Casey McQuiston's Red, White & Royal Blue became a phenomenon. It hit bestseller lists, got a movie deal, launched a thousand fan accounts. But if you're trying to learn how to write sapphic romance, the more interesting book to study is One Last Stop.
The protagonist, August, is bisexual. She falls for Jane, a woman stuck in a time loop on a New York City subway car. McQuiston made a choice early in that book that changed everything about how the love story landed: she treated the queerness as a given. August's bisexuality isn't the obstacle. The time loop is the obstacle. The question isn't will she accept who she loves but can she save the person she loves before it's too late. That distinction freed McQuiston to write a romance where the tension came from the relationship itself, from two people learning each other under impossible conditions, rather than from the fact that they were both women.
I keep coming back to that choice because it clarifies something about WLW romance writing that newer writers often get tangled up in. The question isn't whether queerness matters in your story. It does. The question is what role you're asking it to play.
Queerness as context, not as conflict
There's a generation of sapphic romance that built entire plots around coming out. The central tension was internal: a woman realizing she's attracted to another woman, fighting it, eventually accepting it. Those stories mattered enormously. They still do for readers who need that particular mirror.
But something has shifted. Readers increasingly want stories where queerness is the water the characters swim in, not the wall they're trying to climb. The couple can be out from page one. The families can be accepting. The world can be, if not fully safe, at least not the primary source of pain.
This doesn't mean conflict disappears. It means the conflict gets to be specific. Two women can argue about money, or ambition, or whether to move across the country for a job. They can hurt each other in ways that have nothing to do with their orientation and everything to do with who they are as individuals. When you let go of queerness-as-plot-engine, you gain access to all the same human friction that drives any romance.
The craft question is where you set the dial. Some stories need the coming-out arc. Many more are waiting for writers brave enough to skip past it.
Writing attraction without the male gaze
This is the part that trips up even experienced romance writers.
Attraction scenes between women have a specific inherited problem. Decades of film, television, and fiction have trained us to see two women together through a camera positioned for a male audience. The lighting is soft. The bodies are arranged for someone who isn't in the room. The desire belongs to the viewer, not the characters.