata there). Another book may involve a cashier looking for love and money and not finding much of either at the grocery store (where he speculates about the motivation for Kasumi’s weekend binges). Still another book highlights the local research and development firm for a technology company (that Tionna desperately wishes she could work for). With all of these places being in various parts of a city, serving and employing people who live in different areas, these characters help give your reader a tour of the world you built in a way that feels fun and organic. 

Create a list of at least three ongoing roles in your world. These would include things like leadership (chiefton, city council member, mayor, etc.), teachers (university professors, self-defense instructors, and so on), tradespeople (carpenters, mechanics, woodworkers, or tailors), and entertainers (singers, dancers, musicians, athletes, etc.). 

For each of these roles, create a general sketch (with words or images) of what kind of person fills that position. What does a day in their life look like (what stores do they frequent, who are they dating, how many kids are they raising)? 

In each book that’s part of the series, you can keep things fresh by having characters go on business trips out of town or need to visit the curmudgeon that lives in the rundown mansion on the outskirts of the city. Each couple you spotlight can meet in a different area of town, interact with new characters there, and gradually, naturally show your reader more of the world that you developed. Every now and then, you may even want to pull one of your supporting characters (the mayor, the librarian, the park ranger) into a love story all their own. 

World building is a critical aspect of writing a romance series that sticks with readers and keeps them coming back for more. If you can change the setting of your story without affecting the story itself (at least a little bit), you probably need to do some more work on the the environment you created (wouldn’t taking place on Mars drastically change Outlander?). Take the ideas above and get to work. Start putting together the pieces of the new world of romance that your fans won’t want to stop reading about! 


Tenesha L. Curtis, MSSW is an indie author, screenwriter, and managing editor at Volo Press Books. She uses her formal training as a psychotherapist to inform her gripping fiction and easy-to-understand guidebooks for writers. Learn more about her work at http://TeneshaLCurtis.com.