The Meet-Cute

The movie The Holiday introduced the wider world to the screenwriting term ‘meet-cute’. (I’ve also occasionally seen it referred to as a ‘cute-meet’ but somehow that doesn’t have the same ring to it!) The meet-cute is the scene in which two characters, who will become a romantic couple later in the story, meet for the first time.

While meet-cutes are a staple of romantic comedies, the same principles apply to all sub-genres of Romance. This initial encounter sets the stage for the rest of the story.

In a Romance novel this initial meeting on the page, even if it’s between characters who already know each other, is one of the book’s most crucial scenes, because this is the scene that’s going to set our expectations. Usually this scene gives us the first impression of their chemistry (what’s going to bring them together) and also of their conflicts (what’s going to keep the apart until the end of the book.)

If this first moment of meeting is highly-charged and filled with sizzling chemistry then readers will expect that to be sustained and built on throughout the story. If there is less focus on mutual attraction in that first scene (which would be usual in a friends-to-lovers story, for example) then readers might expect a slow burn story that will unfold more gently and be more focused on them overcoming their conflicts than on them burning up the sheets together.

Ideally in a Romance, you want this scene to happen as close to the start of the book as possible, preferably in the first chapter (especially if you’re writing shorter category Romance) or at the very least in the first few chapters. There are exceptions to this rule, such as Alessandra Torre’s Hollywood Dirt, where the characters meet only in Chapter 26, a full 20% into the story, but for the most part Romance readers are going to expect to meet both characters, and see them together, within the first 10% of the story.

For some ideas of different types of meet-cutes, watch this video which uses movie examples to illustrate four different types of initial meetings between the characters: