How I Write Romantic Comedy With My Husband

Hint: There are a lot of rude jokes, laughter and swearing…

On paper, Tony and I are the last people you’d imagine in a writing partnership. We’re polar opposites, but we’re twenty years into our relationship and have been writing romantic comedy for ten.

He’s an engineer who recently spent his time troubleshooting for international oil and gas corporations. He had a liberal middle-class suburban upbringing with all the perks that came with it, including overseas holidays, going to the theatre, the cinema and attending after-school activities. His parents drove a nice car and they lived in the same house his entire childhood. It’s the stuff of an eighties sitcom.

I, on the other hand am a former aspiring liberal Arts academic who started out as a working class kid from the Australian Outback. I didn’t go to the cinema until I was in my teens and had sure as hell never attended the theatre. I was raised hand-milking cows, raising sheep, pigs, goats and every other critter in between. I rarely wore shoes and most of my clothes were hand-me-downs. In my childhood home, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ were a thing, and by the time I was nineteen, I’d lived in over twenty small towns and Australian cities.

Improbably, we met at an amusement park in Sydney on a roller coaster ride. In hindsight that ride was a giant metaphor for the life we’re leading today, but at the time we were just horny and keen to get into each other’s pants!

So how’d it all work out? How did we start writing romantic comedy and how do we manage to get words down on the page without using up all the soft furnishings in our house as missiles?

I can safely say that it all kicked off ten years into our relationship, when Tony took a job in Saudi Arabia. I found myself standing in the romance aisle of a local book store chatting to a veiled Saudi woman about our favourite Lisa Kleypas novels. It didn’t matter that we were from completely different social, religious or cultural backgrounds. What mattered was that we could connect over books we loved and I walked away from the conversation feeling electric. It got me thinking.

By the time I got home to our heavily guarded expatriate compound, I’d made my decision to try writing my first romance novel and I didn’t think twice about including Tony in the process as both a plot-brainstormer and beta reader. And much to our surprise, it worked perfectly!

Who am I kidding?

It took nearly three years for us to get used to working together without almost murdering each other. It turns out that an extremely blunt engineer giving criticism to a former academic specialising in the kind of neurosis that only Chihuahuas manage can result in arguments. Who knew?

There’s no way in hell any author wants to be a part of the following very real interaction:

Tony: “You’ve included too many boobs in this scene, pumpkin. Your heroine has three boobs. Three boobs is not the right number.”

Me: “I’m a woman! I know how many boobs there are!”

Tony: “Then why are there three in this scene?”

Me: “I don’t know! One snuck in. How am I supposed to help it if a boob sneaks in to a scene?”

Tony: (Getting frustrated now.) “Boob wrangling is your job. Do your job. It can’t be that hard. One boob. Two boobs. Three boobs? Oh? That’s one too many. Simple. Get rid of the third boob.”

Me: (Reaches for a projectile.)

Rehashing the memory of this particular argument, I can kind of see how we ended up writing romantic comedies! Maybe it works because we’re so different. We end up taking any writing argument to such extremes that they get ridiculous and we crack each other up. There have been so many times we’ve sat in cafes, coming up with plot ideas, cackling at the ridiculous thing the other person’s said. It’s what makes this job so much fun.

Nowadays, I couldn’t imagine the two of us not writing together.

There was a moment last night that made me aware of just how great it is to have a writing partner. I was working on a scene where my hero and heroine were meant to be indulging in a bit of sexy banter. I wrote a draft and showed it to Tony who promptly started laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever read. I asked him what the heck I’d written that was so hilarious and his reply was:

“Your characters are yawning all the time! Go to sleep and rewrite this in the morning. Anyone would think they want to have sex with their pillows. We don’t write pillow humping erotica. Or we could. But that’s a whole different genre.”

Instead of sparking up and getting offended, I reread the scene, saw exactly what he meant and took myself off to bed. I rewrote it this morning and this time Tony was laughing for the right reasons. It’s an awesome scene and it’s all the better because I know someone’s got my back.