Uncalculated Effect: How a Book Taught me How to Write Romance (And Other Things I Learned From Calculated)

When you’re a bookworm writer, what you read affects what you write in greater ways than you know. And for me, the books that have resonated with me the most are the ones that affected my writing the most.

When I was younger, it was Saddle Club and The Phantom Stallion. As an early teen, it was The Guardian Herd and Dee Henderson’s O’Malley series. And now, it’s been YA novels like Fawkes, Ignite, Extension Squad, and Calculated.

And since I joined the internship team to help promote Nova McBee’s book series Calculated, I’ve been thinking a lot more about how this series has affected my writing– and how much of a writer I’ve grown from it.

So, instead of a boring old book review, today I’ll be doing a deep dive into the elements of Calculated that helped me become a better writer– and how you can learn from it to do the same.

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#1. Writing Romance

True fact: I hated teen romance before reading Calculated.

I would say I hated all romance in books, but that wasn’t entirely true because of Dee Henderson’s books. But those characters were adults, and from what I had seen in fiction previously, teen romances never ended well.

However, this romance wasn’t the same. Instead of focusing on the emotions and “all the feelings” between Jo and Kai, we got to see the personalities first, and how the characters interacted. We fell in love with the dynamic because instead of being mere physical attraction, the author took the time to show us why the ship works, why Kai and Jo were so right for each other– or conversely, why they wouldn’t be so right for each other.

How does this apply to writing romance in our own novels? Well, think of it as a more nuanced form of show versus tell. We could just tell the readers that they’re right for each other through holding hands and flirting, but those things are only surface. To convince the readers and have them shipping your characters as hard as you are, you’ve got to go right for the heart (pun unintended) of why these two people could have a lasting relationship.

Show how they strengthen each other, build up each other. Where one is strong, is the other weak? What are their love languages (aka, how do they show their love to others?). How do their own goals and dreams match– or rub against– their significant other?

Another important thing to factor: not every relationship will be “the one”. And few people who meet as teens get married later in life. At the same time, don’t just shove the love interest out of the picture with no reason– if the character’s aren’t right for each other, take the time to show why. And please, if you’re going to do a love triangle, make it worth the reader’s time and make BOTH of the candidates equally intriguing.

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#2. Writing Sensitive Topics

Not everyone is called to write sensitive topics, but if you do feel called to write them, it’s important to write them… well… sensitively. Sensitive topics can be extremely triggering to certain people, especially if they aren’t done well.

However, Nova McBee knows how to write STs well. Human trafficking and abuse are both touched in Calculated, and while these are some of the toughest topics to deal with fiction, the way she writes them with attention to the issue without making the topic seemed watered down is both inspiring and a good example of how to write it well.

What can we draw from this? Well, number one is to do research. Talk to people if you can. The more knowledge you have on the subject, the better you can discuss the issue without spreading myths and incorrect ideals. For instance, a lot of people think that depression is simply a mindset, that you can “choose” to be happier. In reality, true depression is a lack of chemicals and hormones in the brain that allow us to feel happiness. It’s a disease, like cancer is a disease, and the brain sometimes needs a little help to work functionally.

Number two, learn how much is too much. Not every story will require a long, graphic scene with the main character being sexually abused– some of them might just require an allusion to the event in the character’s past, or have an allegorical representation of it (such as suicide’s allegorical representation as “Red Tide” in Sara Ella’s Coral). In Calculated, Nova McBee never goes in too deep into the types of trafficking or extent of abuse. She hints, and lets the reader’s imagination fill in the rest.

Number three, get sensitivity readers, those who have experienced the topic and are willing to give feedback on it. If asked respectfully, many people are willing to give input in order for the topic to be represented well.

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#3. Writing Action Scenes

If there’s one thing that always gets my heart pumping in a good story, it’s a well-written action scene. And Calculated is no exception. From epic camel races to car chases, kung fu fighting and backstreet brawls, the entire Calculated series earns its weight in epic action scenes.

One author said that action scenes weren’t about what you saw, but what you felt. That was certainly true of the Calculated series. For whatever reason, my most vivid memory of an action scene in the Calculated series is in Activated when Jo described Kai fighting and “spinning like a break dancer”. The mental image of Kai break dancing was terribly hilarious and the scene itself– Kai jumping in to aid two dad characters in a brawl– made my fangirl so ridiculously happy it remains one of my favorite scenes.

The main thing I took away from this was the importance that characters have in an action scene. If we don’t care about the character, we don’t care about the action. Conversely, we can care about the character, but if the action scenes get too unrealistic we can lose our interest in the character (not to name any names, but does Ethan Hunt ring a bell? Yes? Yeah, don’t make your character smash into rocks and get thrown from helicopters without much more than some scratches that will give him rudimentarily cool scars later. Brain injuries are a thing, people, and not everyone can smash through windows Mission Impossible style without getting shredded to bits.).

So, characters first. Figure out why you need this action scene (and no, “because it would be cool” is not a good reason). What is your character’s goal? Is it to settle a pecking order dispute? Save their friend? Retrieve a plot-relevant object? Try to go deeper than just “staying alive” (although that can be a perfectly acceptable excuse. After all, a dead character isn’t much help to your story. Unless it’s a ghost. Kung fu ghosts, anyone?).

Then, do some research, especially on INJURIES. Would it really be realistic for your character to fall through sixty floors with only some bruising? Would that stab to the leg actually kill them? How do you escape zip tie handcuffs? Would capoeira be an appropriate fighting style for that one character? (seriously, go look up capoeira some time, it’s really epic). Should they have a naginata, or throwing knives?

(P.S. A great place to start researching all of this is fightwrite.net. It’s the only site I’ve come across that talks about everything fight scene from how to fight with sticks to the stages of decomposition.)

Finally, figure out the balance between showing and showing too much. We don’t need to know the technical terms of every move the characters do– paint the scene in broad brush strokes, sticking with the emotion and the action instead of the exact science.

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These are only a few of the many skills a writer can learn from reading Calculated. I immensely enjoyed this series, and I hope you enjoyed this article!

(also fun fact: the Calculated books are all available for free with a Spotify Premium account! The audiobook narrator is superb, and I definitely recommend listening to the books on audio).

To learn more about the author: https://www.novamcbee.com/