Writers With Wrinkles: Patience Bloom on Romance Writing
Patience Bloom, a freelance book editor with 26 years of experience in romance publishing, joins Beth McMullen and Lisa Schmid on the podcast Writers With Wrinkles.
Key points:
Patience Bloom's additional insights:
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Timestamps:
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Writers With Wrinkles: Patience Bloom on Romance Writing
Patience Bloom, a freelance book editor with 26 years of experience in romance publishing, joins Beth McMullen and Lisa Schmid on the podcast Writers With Wrinkles.
Key points:
Patience Bloom's additional insights:
Links:
Timestamps:
Website: https://www.writerswithwrinkles.net/
Threads: @WritersWithWrinkles
Insta: @WritersWithWrinkles
Twitter: @BethandLisaPod
Support Writers With Wrinkles - become a subscriber
Email: Beth@BethMcMullenBooks.com
Writers with Wrinkles Link Tree for more!
Hi friends, I'm Beth McMullen and I'm Lisa Schmid, and we're the co-hosts of Riders with Wrinkles. This is season three, episode 10. And today we are excited to welcome Patience Bloom to the show. Patience is a freelance book editor with 26 years of romance publishing experience. In addition to reading everything, she is the author of her own true romance. Romance is my day job, whose lesson is that happily ever after can strike at any age. So welcome, Patience. Thank you for being here. We are very excited to have you.
Patience Bloom:Thank you so much. This is a pleasure.
Beth McMullen:So for our audience, patience and I went to boarding school together many, many, many years ago. We sure did. And one of the great things about boarding school is, if you live in California and you say you went to boarding school, people automatically assume you're in some sort of juvenile detention center. So whenever I say that, people are like, oh my god, what did you do? Like I had committed some grievous crime, but it wasn't like that, it was all in the up and up.
Patience Bloom:Yes, it was no for me. My grandparents lived in the town where our boarding school was, so it was very lenient. So I got to go visit my grandmother and get my grandparents and get this great meal on Sundays. You got to escape.
Beth McMullen:Yes, that would have made it very, very different, I think.
Lisa Schmid:Did you guys get in trouble together? Were you like drinking in the back or anything fun like that?
Patience Bloom:Patience was way too smart to hang out with me and I got in trouble, apart from you. What did you do? This is really stupid. I love stupid, but I just smoked a cigarette in my room.
Lisa Schmid:That's it.
Beth McMullen:That was an offense.
Patience Bloom:That was an offense. I did other things too, but I did not get caught.
Beth McMullen:That was the key element of all of it. How much could you get away with? Everybody was smoking cigarettes out their windows. Yes, you had to rebel a little bit because it was so grueling. When I look back on it now, they're going to school six days a week. Oh my god, yes, what was?
Patience Bloom:that about?
Beth McMullen:I don't know. We had classes on Saturday, and when I say that to people now they just look stunned.
Lisa Schmid:Are you guys sure that this wasn't like a juvenile detention center? And you're just now figuring it out?
Beth McMullen:It felt like it.
Patience Bloom:No, it was just old school at its best. You know what I mean. Or edits whatever you think.
Lisa Schmid:Edits worse.
Patience Bloom:Six days a week.
Beth McMullen:Yeah, you just got used to it. You did. It didn't even seem like a thing. You had one day off and everybody stayed up all night. Nobody ever slept. It was like nobody. We ate badly, we didn't do the right kind of exercise. We stayed up all night. It was so unhealthy.
Patience Bloom:Yeah, constant moving around.
Beth McMullen:Yeah, yeah. As soon as I started writing books, I was so obsessed with using that setting because it's so unique. It just it comes into focus for people really quickly, like this is what they think it is. So I had wanted to use it and I just couldn't figure out, how you know, until I finally did the Mrs Smith Spicebook books, and that was never my intention at the beginning.
Beth McMullen:My whole take on boarding schools is all based on British television and there's always a murder taking place, so I didn't have any murders that I can remember, but you know they maybe would have kept those from us or we would have noticed there were only like what, 550 students. You would have noticed if somebody got murdered, I think yeah yeah.
Beth McMullen:Anyway. So what was great is that patients is not only a veteran romance editor, she also is an author, as I mentioned in the intro, and the man in the story named Sam. He was at boarding school also, which, when you all go out and buy the book and read it because it's excellent, you will be caught up on this.
