A deep dive into novel structure: Romantasy

How to write a swoon-worthy sword and sorcery story (say that three times fast).

If you’re a citizen of the internet and a reader, it’s likely that at some point you’ve fallen down the BookTok rabbit hole and emerged in Romantasy wonderland.

For those that haven’t: The term “romantasy” is a portmanteau of the romance and fantasy genres, and is used to refer to romance novels set in a fantasy world.

On TikTok, there are a combined 473.3K posts with romantasy tags. On Instagram the number of tagged posts is nearly double at 797K.

Here’s a chart from Google Trends showing search interest in “romantasy” over just the last 2 years:

Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular.

And, bear in mind that last year was the first year that Goodreads added Romantasy as a stand-alone category in the annual Goodreads Choice awards.

Romantasy has a growing fanbase of dedicated readers, and it’s carved out a new sub-genre.

So, how to write one? I wanted to understand what it would look like to combine a classic romance novel structure (like Gwen Hayes' classic Romancing the Beat) with an action-adventure plot that suits a more traditional fantasy story (for this, I used Shawn Coyne's Story Grid approach to outlining a novel with a good vs evil plot) to see if I could construct a romantasy novel template.

Here’s what I came up with…

The ultimate guide to writing a romantasy novel

If you want to dive straight in, you can check it out here: Romantasy Novel Template.

• This template is designed for a 90,000-word novel — Romance novels are typically fast-paced, and between 50K–90K words. Fantasy novels require more time for worldbuilding, and so can be up to 150K words long. By that guideline, a romantasy novel should be around 80K–120K words to balance pacing and worldbuilding.

• I’ve included classic romantasy tropes in the guide, but you can dive into the full collection of articles on tropes here.

• There’s a lot of speculation about where the line between fantasy romance and romantasy lies, with many readers and writers arguing that romantasy requires a happy ending (even if it’s a temporary one), while fantasy romance can go either way. This template ends on a happily ever after/happy for now beat.

• A template is just a guideline. It's your book! You might want to shift some moments from one chapter to another, or have them happen “off the page”.

Next in templates

There’s already a Nanowrimo template in First Draft Pro, that guides you through writing a 50K word novel in 30 days.

Next up, we’ll add this romantasy template to the app so that you can start a project based on this guide.

Thanks for being awesome!

And since we’re talking about romantasy, please indulge my soppiness: I’m so grateful to every single person who subscribes to First Draft Pro because you guys make it possible for me to continue building the app.

If you aren’t a paid subscriber and you want to support future feature development:

1. The best way to do this is by becoming a paid subscriber (assuming you can afford it, and assuming you would get value from the premium account).

2. The second best way to support is by sharing! Whether that’s telling friends, resharing social posts, or forwarding newsletters like this one to people who you think would care!

Regardless: Thank you so much for being here! You’re the literal best.