Why Romance Is Only Part of the Story

I remember my days as a university student.

As an English student, I did my fair share of reading and writing. Dozens upon dozens of books across literature and history. I studied Shakespeare, worked my way through novels from every corner of the literary spectrum, and wrote enough essays that my fingers still ache just thinking about them.

But outside the classroom, there were the books I chose for myself.

Dungeons & Dragons. David Eddings. Lynn Flewelling. Raymond Feist and The Magician series. Robert Jordan. J.R.R. Tolkien.

Those were the worlds I escaped into.

I could disappear into them for days. And looking back, I think they taught me a lot about the kind of stories I would eventually want to write.

I was fascinated by the worlds I discovered, the characters and their supporting casts, the plots and how they developed. I loved seeing how one character's decision could ripple outward and affect an entire story. The romance, when it existed, was rarely the only thing happening.

There was a world to understand and a conflict to unravel. Characters with motivations of their own and villains with reasons for becoming villains. Friendships, rivalries, loyalties, betrayals, politics, duty, sacrifice...

The romance existed within the story. And that stayed with me.

Years later, another kind of storytelling would have an equally important influence on me.

C-dramas.

I grew up watching them, but as an adult, I found myself falling in love with them all over again. And eventually, shows like The Untamed helped pull me toward MM romance and BL storytelling.

Asian romance stories simply hit differently for me.

There was something about the build-up. The restraint. The relationships that developed slowly through shared experiences rather than arriving fully formed the moment two characters met.

I loved the way these stories explored devotion, not just through romance or attraction, but through loyalty, sacrifice, duty, and the choices the characters made for one another. Sometimes those choices came at a real cost. Sometimes loving someone meant going against family, expectations, or even a responsibility they had spent their entire lives preparing for.

That was the part that fascinated me.

I found myself drawn to relationships where attraction was only the beginning. I wanted to know what these characters were willing to do for one another.

And, strangely enough, my love of C-dramas gave me something else too.

C.C Towers.

Our friendship began because of a shared love of C-dramas. Long before we ever considered writing together, we were talking about someone else's stories – the characters, the relationships, the plot twists and betrayals, and probably spending far too much time dissecting why someone made a particular choice.

When we eventually started writing together, I discovered just how similar our approaches to storytelling were.

C understood why I could spend hours working out the history of a world or the motivations of a supporting character who might only appear in a handful of scenes. I didn't have to explain why those things mattered.

She already believed they did.

I think that's one of the reasons writing together has felt so natural. We bring different strengths and perspectives to the page, but underneath them is a shared belief that the world surrounding a romance deserves just as much care.

For me, the romance and the rest of the story have always been connected. The world shapes the characters and influences the choices they make. Those choices have consequences, not only for themselves, but for the people around them and the relationships they've built. And love can complicate all of it, sometimes changing the choices they might otherwise have made.

That's where romance becomes most interesting to me. Falling in love is one thing. Being in love when there are other things at stake is something else entirely.

What happens when the person you love has a responsibility they can't ignore, or when duty conflicts with desire? What happens when protecting one person means betraying someone else? Or when the person you love believes something that challenges your own beliefs?

Those are the questions I love exploring.

I want the people in my stories to have full lives beyond their romantic relationships. They have friendships and families, ambitions and fears, loyalties they aren't willing to abandon and responsibilities they can't simply walk away from. The person they fall in love with becomes part of that life, but doesn't erase everything that existed before.

The same is true of the setting around them. When I create a fantasy world, I don't want it to be beautiful scenery sitting behind the romance. Its history, traditions, conflicts and rules should influence what happens on the page. If a society demands something of a character, I want that expectation to carry weight. If someone defies it, there should be a reason - and something at stake when they do.

That, I think, is what I hope readers come to expect when they pick up one of my books. There will always be a love story at its heart, but there will be more happening around it. Friendships can be tested. Families can complicate things. Loyalties can shift. Someone who appears to be the villain may have reasons that make their actions harder to dismiss. And sometimes doing the right thing for one person means hurting another.

None of that makes the romance less important to me. If anything, it's what gives it weight. When two people finally choose each other, I want to understand what that choice means for them - not only what they gain, but what they may have risked or given up along the way.

Maybe that's the thread connecting those old fantasy novels still sitting on my shelves, the C-dramas I've fallen in love with, and the stories I'm writing now. They taught me that a relationship doesn't exist in isolation. It grows alongside everything else happening in a person's life, influenced by where they come from, who they care about and what they believe.

That's the kind of romance I want to write: one that belongs to the story around it, rather than sitting apart from it.

❤️JJ

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