“Show, don’t tell” is standard advice that every author has heard at least once. And it’s good to hear—letting readers see that your character is angry through his actions is always more convincing than telling them “Harry was livid.” But sometimes it clashes with another prime directive in romance writing: let your readers know what your character is thinking. Yeah, you want to show Harry’s anger, but occasionally you also want to take a quick journey inside Harry’s head to illuminate all the cobwebs that are hanging out there.

Romances use more interior monologues than a lot of other pop fiction. We romance authors are prone to explaining how our heroes came to be towering alphas (sometimes towering to the point of misogyny) and why our heroines can never trust themselves to love until meeting Mr. Right. We also like to come up with metaphors for the way sexual attraction makes people feel. An author in one recent book claimed the heroine wanted to crawl inside the hero’s skin and stay there. Personally, I found that metaphor to be pretty creepy since it makes the heroine sound sort of like a hookworm, but to each her own.

All of this came to a head for me recently when I read some romantic suspense by an author who’s on my “auto-read” list (yeah, she’s also the author with the hookworm heroine, but shaky metaphors happen to all of us). I won’t tell you her name, but I will tell you that it’s been a couple of years since she’d published anything and I was really looking forward to her new book. Unfortunately, it took me a while to get into it. A big part of the problem was the hero and heroine, who had one of those instant attractions that frequently happen in romance novels. Now I have nothing against the whole “love at first sight” trope—I’ve used it myself. But the way this author handled it was to give the hero and heroine constant internal monologues about how hot they found one another. Their scenes together seemed to consist of lines of mundane dialogue alternating with paragraphs of internal musing about how much they wanted to do the deed.

I had two reactions to this. One was to wish they’d, in fact, get the deed over with so we could move on to the plot. The other was to feel that the whole thing was bogus. The author was spending so much time telling me about, in fact hammering me over the head with, the characters’ sexual attraction that she never got around to showing me how they felt. The words were there, but the concomitant action wasn’t. Moreover, the characters never seemed to actually feel anything. Despite the number of times the author told me they were nuts about each other, it never really rang true. Nothing they did or said seemed to go along with that heat level.

I’m not sure what the moral is here—even big time authors sometimes need to be reminded of the show-don’t-tell rule? But it may simply be that chemistry isn’t a matter of explanation. The characters have to be believable to begin with, and then their connection will be believable too. Without that, no amount of assertion will ring true. There’s got to be something beyond just “Harry could hardly believe how turned on he was” if an author really wants me to buy in. Maybe she could have Harry slowly discover the truth of his feelings or maybe she could have him fight his impulses or maybe she could have him walk into a wall because his attraction to the heroine makes him goofy. But it would help to have him do something other than tell me she’s hot. Trust me, Harry, most heroines are.