Patience Bloom:Oh, thank you so much. I appreciate that, and the thing that's so funny about my marrying Sam is the fact that to me he was a celebrity and everybody he hung out with, all of those friends of his, are celebrities. So I get to go to his reunions, so it's like seeing all these people idolized.
Beth McMullen:Because they were this. You know, think about the popular kids in high school and they were fun and they were cool and they were funny and they were all good looking and they had all this stuff. And so if you were an underclassman, you were like, ah, you know that sense of like, I can view them from afar, but I can't get too close, exactly yeah, and that was the first thing.
Patience Bloom:I know this is very charming of me, but when Sam first DM'd me on Facebook I said, oh, you're the popular guy from high school. And he wrote back, unfortunately, yes.
Beth McMullen:I know there's a lot of baggage to go along with that, right, and when you talk to people who you know later in life, who were the popular kids in high school, they're always like, oh God, that was awful. You know, it was a lot of pressure and kind of keeping up this outward appearance or whatever, and everyone's always watching you. So the mistakes you make everyone's like, oh, they did this thing Well. We could reminisce about Taft for days, but we do have some questions for you about romance and writing.
Beth McMullen:Romance and romance right now is suddenly so hot in all the ways that that word can be taken. I just read literally this morning in a newsletter that I get, that I love. It's called the Hot Sheet by Jean Friedman. So romance in five years, the number of romance bookstores in the US has increased 10-fold, which is crazy. The LGBTQ plus romance genre has increased by 40% since 2023. And suddenly bookstores are expanding their romance sections because they're saying the stigma is gone. I'm like, wait, there was a stigma. I mean there definitely was, but suddenly it's coming into the forefront and people are recognizing that it has a lot of readers and people enjoy reading it. And there's, you know, I don't know why they thought that that was something they needed to keep in the shadows, but it's gratifying to see it happen. Oh, absolutely, anyway. So that's why we're excited to talk to you about it, because I know that our listeners are gonna be interested to hear what you have to say.
Lisa Schmid:Yes, yes. So in your extensive experiences of romance editor, what are the key elements that make the protagonist in romance novels resonate with readers?
Patience Bloom:I would say that well, first of all they're the obvious qualities that the protagonist have to have is some element of being lovable, even if they're a little bad and I don't like to use this word, but relatable to some extent.
Patience Bloom:But also I think the characters have to be human and I know that from reading romance novels since the 80s that protagonists have changed a lot. You know you would have these godlike characters, you know, either a hero or heroin who either he's completely awful that has that soft underbelly and then, or she's kind of a doormat and then she finds love, sort of a Cinderella story. But I think that now you have characters who can be vulnerable but also very strong at the same time. And also I find too that with characters they should have some kind of expertise, whether it's, you know, in their career, whether it's how they communicate with people, how they see the world, something that makes them admirable. I mean, in thrillers it's very easy to see the expertise, but I think in romances they, you know, you have to see how somebody is special, and that's one of the bigger points.
Lisa Schmid:Can you give an example of that? I mean, that's really interesting.
Patience Bloom:Sure. So I was thinking of this. Recently I read this Kristen Higgins book. She's one of my favorite authors because she usually has a really great romance in her stories. I wouldn't necessarily call it it's a women's fiction with heavy romance elements in it.
Patience Bloom:But out of the clear blue sky, I remember reading the synopsis for this and thinking to myself I don't think I would like this because it's about a woman who gets dumped, which is such a like cliché I think in romances is she gets dumped and then she tries to find herself and then she meets somebody new. But in this one, the heroine Lily, she's a midwife, slash nurse, so you have like expertise on one level. But she decides she wants revenge and it's over the top revenge. Just you know, dressing as the angel of death at her ex-husband's wedding, just doing everything she can to really things that are kind of funny. But at the same time do I really admire this so much.
Patience Bloom:But the way she does it is, you know, you have her in this world where she's very nurturing to people, to women and their new lives and just all the work that went into that.
