Writing a love story without the déjà-vu

How I build my characters so their love feels like a discovery, not a formula.

Romance is a genre we often underestimate, as if telling a love story were simpler than telling a war or a mystery. It's quite the opposite. To make a sincere love felt, without it seeming written in advance, demands meticulous, almost surgical, work on the characters.

My first rule is to never begin with the love story itself. I begin with two whole people, with their wounds, their habits, their small cowardices. If each of my characters could exist alone, in their own story, without ever crossing the other's path, then their meeting will carry weight. Conversely, two characters built only to complete each other produce a romance that rings hollow, because you can feel they exist only for one another.

I'm also wary of artificial obstacles, the misunderstanding a single message would have resolved, the rival whose only function is to delay the inevitable. The real obstacles, the ones that make a story memorable, come from inside the characters: a fear of reliving an old pain, a loyalty to someone else, a version of themselves they're not yet ready to give up. These are obstacles you can't resolve in a single sentence, because they require someone to change, not merely to understand.

I also like to take my time. Love at first sight exists, but it's almost never what I most enjoy writing. What interests me is the instant just before a character admits it to themselves, that moment when they start inventing excuses to stay a little longer in a room, without yet understanding why.

Finally, I believe deeply in small gestures rather than grand declarations. A jacket held out without a word. A question asked for the third time, just to hear the answer once more. It's those details, more than solemn promises, that make a reader close a book thinking: yes, I believed it.

Writing romance without cliché isn't about inventing situations never seen before. It's about making familiar situations true, and that depends only on the characters you choose to build.

And you, what small gesture, in a love story, made you believe in what you were reading?