14 Days of Fictional Swooning- Huntley Fitzpatrick Tells Us How To Write A Swoony Boy + a Giveaway!

I have to fall in love with him myself first.

That’s rule number one about writing a swoony guy.

In fact, it’s usually where my stories begin. I get an image of a boy…and then I imagine his story. MY LIFE NEXT DOOR began with a couple I saw on the Boston Common—she was blond, he was dark, they were laughing together. He wanted to take a picture of her against the water, and he tucked her purse under his arm to do it.

“See how in love with you I am,” he called, as she laughed and posed. “I’m not at all threatened by holding your purse.”
They had an ease between them, a friendship besides the obvious love and attraction. I thought “Wow. I bet that’s a really great love story.”

A lot of my writer friends find pictures of people, celebrities, and etcetera, to embody their heroes. I never can, because when I think of my hero I see him in my mind, and he never looks like anyone else. I can see the little scar in Cass’s eyebrow. The way Jase ducks his head when he’s worried, kicks the carpet with the toe of his foot. I picture how Tim falls back on his elbows when he laughs, lying on the sand.

This is my secret to writing heroes: to fall in love with them. When we love someone, we focus on all the little particular things that make them…them. What you notice, when you care. I think of how they dress, what goofy habits they have, what they have for breakfast…things that will never make their way into stories, but that are important for me to know.

Confession: I have, on occasion, dropped a hero from a story because I just didn’t love him enough. The original hero of WHAT I THOUGHT WAS TRUE was painfully shy. Like stammering-he-could-barely-talk-to-the-heroine shy. I wrote a few chapters with him as the hero ….magic just was not happening. I’d have the heroine say things and he’d be silent, she wouldn’t know what to say, and I’d be squirming in front of my computer. Finally, I got that it was not going to work for me, and if it didn’t, it would never work for them or anyone who read about them. So I changed him completely. I made him charming, and a little smooth, and funny and quirky. I fell for him. Then she could too.

So this is the way I write my heroes. It starts with love.