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Okay, so with our topic about unrealistic romance, we covered a lot of what you shouldn’t do in a love story.
Now what about what we should do? What makes a love story a good love story, in your opinion?
Do you have any examples from literature of a love story done well?
What are some common steroetypes of love stories? Could they be twisted and improved upon? Should they be discarded and replaced with something totally original?
Yes, I ask a lot of questions.
Let me start the discussion by taking my last question and answering it. There is only so far you can go with discarding cliches in a love story and replacing them with something less common. Think about it. All love stories have a lot in common.
To begin with, there is a man and a woman who love each other. Or at least come to love each other in the end of the book.
And yeah, that pretty much sums it up. Of course on the surface it’s a lot more complicated than that, but in the end that’s what it boils down to.
So we have our love story. There has to be some obstacle. But there can only be so many obstacles for one problem. A few common ones are as follows— disapproving parents (you have to be careful with that one), a guy and a girl who absolutely hate each other in the beginning of the story, a rival, or something common like that.I actually don’t think these should be dumped. They’re valid plot twists, and extremely realistic. My point is, you can add deeper reasons to these common twists and make them more gripping. Add something less common, and have it be yet another obstacle besides the common one. Maybe some terrible dark secret in one of the love interest’s past (Jane Eyre, anyone?). Or maybe some political restraints— maybe it’s a Romeo and Juliet type of thing where two political —or almost political— parties have sworn to be lifelong enemies and therefore love should not exist between two of their separate members.
And… I forgot where I was going with this.
Oh well.So what do you think?
Don’t make love just HAPPEN. They should like each other for who they are as people BEFORE jumping into all the love stuff. A lot of books skip the “good friends” phase that is almost always there.
It has to make sense with both your characters and what they’ve been proven to do in certain situations. If it doesn’t you’ll just end up ticking off your readers. (Mariette from Hornblower is my prime example of an out-of-character, unneeded romantic subplot)
Romance is the perfect (though often ditched) chance to play off both your characters’ personalities more than ever before. Don’t ignore it!
I just watched the movie “While You Were Sleeping” last night. Seriously, that was one of the best handled romances I’ve ever seen.
So, good timing on the topic, Kate! 😀One thing I love seeing in romances is when the brothers are protective…sometimes even over protective and give their sister’s suitor a hard time. 😉 I also like seeing the sacrifices of love, not just the emotional part of it.
INTJ - Inhumane. No-feelings. Terrible. Judgment and doom on everyone.
Stories where two people hate each other and then end up falling in love can be fun. Sure its been used before, but that’s because it’s worth using.
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@Rosey—yes, I agree. There should probably be in most cases a long prior acquaintance before anything gets serious. We covered this on the unrealistic romance topic, but I’ll say it again— we established that there is no such thing as love at first sight, only love and first acquaintance, and that is rare. It only happens when the two people involved are very wise and mature.
And Mariette was used to further Horatio’s dislike for Moncoutant, but I think those two would have needed no assistance in falling out, so yes, she wasn’t really necessary.
@Hope— yes! I love it when brothers are obsessive over their sisters. I have no older brothers myself (only an awesome dad and four younger brothers) but I love it when any brother takes it on himself to protect his sister. Those relationships can almost be as meaningful as the love story itself. And yes— I think there should be some requirement for sacrifice in every love story.
@Daeus— you’re right. They’re cliche because they’re beautiful, and everyone loves them. They never get old. But it still won’t hurt to add in some unexpected elements.And here’s a question— I think I know the answer, but I’ll ask it anyway. For the longest time I had difficulty in the love stories that ended on the proposal, and didn’t go as far as the wedding. Why? Because the first kiss should come on the wedding day, but it didn’t seem right to end a love story without a kiss.
So I thought on that for a long time. And I concluded that it’s perfectly acceptable to have the kiss before the wedding in a story. Because a lot of the time (most of the time, actually) the culture has no ‘first kiss on the wedding day’ rule like homescholars have nowadays.And it’s not wicked to kiss before the wedding day, either. There’s no Bible verse that commands engaged couples not to kiss until their wedding day. The first kiss on the wedding day is symbolic, more than anything else. It’s a good symbol, and it’s good to keep that tradition, but in a story you don’t have to if it doesn’t work. As long as you as the writer are not promoting the violating of what the first kiss on the wedding day stands for (namely, keeping yourself pure until marriage) then you’re fine.
What do you think?
Hmm, first kiss before the wedding day. I don’t think it’s a sin, but at the same time I really like the idea of a first kiss on the wedding day, both in real life and in books I write. In one of my books, I have an engagement and the end and the MC kisses the girl’s hand. 🙂 Perhaps, after I’m married myself, I’ll go further in my own books. 😉
INTJ - Inhumane. No-feelings. Terrible. Judgment and doom on everyone.
Well, I think speculating about romance is not helpful to anyone and builds up more false expectations. I think it is important, as is often reiterated, to ‘write what you know.”
This doesn’t mean, obviously, to write a story exactly like yours, or that you can only write about experiences you have felt. However, I do think you should write a love story using what you know about love- what you’ve felt, even for a parent or a best friend, what you’ve seen, in real life, not in hollywood. I think the problem with a lot of love stories today is that they are just plain unrealistic and unhealthy. They don’t help anyone learn from them because there is nothing practical about the character’s depth of emotion; it is an alternate universe of human nature, so often.@Emma. That’s certainly a valid concern. I don’t like unrealistic, unhealthy, just peachy love stories either. However— keep in mind that you don’t have to have a ton of personal experience to write about something. Remember, Jane Austen wrote some of the most beautiful and popular love stories ever written, and she never married.
In reading her books, you may realize that she downplayed the passion of love and focused on it as you would on anything a character wanted to obtain, no matter if it was a wife or a set of china teacups. She treated it as a goal, not a passion, and that can certainly work.But I don’t think it’s a good idea to always do a love story that way. As with all stories, a love story needs emotion. It doesn’t have to be (probably shouldn’t be) a Song of Solomon, but there does have to be at least an undercurrent of attachment.
Also, since most people have a romance going on under their very noses in their homes, it shouldn’t be too hard to people-watch and take their experience and use it, especially if your mom doesn’t mind talking to you about it. In fact, I know more about Christ-like love and romantic love from watching my parents than I know, say, about prisons, or trials, or shipwrecks, or things like that, yet we use those things so much in our stories.
So I don’t think it’s ‘write what you know’ so much as it is ‘write true to human nature, no matter the circumstances’.
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