Communications professionals should read more romance novels
Why becoming a better writer might require reading outside public relations
By Matthew Celestial
I think communications professionals should read fewer books about public relations.
I don’t mean we should stop learning our craft. There are books about public relations, journalism, marketing, business and leadership that have fundamentally shaped how I think about my work, and there is enormous value in understanding the theory and practice behind what we do.
But I have started to wonder what happens when the only writing we consume is written by people who sound like us, for people who work like us, about the same problems we spend all day thinking about. Eventually, perhaps unsurprisingly, we start sounding like one another.
Some of the writing I find myself studying most closely these days has almost nothing to do with public relations. I love romance novels. I love romantic comedies. Give me two people who clearly belong together, 110 minutes of increasingly ridiculous reasons they cannot admit it, a beautifully timed misunderstanding and an airport scene that would almost certainly result in an arrest under normal circumstances, and I am there.
I’ve watched enough romantic comedies to know the architecture. I know there will probably be a meet-cute. I know somebody will say the wrong thing. I know there will be a moment when everything seems hopeless. I know somebody is going to realize something approximately 15 minutes before the credits roll. And still, when it is done well, I keep watching.
With all of the romcoms I was diving into this summer, I realized I wasn’t just consuming them but rather studying the communication.
Romance has an interesting challenge as a genre because the audience frequently enters the story with a pretty good idea of where it is going. That should make it boring. It doesn’t though.
A reader can pick up a romance novel knowing that some version of happily-ever-after is probably waiting at the end and still stay awake far later than intended because they need to know what happens on the next page. That tells us something important about writing.
Knowing where a story is going does not necessarily make it predictable. Not caring how it gets there does. Now, what does this have to do with the communications profession?
Communicators work with predictable destinations all the time.
The company is pleased with its quarterly results. The organization believes its new initiative will create meaningful change. The executive is optimistic about the future. The partnership brings together two organizations with complementary strengths. We often know the ending before we start writing.
Our job is to make the journey there worth someone’s attention.
Romance writers do this through character, conflict, anticipation, specificity and emotional stakes. They understand that two people simply meeting, discovering they like each other and living happily ever after would make for a remarkably short book. Something has to happen.
Professional communications obviously isn’t fiction, and we should never manufacture conflict or drama where none exists. But sometimes, in our determination to present organizations at their most polished, we remove the very things that make their stories interesting.
The obstacle. The difficult decision. The thing that didn’t work. The unexpected result. The person who changed their mind. The reason this mattered in the first place. We leave the conclusion and remove the journey. Then we wonder why nobody keeps reading.
Good characters aren’t described. They’re revealed. One of the things fiction has made me much more conscious of is how often professional writing tells readers what to think instead of giving them enough information to reach the conclusion themselves.
Consider the way we introduce executives.
They are visionary, dynamic, accomplished, innovative, passionate, they have an impressive track record and are committed to driving transformational growth. Perhaps all of those things are true. But compare that with the way a novelist introduces a character.
A good writer might tell us what someone orders for breakfast, what they notice when they enter a room, the joke they make when they’re uncomfortable, the photograph they keep on their desk or the thing they do when they think nobody is watching.
We understand the person through details.
This is something entertainment understands particularly well. Characters become memorable because they are specific. They have contradictions, habits, flaws, desires, histories and ways of speaking that belong to them.
The same principle can make nonfiction and professional communications dramatically more interesting. Instead of telling me that an entrepreneur is resilient, tell me about the moment they almost closed the company. Instead of telling me that an organization is innovative, show me what it built that nobody else was willing to try. Instead of telling me an executive cares deeply about an issue, show me why.
Specificity is evidence. And evidence is usually more interesting than an adjective. Professional writing could use a little more tension
I should clarify what I mean here before somebody adds a love triangle to the annual report.
When writers talk about tension, they aren’t necessarily talking about conflict between people. Tension is often simply the distance between what someone wants and what currently exists. Romcoms are extraordinarily good at this. We know these people like each other. They know these people like each other. Everybody else in the fictional universe appears to know these people like each other. And yet. That and yet can sustain hundreds of pages.
Communications has its own versions of and yet.
We want cities to be more sustainable, and yet changing infrastructure is expensive and complicated. We have access to more communications technology than at any point in history, and yet trust remains difficult to build. An organization has an ambitious goal, and yet something stands between where it is and where it wants to be.
That space is often where the story lives.
Corporate writing has a tendency to resolve tension as quickly as possible because unresolved questions can make organizations uncomfortable. We prefer certainty. We prefer solutions. We prefer announcing that the challenge has already been addressed.
But sometimes the honest question is considerably more compelling than the polished answer.
Voice matters more when everyone can write.
