Breaking With Tradition

Anyone who's spent any time writing romance knows one of the cardinal rules of the genre is that the initial meeting of the hero and heroine must take place no later than Chapter Two.


I never liked following the rules.

My current WIP features a couple who are operating under false pretenses, not of their own making. She had been informed of his death six years ago, on a far-away battlefield. He had been informed of her marriage to another. He's a spy now, involved in an undercover operation and has assumed a different identity. So a meeting in the first chapter or two would undermine the entire concept of the book.

But what to do? If hero and heroine don't even have a conversation until page 100, how can I get around it, do what is expected of a romance and let them interact with each other? This is where brainstorming with my writing buddies pays off. We kicked around a couple of ideas and I finally decided a few lusty dream sequences by the heroine were in order. I've been adding in little snippets of dreams here and there before page 100, and it seems to be working. Maybe add in some fog, since the setting is London, after all.


I'll let you know how it pans out in the long run.