Patience Bloom:So you see, on one level, that she's mostly about being nurturing, being these new lives, being there for women. But on the other side there's this part that she has to work on, so it's like that's the vulnerable part, and so I always like to see those those two things at play. So I found that I just I couldn't put this book down, because not only did she have that going, but she had the point of view of the woman, the other woman, and that was fascinating because a totally different person who really wanted money that was her expertise, finding ways to to get money and I admired that. You know, like I thought that was pretty amazing how she did that and just kind of pretty much hoodwinked these men into marrying her. But then, as she goes on, she seems to want love more than anything, and the way it's done was just so beautiful. So I began to like both of these characters equally.
Beth McMullen:Isn't that interesting. I just had two romances that I read. I'm not gonna name them because I didn't particularly like them, but both of them had protagonists who were a drift, who didn't have that expertise that you talk about. They hadn't found a path. They were sort of, you know, drifting along on the currents of life and I didn't. I couldn't latch on to them, I couldn't find a way, and it's funny because I didn't recognize that until you said what you just said. That was the part that kept me from fully engaging in the books, and both of them I stopped reading.
Patience Bloom:Now I read a lot. I've read a lot at many submissions where I think the writer just packs on all the troubles that this heroine has to go through and it's like, well, what else you know?
Lisa Schmid:Do you feel like it's moved away from like the damsel in distress kind of thing, where it's just like this woman has you know, goes in and is like looking to be rescued kind of romance? I mean, has that shifted or is that? Oh?
Patience Bloom:absolutely Just. It's changed so much even since, like the early 2000s, I think, at least in suspense. I worked a lot in suspense where it wasn't so much the heroine whose life was in danger, she was the sheriff or she was, you know, a detective on the same case. So that happened more and more. And I know that on some of the covers too, you've more and more covers are featuring women only, which has become more appealing, I guess, to readers.
Beth McMullen:I think so many of the readers are women. I mean, that's your audience. So one of the central aspects of romance novels is the development of the relationship between the characters, the actual romance part. So what are the most common pitfalls in portraying these romantic relationships and how can writers avoid them? You mentioned some of the more cliched stuff, but what are the things that you see happening repeatedly that you're like don't?
Patience Bloom:do that. The problems that I often see are there's no conflict. The characters are just mad at each other for no reason. There's no deep reason. They could easily just in a few words, settle their misunderstanding or whatever and jump into bed, but you know, it's just drawn out over 250 pages. In a way. That's not. We don't care. So I think that what writers have to do is well, actually, I'll give an example of that. So this may be controversial, but I think that we love controversy.
Patience Bloom:This is controversial because I think that in a romance novel if you wrote Titanic, the movie Jack and Rose I don't think they don't have much internal conflict. You know, there's the iceberg, there's the fact that the ship is going down, there's that life and death. They're on different levels of wealth, but they love each other. They love each other. I mean, sure, she has to marry somebody else, but they love each other. There's nothing other than the outside stuff that's in their way. But to make this juicier, so Jack dies, he doesn't get on the raft and she has to go on, she marries somebody else, but you know, it would be kind of a juicy story and I don't know if it would be doable, but it would be interesting, as if the Billy Zane character could somehow win her. How would he do that? You know the worst person. That would be some interesting conflict. Another example is have you watched Louder Milk? Yes, so I think so.
Patience Bloom:Ron Livingston Berger from Sex and the City. He's recovering alcoholic and he wrote a review that pretty much ruined this woman's career. And he finds her many years later to make amends and she doesn't realize who he is. But then she does, and I thought that was kind of interesting, because why would she let him do that? Like how would she ever be with him again? Because that's like a very vulnerable thing. And then he's in a vulnerable position too, because I mean not as much but trying to build his life up again, to trust in relationships again in any case. But they don't really do much with that, but it's. I thought it was kind of an interesting way to get two people together that shouldn't probably be together.
Beth McMullen:That's a good reference to keep in mind when you're doing this kind of writing that the conflict needs to be real. And maybe, if you look for the things that are more eyebrow raising, the better off you're going to be in the writing, because it gives you something to chew on, as opposed to, like you said, where the two people are just kind of mad at each other for 250 pages and if they just went and had a cup of coffee and hashed it out, then the book wouldn't happen. So I mean good benchmarks to keep in mind. Are you reaching that level of conflict that's going to keep your reader engaged in what's going to happen to these two people? Like you actually are going to care, as opposed to being like there's nothing here.