There is another reason I have been thinking about fiction lately.
Generative AI can now produce technically competent professional writing in seconds, which means simply being able to construct a grammatically correct paragraph is becoming less distinctive. Voice becomes more interesting.
Pick up novels by several great writers and you will notice how differently they see the world. Sentence length changes. Rhythm changes. Humour changes. The details they notice change. Even when two writers are exploring similar themes, you can often feel the presence of a particular person behind the words.
Professional writing tends to work in the opposite direction.
We are often trained to disappear. Sometimes that is entirely appropriate. The communications professional isn’t supposed to become the story, and writing on behalf of an organization requires discipline.
But organizational voice doesn’t have to mean the absence of voice. An executive should sound like that executive. A university should not sound like a bank. A children’s organization should not sound like an accounting firm. Two companies competing in the same category should still have different ways of seeing the world.
If every organization feeds roughly the same information into roughly the same tools and asks for “professional, engaging copy,” sameness becomes almost inevitable. The advantage belongs to whoever knows what they actually sound like. Read for rhythm, not just information.
Romantic comedies taught me another lesson that I didn’t initially think of as a writing lesson at all: timing.
A great joke delivered two seconds too late doesn’t work. Neither does a confession that arrives before we care about the characters making it. Stories have rhythm. Scenes have rhythm. Conversations have rhythm.
Writing does too.
Sometimes a sentence needs room to wander, gathering detail and momentum as it moves toward an idea the reader hasn’t quite reached yet. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the sentence should stop.
Professional writing can become strangely monotonous when every sentence has roughly the same construction, every paragraph roughly the same length and every idea receives exactly the amount of explanation expected of it.
Read great fiction aloud and you can hear the difference.
Long sentence. Short one. A pause. Something unexpected. Then movement again.
This is one of the reasons I think becoming a better writer requires reading beyond the kinds of things we are expected to produce professionally. You start noticing not just what writers are saying, but how they are controlling your attention while saying it.
Once you notice rhythm, it becomes difficult not to hear it everywhere. Read something that has nothing to do with your job. Perhaps the broader lesson isn’t really about romance novels at all.
It is about creative cross-training.
If you write speeches, read comedy and pay attention to timing. If you work in crisis communications, read thrillers and notice how information is revealed. If you write executive communications, read a memoir and study how people develop a recognizable voice. If you work in branding, read poetry and look at what happens when every word has to earn its place.
If you pitch journalists, read journalism, not just the headlines, but the structure, the ledes, the transitions and the details reporters choose to include. If you communicate with communities, read novels written by people whose lives look nothing like yours. And yes, if you want to understand tension, character, anticipation and emotional payoff, read a romance novel.
The objective isn’t to imitate these genres. Please do not end your next CEO memo with a kiss in the rain. The point is to expose yourself to writers solving different problems.
Because eventually those techniques start following you back to work. You notice that the opening isn’t doing enough. You recognize when you’ve described someone instead of showing us who they are. You hear when three consecutive sentences have exactly the same rhythm. You realize that the interesting part of the story is buried in paragraph eight. You become less satisfied with language simply because it is correct.
You start wanting it to be good. I still want the happy conclusion. There is probably another reason I love romantic comedies and romance novels, and it has nothing to do with professional development.
I like hope.
I like watching people find each other. I like ridiculous misunderstandings and grand gestures and dialogue that is somehow much cleverer than anything anybody says in real life. I like knowing, particularly when the world feels complicated, that for the next couple of hours somebody has constructed a universe in which things might work out.
I don’t think writers need to apologize for loving the things they love.
In fact, I increasingly think the opposite. Our taste shapes our writing. The movies we watch, novels we underline, magazines we keep, jokes we repeat, songs we play again and conversations we remember all teach us something about language, whether we realize it or not.
The trick is learning to pay attention.
So yes, read the communications books. Read the industry reports. Study the frameworks. Understand the research. Know your audience, your objectives and your key messages.
But every once in a while, close the business book. Pick up something that has absolutely nothing to do with your job. Read the sentences slowly. Notice what makes you laugh. Notice when you become impatient. Notice the line you reread because you wish you had written it. Notice when you suddenly care deeply about a person who does not exist.
Then ask yourself how the writer did that.
For me, sometimes that means a romance novel. And if two fictional people taking 350 pages to realize they’re in love can teach me to write one better paragraph, I consider that a pretty good professional development expense.
Matthew Celestial is a Toronto-based writer and communications professional covering media, culture, entertainment and the ideas shaping how we communicate. He has spent more than a decade working across animation, film, technology and consumer brands, and is Managing Partner at Rhetor and the founder of Statement Worldwide and Matte Equation.