It is essential to have the right idea and craft characters with emotional baggage that afford compelling conflict. But more importantly, you need to use that conflict to propel your story. To move your narrative forward, you need to work with your story idea and the core of the tension between your hero and heroine. In this article, we explore helpful tips on how to highlight and maximize conflict for the progress of a riveting romance novel.

1. Keep Them Together

Your hero and heroine need to physically be in each other’s presence a lot throughout your story. This proximity allows them to focus on their emotional issues. A powerful romantic plot puts the main characters together from the first few scenes, despite how difficult it may be for them to connect emotionally. There shouldn't be a long space in your narrative where these characters are far apart.

Your plot is a perfect tool for bringing your hero and heroine together all the time. The hero and heroine having to work together on a project, or one needing the constant assistance of the other, are plot ideas that can ensure they are always together. Proximity gives a reader the chance to see the characters display their internal, emotional conflicts.

2. Let the Plot Influence the Conflict

Allow the emotional conflict to complicate your plot. Let the emotional conflict be affected by the plot and vice versa. When a crucial plot point occurs in your narrative, there should be an emotional response that accompanies it and influences the trajectory of your plot. 

A major revelation about the hero can elevate the heroine’s affection toward him or make her build an emotional wall to block him out. And the occurrence of another event can make her see him in a different light that causes her walls to crumble.

3. Make It a Bumpy Ride

Your romance narrative shouldn't read like one smooth ride around the park. It needs to be a bumpy ride through hectic traffic. When the hero and heroine take a step closer to each other, it should be followed by them taking two steps away from each other. There needs to be this back-and-forth to keep your readers invested in your story, wondering when and how it will all end.

Mount a lot of hurdles on their part to emotional closure. Follow every progress with a reversal. They can kiss in one scene, and in the next, they refuse to talk to each other, probably because one of them feels betrayed or is reminded to keep her guard up.

4. Exploit Sexual Tension

Sexual tension can provide additional strategies for highlighting the conflict in romance. It starts from the first time the hero and heroine set eyes on each other and continues throughout the narration. Sexual tension emanates from sexual longing. And if your hero and heroine are meant to be together, it only intensifies when you drive more conflict between them.

Readers need to feel the need for your characters to be physically intimate and even make it theirs as well. After all, this is what sets a couple’s intimacy apart from everything else. It’s the ultimate prize. Their sexual longing reminds them of what they want and can’t have — what they’re missing when they fail to sort out their emotions.

5. Delay the Declaration of Love

To maintain emotional tension between the hero and the heroine, you need to save “I love you” for the right time, which is usually not the beginning or middle of your plot. This can come at the climax of your romance, right before the denouement begins. The quickest way to dissolve both sexual tension and the force of your emotional conflict is to have your characters confess their love. Afterward, all suspense is gone. So timing is very essential.

Your hero and heroine can recognize their feelings towards each other at any point in the story, without each of them knowing if the feeling is mutual. But you must make their feelings believable. Readers need to see these feelings in your characters as the narrative progresses. Make them fully witness the development and step-by-step solution of the emotional conflict.