Lisa Schmid:It's so funny. I'm watching the show called Miss Scarlett and the Duke. Of course it's like a masterpiece BBC thing. You know the two main characters are supposed to fall in love. You know they've got that tension between them and it's three seasons in and they are like no further along in getting together and there's no real conflict. I'm in this chat room, which is pathetic. I know British television and we're all talking about it. We're like it's three seasons, like what are they even fighting about? Like there's no. Like you said, there's no, there's no real reason for them not to be together. And it's just become irritating. It's like those sentences where they stop and then they're like you know they get distracted and they go off instead of finishing this crucial conversation. So you can see people getting irritated and drifting away from the story. And I think the exact same thing happens in books, like if you don't have like a real conflict, like you said, people will get irritated and just close the book.
Patience Bloom:They won't care. I had one more controversy and this is going to just make people mad.
Beth McMullen:There's that's good. Mad people talk about the podcast and then other people listen, so we're here for it.
Patience Bloom:So I'm a firm believer that Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler should never be together. That time is over. If you were going to have them as a couple, it should have happened earlier. I just don't believe it. Now they keep trying to get them to maybe almost kiss and I just think, no, no, 25 years. Really, how it's written anyway, it just doesn't work. They're not and they're not spending any time together. Maybe he gave oh, he gave her a necklace. Who cares?
Beth McMullen:I think that's actually an important point, that timing is critical in how you roll out the romance. Especially in television, people want to avoid that moonlighting moment, which is that your two main characters get together and then all the sort of snap, sizzle and fire is gone, and then what do you do with your show, which I totally understand, but at some point, like you're saying in this example, you run out the rope. It's done, it doesn't work anymore and people are not gonna be vested because you keep on not doing the thing that they expected you to do all these years ago. So you have to be aware of the timeline. I think, when you're writing too, that you aren't waiting too long to have stuff start or doing it too quickly so that it doesn't feel you don't really care because there's been no tension, so that I mean that's actually really interesting.
Patience Bloom:It's interesting you say that, because I'm also thinking of, like pride and prejudice, the timing there is. It seems like a year goes by before they all get together. It seems like more time there, whereas like there's such an urgency to the romance. I feel like an urgency I'm gonna die if they don't get together and I think that in romances you have to have that at least a little bit of that feeling of urgency Like this has to. This romance has to happen.
Lisa Schmid:And I think we've really touched on this. But I just wanna see if you have anything to add in regards to the genre and how it's changed. We've kind of touched on that a little bit. But if there's anything that you wanna add, please do. And what current trends should aspiring writers be aware of? You know, and is that something that you can play to in?
Patience Bloom:the market I mean the trends of the last five years at least is there is more inclusivity, which is great. That seems to me like one of the reasons why romances are much more popular and there's more space for them. Some of the trends I see are witches are back.
Lisa Schmid:Oh my God, my critique partner, catherine, is gonna be so excited to hear this. I can hardly wait to tell her.
Patience Bloom:Last year, the last time I was there at the office, we were talking about witches and wanting more witch romances, sports romances.
Beth McMullen:Can I tell you how stunned I was to realize that hockey romance is its own subgenre.
Patience Bloom:Yeah.
Beth McMullen:Wow, blew my socks off.
Patience Bloom:I know, and so many writers now are being able to realize that dream of writing sports romances, because I think, you know, five years ago it wasn't as like when I'd get submissions, I'd be told yeah, no, we're not interested in that. But witches, and I have to say this this is kind of funny, but if there's a dog in your book or a dog on your cover, I mean, don't hesitate to put a dog in your book.
Beth McMullen:Okay, this is practical advice that everyone listening can use. Go and put a dog in your book. It's not that hard. Lisa has pugs. Lovable dog Like a pug perhaps Any dogs with personality.
Lisa Schmid:That is like is that something that's requested? Like how do you know this? Like how did this come about? Or it's like this is a factoid that you're just like yes, this is real Before I was freelance for, you know, a good, solid couple of years.
Patience Bloom:we did a lot of talking about dogs.
Beth McMullen:Oh my gosh we all got into dogs.
Patience Bloom:It's not something we asked for, but we noticed that dogs were very popular with readers. If you have a dog in a book featured prominently, that's a little secret. We had a similar trend with pregnancies on covers because we noticed on the rack there were like five out of seven pregnant women on the covers and we had to sort of figure out A romances. Yeah, so there are things like that.
Lisa Schmid:It was a weird trend, so that I wouldn't have thought of something like that. That's interesting.
