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Important Information About Our Instructor-Led Courses
Our courses are asynchronous, meaning you never need to be at your computer at any specific hour. Instructors provide guidance through forum discussions and feedback on assignments. More information about our courses and webinars is available here.
After you place your order, your course will be added to your personal course library on our education site. That site has different login information from the main EFA site. Please check your email for information on how to access the course.
If these dates don’t work for you, sign up to be notified when the next session of this course is open for registration.
This deep dive into romance will help developmental editors build genre toolkits. Though being familiar with the romance genre is a plus, it's not required. Students should have experience with developmental editing and a strong understanding of story structure fundamentals.
All the basics of romance — story beats, tropes, and even the history of the genre — will be covered. We'll read a wide array of romance excerpts and one complete novel, and you'll get direct instructor feedback on several short assignments and then a complete developmental edit (including editorial letter) of a short novella.
- Week 1: We'll read After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez and identify the narrative beats, filling out the beat sheet from Gwen Hayes's Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels.
- Week 2: We'll identify the tropes and archetypes in After Hours on Milagro Street and how they contribute to the narrative, and also identify the tropes and archetypes listed in the back cover copy of several other romances.
- Week 3: We'll take a deeper look at the "rules" of romance, review the history of the romance genre, and study examples of books that subvert tropes and otherwise go against expectations.
- Week 4: We'll discuss sex on the page: how it functions, what it can do within a narrative, and how it can be hot (or funny, or tense). You will also receive a short novella to developmentally edit, which will be due at the end of Week 5 as your final project.
- Week 5: We'll go over the summary sheet and discuss how editors can help writers receive feedback.
You should expect to spend five to seven hours per week on classwork and forum discussions with the instructor and other students. You'll come away from this class knowing everything you need to begin providing developmental editing services to romance writers.
Required materials:
- After Hours on Milagro Street by Angelina M. Lopez
- Romancing the Beat: Story Structure for Romance Novels by Gwen Hayes
Our students say...
The content was well-organized, the forum questions and exercises were good practice, and Megan's feedback on the summary sheet helped clarify how to practically apply what we were learning. —C.W.
Before I took this course, I was developmental editing romance novels based on intuition, but now I know the terms to use when commenting on my clients' work. —M.A.
Age Restriction
You must be 18 or older, as of the course start date, to enroll in this course.
Megan Hennessey (she/her) is a freelance writer, instructor, and developmental editor. She got her start in romance at the height of 50 Shades of Grey at Sourcebooks Casablanca reading the slush pile. She continues sharing her love for romance by giving workshops and courses at writers' groups, the Women in Publishing Summit, and the Editorial Freelancers Association. She loves romance novels that break the rules and center queer, kinky characters.
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