How to Write Romantasy That Balances Plot and Romance

In the fall of 2019, Sarah J. Maas was sitting across from an interviewer at New York Comic Con when she said something that stuck with me. She was talking about writing A Court of Mist and Fury, the second book in her ACOTAR series, and she mentioned that the entire plot of that novel, the war, the politics, the courts, grew out of one question: what would Feyre need to go through to be ready to fall in love again?

The fantasy didn't come first. The romance didn't come first. The emotional need came first, and then both grew out of it like two branches from the same trunk.

Most writers trying to figure out how to write romantasy don't start there. They start with the world or they start with the love interest. And then they spend months trying to stitch those two halves together, wondering why the seams keep showing.

The ones who get it right tend to do something different. They find the place where the plot and the romance are the same thing.

How to Write Romantasy: Make the Romance Load-Bearing

There's a concept in architecture called a load-bearing wall. You can tear out most walls in a building and it'll stand. But take out a load-bearing wall and the whole structure collapses. That's what the romance needs to be in a romantasy novel. If you can remove the love story and the plot still works, you've written a fantasy novel with a subplot. Which is fine. But it isn't romantasy.

Look at what Carissa Broadbent does in The Serpent and the Wings of Night. Oraya enters the Kejari, a tournament to the death, and her alliance with Raihn isn't a side attraction to the competition. It is the competition. Every time they grow closer, the stakes of the tournament shift. Every time the tournament tightens, the relationship has to bend. You literally can't talk about one without talking about the other.

That's what I mean by load-bearing. The romance carries weight in the plot. The plot puts pressure on the romance. Neither is decoration.

The Scene That Does Two Things at Once

Jennifer L. Armentrout once mentioned in a newsletter that she tries to make sure no scene in her books does only one job. A conversation that reveals political information also has to shift the dynamic between the two leads. A fight sequence also has to be the moment one character realizes they'd die for the other.

I'm not sure why this works as well as it does, but I think it's because readers of romantasy aren't switching between two modes of attention. They're not reading for plot and then reading for romance. They're reading for feeling, and the feeling has to be continuous.

When you write a scene that's only plot, the emotional temperature drops. When you write a scene that's only romance, the sense of consequence disappears. The best romantasy scenes do both at once, and the reader can't separate them even if they wanted to.

Pacing the Romantasy Plot: When to Pull Them Together and When to Pull Them Apart

Holly Black does something interesting with pacing in The Cruel Prince. Jude and Cardan spend most of the book in opposition. They're barely circling each other. And then, very late, there's a shift. The timing matters because Black spent hundreds of pages building the political plot to a point where Jude's alliance with Cardan isn't just romantic, it's the most dangerous political move she could make.

A lot of writers bring their leads together too early. Or they keep pushing them apart with manufactured misunderstandings. The trick, if you can call it that, is to let the plot be the thing that controls the distance between your characters. Not miscommunication. Not jealousy. The actual stakes of the world they're living in.

Think of it like a tide. The plot pulls them together, then the consequences of being together push them apart, and the cycle gets more intense each time because the stakes in both the world and the relationship keep climbing.

Writing Romantasy Readers Actually Trust

There's one more thing worth saying about learning how to write romantasy, and it's the thing that's hardest to teach. Readers of this genre are incredibly literate in both fantasy and romance. They've read hundreds of books. They know when you're faking the fantasy elements to get to the kissing scenes. They know when you're faking the romance to justify the worldbuilding. They can feel it.

You have to actually care about both halves. That sounds obvious but I think a lot of writers secretly prefer one side. They're really a fantasy writer who added a romance, or a romance writer who added magic. And the side they don't love as much always reads thin.

The readers can tell. They always can.

I think about this a lot when I sit down to write in the morning. The best work I've done has always been the work where I stopped treating different elements of a story as separate problems to manage and started treating them as one thing, one living system where pulling on any thread moves everything else.

That's what the best romantasy does. It doesn't balance plot and romance like a person balancing plates on sticks. It grows them from the same root.

If you're a romantasy writer and you want a daily reflection to sit with before you open your draft, that's what we send every morning at The Writer's Daily Practice. It's free, it's short, and it's built for writers who take their work seriously.

How to Write Romantasy: Make the Romance Load-Bearing

The Scene That Does Two Things at Once

Pacing the Romantasy Plot: When to Pull Them Together and When to Pull Them Apart

Writing Romantasy Readers Actually Trust

Stop staring at the blank page. Start writing with purpose.