Beth McMullen:I can understand the dogs better than the pregnancies.
Patience Bloom:And cowboys too, that's. The other thing is, cowboys are very appealing in romances. So you know, do you take the hat off, but then is he still a cowboy. So sometimes you have to go all in, I think, on those hooks.
Beth McMullen:Yeah, that is very good information. I loved in lessons in chemistry my favorite character was the dog. Yes, see, that goes hand in hand with and I don't. I can't verify this because I don't know where I read it, but audiences have very little tolerance in a movie or TV show If the animal is killed, but they don't really care how many people are killed.
Patience Bloom:Another thing mountains and wilderness, those kinds of settings are Like rustic, yeah, yeah.
Beth McMullen:So, as we talked about earlier, you published a memoir. Romance is my Day Job that we love so much. I'm a big fan, so I want people to go out and get that book and read it for themselves. How did going through the process of publishing yourself change how you felt you dealt with your stable of writers at Harlequin, if at all?
Patience Bloom:Well, my authors were so supportive and being edited was amazing. I had such a great experience and Jill Schwartzman from Dutton Penguin Random House was my editor and then the copy editors. It just was fascinating to watch to see how she worked and it made me more efficient and less lazy as an editor. I was just so impressed with how she edited and how she got me to structure the book things to bring in and things to remove so I definitely killed some darlings in this book, but I had such a lovely experience and so I became.
Patience Bloom:I think it made me a better editor for my authors and I also, and a more understanding editor too, because of what they go through and they write many more books than I think the average writer they write. Sometimes I had a writer who wrote 12 books a year. Many of them wrote at least three to four a year. So going through that, I just wrote one, you know, and that was a lot for me. You know just all the marketing stuff and going through this book so many times and then being so vulnerable and emotional about releasing it to the world and how writers go through that more than once, you know. It just blows my mind and then having to go back and do it again. So it just. I had such an amazing experience with publishing my book, so it only added to how I went about. You know, being an editor.
Beth McMullen:I would love for editors most editors to have that experience, because I think it definitely is, or it sounds like I've never been an editor, but it feels like it's just very different to be on that side of it, and if you can, you know, walk a day in the shoes of the author, it might make you approach it differently. So I think that's probably what makes you so exceptionally good at what you do is that feeling of having been in both places. Are you going to write another book?
Patience Bloom:of her. Yeah, no, I mean, I have one that's almost finished. It's fiction, and it's really hard to read fiction. It's so much easier to just oh, here's my life story, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Beth McMullen:But right, because I know what's going to happen.
Patience Bloom:Yeah, exactly, and I'm starting to think about writing another memoir just based on, you know, 10 years, 13, 14 years of marriage and then and all the different things that have happened in our world in the last 10 years. But no, it's. I definitely feel this year is going to be pretty prolific.
Beth McMullen:Well, I'm glad to hear that you're writing. I'm, you know I'm a fan, so of course we're going to be cheering for you from the sidelines.
Patience Bloom:Thank you, and I have a blog too, so I do write that.
Beth McMullen:Oh, okay, so I'm going to yeah, I'm going to put your blog and your editing link on the podcast notes and also in our podcast blog. So not only did I go to high school with patients, and I've known her for a long time, she just gave me an amazing, amazing edit on a work in progress of my own, which has kind of opened up a lot of new opportunities for this manuscript. I think it's going to make it so much better after.
Patience Bloom:I'm going to be amazing, amazing, After I work it all through. It was so much fun.
Beth McMullen:This is my, this is my plug you need if you have hit that point in your own writing where you're like, yeah, I have, there's a wall and I can't get over it. I don't know what else to do. Definitely seek out patients services, and it is worth everything that you put into it. So thank you so much for being here. I know romance is hot and everybody wants to hear about it, so we are very grateful that you've shared all of your experience with us, and I know our listeners are going to be excited for this episode. Thank you, beth and Lisa.
Patience Bloom:This has been amazing.
Beth McMullen:And listeners. Remember you can find out more about patients, as I just said, in our podcast notes and on our website writerswithwrinklesnet. Visit either of those to follow, support and share about the show, and we will see you again next week, march 11th, for a deep dive craft episode. Those are really popular now, so we hope you will join us for that and until then, happy reading, writing and listening.