Write Workplace Romances with Donna Hill

Write along with Donna’s playlist!

Prompt #1: Against Policy

You meet your dream mate at work, but it’s against policy to “fraternize.” Write a scene where you almost get caught.

Prompt #2: Passed Over

You swore you were over and done with your significant other. Then they wind up working at the same job as you and getting the promotion that you wanted! Write the scene when you find out that you’ve been passed over for your ex.

Q&A with Donna Hill

Since you’ve written multiple romance books, how do you come up with individual plots?

Oh, so that they don’t all sound the same? I think a lot of it has to do with—at least for me—my interest. I’m interested in a lot of different things. And so those interests spark story ideas and I think that that’s a large part of it. I get inspired by somebody’s name, I get inspired by watching a news clip. I can get inspired by a headline, a song title, all sorts of things, conversations that I have that I have had.

So I’m always inspired by different things, and I think that that’s probably the centerpiece. And I think for writers, in order to maintain your creativity, you have to be engaged. Even though writing is a solitary type of activity, you still have to be engaged in the world because that’s where your inspiration comes from. From listening to conversations and reading. You know, you have to read in order to write, you have to read. All of those things continue to inspire me.

How do you write romance without making it cringey, predictable, or doubting yourself every second?

I try to stay away from, you know, the typical tropes in romance. I did a Girls Write Now romance writing workshop last year on how to actually craft the novel. We went over all of the different tropes, and what you want to really think about is, you know, with these tropes, how can you think out of that trope box? What can you add to it?

The thing of it is, there’s no story that hasn’t been told. There’s only thirty-six dramatic plots, essentially. And so there’s nine zillion trillion books. And books have been written across, you know, ages and times. And everybody comes at that story with their own perspective. It comes back to what I was saying earlier about keeping yourself open to the world and to, you know, what’s happening around you. Those are the things that will make your voice unique because you can tell the same story about—because romance is boy meets girl. They have a problem. They break up, they get back together, they have some more problems, and they live happily ever after at the end. That’s the story. But what are you going to do differently? What is it that inspires you? What story do you want to see told? One of Toni Morrison’s favorite famous lines and I’ll kind of paraphrase, you know, she said, you have to write the story that you want to read.

Which techniques do you find best work when developing romantic sexual tension?

That’s a good question because a lot of times, you know, my editors will come back and say we need to heighten the sexual tension. It’s like, what does that even mean exactly? I try to do a lot of the internal. It’s not so much physical contact all the time, but it’s getting inside the character’s head and emotions to know how they’re responding when he or she walks into the room. Thinking back to the last time that they were together, what they could have said, you know, those types of things before any physical culmination of their relationship. Because once that happens, that the dynamics of the relationship change altogether.

It’s almost like when you watch some of your favorite television shows and you always have and you have the male and female character, the buddies or whatever. And there’s always all this sexual tension between them. You’re always thinking, when are they going to get together? Just let them get together already. But as soon as they do, then they wind up breaking up and it becomes this horrible kind of thing. Especially in romance, that’s generally also what happens. You know, they’ll have this intensity for each other, they get together physically, something happens to break them apart. So you have all of those different types of elements.

I think for me, a lot of it has to do with the conflict that I set up between the characters from the beginning. And that often contributes to the tension as well as the sexual tension between them, whatever that conflict or that interest is, because they usually are at opposite ends of this central idea that I’ve set up.

What is your writing process like? Was there a point before you became a professor where you worked full-time in an office in addition to writing? How did you balance writing with raising children and other responsibilities?

That’s a loaded question. And yes, yes, yes to all of that. I always worked. I still work. I worked a full-time job when I was writing. I used to take the subway to work, so I always had a notebook with me. This was pre-laptop and, you know, Kindles and everything. I would write by longhand, in my notebook, on the train going to work. On my way back home, I was writing. When I put my kids to bed at night, I would get on the typewriter and type, and that’s how I worked. Whenever I travel, I write.

I’m not one of those disciplined writers that has to get up at 5 a.m. and write from 5am to 7am. Because of the way my life was, I trained myself to write whenever opportunity presented itself. If I get a break at work in between classes and I’m working on something, I can sit down and start writing just in the middle of my day.

That’s how it works for me. Whenever I teach writing classes, I do not teach that scenario to aspiring writers. They really have to find a process for themselves. That’s how I balanced it. When my kids were younger and I was going on a book tour, I would take them with me. So, you know, they kind of saw what mom did and that was fine. And then when they grew up, they really didn’t care. So I just kind of did my thing, but so that’s kind of how it works for me. You know, you have to find a rhythm for yourself. 

From concept to finished product, it depends. Like my novel Confessions in B-Flat that they’re getting ready to make a movie out of? The idea for it was probably about a decade ago. It was just an idea that sat in the back of my head that I just never got around to writing about. And then as I started working on it, it probably took about a year to do, which is long for me because there was so much research involved and, you know, getting particular rights to images and recordings and things like that. So that took a lot. But normally my Harlequin romances, they probably take about maybe three months to write from start to finish once I start working on it. So that’s usually how long it’ll take.

This event was originally recorded on March 24th, 2023.