Evolution of Romance Story
I tend to have very vivid anxiety dreams that I usually remember. Every so often, a good idea comes from those dreams.
This one is such a story…
In my dream, I’m traveling and meet a man. We get to the airport, and when we get our bags, we find out my best friend had a baby and died. I’m taking the baby, and this man wants to help me. My family is there, and we wait to be able to see the baby.
That was it, the entire dream — I mean, minus those surreal dream transitions and weird details. I woke up and quickly realized that there was a gem of an idea here. It needed to be polished and shaped, but I could work with it. The key idea: woman ends up with a baby after a friend/the mother dies, and a man she meets while traveling decided to help her raise said baby.
From there, we have to flesh out some details:
- Who is the woman, and who is the man?
- How do they meet while traveling? Why are they both traveling?
- Why does the best friend die? Why does the woman get the baby instead of the father or the friend’s family?
- Why is the man so willing to be with the woman and raise this child?
- Is anything suspicious happening? Should this man be trusted? Is the problem forced or faked drama?
The story evolves as I put these things together.
- The friend’s family and the father of the child need to be out of the picture. It’s easy to believe that a woman would choose to have a child without a partner and without knowing the father’s identity.
- How do we eliminate the friend’s family? What if that’s the drama? If our main character is given custody of the child because her friend wants it, I could imagine the family wanting to fight it. There still has to be a reason for the friend’s desire to keep her child away from her family. It could be a family with conservative values, and the friend could be non-binary.
- What about the man who met while traveling? Why would he be willing to get involved? He could be an attorney who deals with custody issues. He could want to help our main character because he sees the developing problem. This means he needs some of the backstory about the friend while they travel, and he needs to be with our main character when she learns what happened.
- Should something suspicious happen? Certainly! What if the man learns he is the baby’s biological father, having donated sperm as a college student. Some quick research suggests a sperm donation can be stored for about 28 years. This could put his motivations at odds with others, making our main character question her trust in him. It doesn’t have to last long, but it has to drive them apart temporarily.
- How do we get our HEA? This has to be a compromise. The friend’s desire can’t be ignored, but she needs help, not having anticipated motherhood. The family can be part of it, but I’d have to do some research here. The man/father is the true HEA, wanting to be a partner and parent.
- How long will this take? Custody battles can take forever, putting a child in the foster care system. It can also come up again suddenly when one side is unhappy with changes. I want to avoid that since it’s not the point of the story.
Where is the story now?
The story is about a woman returning home for the birth of her best friend’s first baby. She’s going to help her friend for the next few months as she adjusts to motherhood. On the long flight (probably international), she sits next to an attractive man, and they start chatting. He’s a lawyer who specializes in custody cases. He was at an international conference and is on his way home. Both are unmarried and currently unattached. They spend the entire flight talking about their lives, making plans to go out for dinner. When they land, the woman is greeted by the police, and the man, expecting her to need legal advice, stays with her. They learn something has happened, and her best friend has passed away, but the baby is premature but alive. They came to get her as her friend’s emergency contact and now the baby’s legal guardian, according to a will and her friend’s dying request. The man stays with her, now positive there will be a way for him to help. He’s seen this happen before — grandparents or estranged partners seeking custody despite the deceased’s explicit wishes.
At the hospital, the friend’s family is trying to see the baby but refused access by the woman. The man decides to represent the woman in court, especially after hearing the family talk about their deceased daughter. He doesn’t want this baby to be with these people.
Things will happen, paternity will be investigated, the court fights will be somewhat nasty. It will come out that the man was the sperm donor for our baby. He has to re-evaluate his position with this conflict of interest in mind. The woman questions her trust in him, afraid he might want the baby and cut them all out. She intends to honor her friend’s wishes and to do what’s best for the child. She’s prepared herself to be a mother — she had been helping her friend — and made adjustments to her life to accommodate a child. These issues pull them apart temporarily, but when they both know they want to do this together, it makes them realize they can give some time to the grandparents with specific rules in place.
Result: they start as co-parents in a relationship but evolve to true partners who live together, creating a non-traditional family. The grandparents don’t make it easy, but the couple figures out how to manage them.
What’s next?
There has to be a bunch of research done. I know nothing about custody battles, sperm donor’s rights, and raising children. I also have to pick names and determine side characters. Little details need to be decided, such as how this could connect to the other stories, if at all. I have this hope to write stories about the Jewish life cycle. This could get into some shaky ground, but it does deal with birth and death. I could pick one of the two and consider the conflict between orthodox values and secular, non-religious Jews. That would require I do some research there. That might pull it out of the light contemporary romance I imagine the story to be.
Sara Marks is an author, librarian, and project manager. As a multi-genre, self-publishing author, she has learned the various elements of the publishing experience and is always looking to learn more. She treats each book like a project, setting goals and working step by step to finish the project, all the way from conception of an idea to promoting the book. You can find her at http://saramarks.net.
