Romance Cliches I Love: The Best Romance Tropes, In My Opinion #favorite romance tropes #tropes in romance novels #romantic tropes #romantic comedy tropes #contemporary romance tropes #romance tropes list

Hey friends! Last week, I shared a few of the worst romance tropes, in my opinion—but plenty of people love those tropes, so it wasn’t meant to be taken too seriously. This week, I’m sharing a list of romance cliches I love.

Wait a minute, you might be saying. Aren’t cliches bad? Eh, not really. Readers can enjoy romantic tropes again and again as long as they’re done in a fresh way. (And on the other hand, they might not enjoy a book with one of their favorite romance tropes if it isn’t handled well.)

 

Even though I think these are the best romance tropes, they might be ones you loathe. That’s okay! It would be boring if everybody liked the same thing! And this is really only a partial list of romance cliches I love. If I wrote about all of them, this post would take hours to read.

 

Romance Cliches I Love: The Best Romance Tropes, In My Opinion #favorite romance tropes #tropes in romance novels #romantic tropes #romantic comedy tropes #contemporary romance tropes #romance tropes list

 

tortured hero with a tragic past

There are lots of these in romance! They had horrible childhoods, survivor’s guilt, they saw terrible things in the war, they made a fatal mistake, and so on. I will never get tired of it. I like tortured heroines, too. It’s easy to root for a character who’s been through hell.

bromance

Okay, this is not really a romance trope; it’s just something that I love in a M/F romance story. A bromance subplot, or at least the hero having a close relationship with a brother or male friend, is something I really enjoy. It’s like a second scoop of emotion added to the story. One of the first romances I ever read (and I came to the genre very late) was The Devil You Know by Liz Carlyle, an emotional Regency romance. The tortured hero with the tragic past and the estranged brothers plot riveted me.

opposites attract

This one is so much fun! The tightly wound character with the free spirit…the soldier and the peacemaker…the scientist and the psychic…the brooding person and the cheery person…you get the idea. It’s so versatile that it’s no wonder it’s such a popular contemporary romance trope.

In an opposites attract romance, the characters complement each other and help each other grow. Often, they share core values, despite how different they appear on the surface. It’s usually a romantic comedy trope, but it can work in more serious stories, too.

amnesia romance

I love amnesia stories! (And not just in romance—the Jason Bourne movies are some of my very favorites.) Retrograde amnesia is much more common in fiction than in real life, but I find both fictional and real-life accounts of amnesia absolutely fascinating. They bring up such interesting questions about the nature of relationships and identity. That’s one of the reasons I wrote The Equinox Stone.

time travel

Specifically, I like a guy from another era in the present day, being all charming and bewildered and not exactly appropriate. (A Timeless Christmas, which we published at my workplace, is one example!) If I met an actual guy from another century, he’d probably annoy the hell out of me with his prejudices, but hey, this is fantasy.

virgin hero or heroine

The latter is much less common, though there are a couple of very popular examples. I like either one—not in every story, but once in a while, you know? A virgin is inherently vulnerable, which makes things more emotional, and it’s enjoyable to see someone learn new things and experience things for the first time. I also have a virginal heroine in The Equinox Stone, and one of my favorite all-time virgin hero romances is Thief of Shadows by Elizabeth Hoyt. The virgin hero or heroine is more popular, I think, as a historical romance trope than a contemporary romance trope, but you see it plenty in both.

the person with the big secret

They’re falling in love, but if one of them knew the truth about the other, it would all blow up! Good stuff.

 

Romance Cliches I Love: The Best Romance Tropes, In My Opinion #favorite romance tropes #tropes in romance novels #romantic tropes #romantic comedy tropes #contemporary romance tropes #romance tropes list

 

Do you have favorite romance tropes? Do you love or hate some of the romance cliches here? Let me know in the comments!

And if you’re interested in a step-by-step way to plan, write, and edit a novel so it’s polished and ready to publish (whether it’s romance, or any genre), pre-order my book Blank Page to Final Draft. You can do one step a week for a year…it fits right into your busy life. Or if you want to go faster and do two, three, or four steps a week, you can do that, too! It’s based on the free series I’m doing right now on YouTube!

 

Blank Page to Final Draft by Bryn Donovan ebook

 

 

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re having a great week!

Related Posts

14 thoughts on “The Best Romance Tropes, In My Opinion

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Discover more from BRYN DONOVAN

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading