Sorry, nothing creative today- a theme I seem to have been following for a while now. I’ll have to fix that. Anyway, right now I just have a few thoughts on creative writing. Specifically, as you should have deduced from the title, love.
Most readers, myself included, expect to read about at least some romance in a story, no matter the genre. Take a look at just about all the movies you’ve seen lately? How many had some form of romantic tension? Was your answer all of them? Mine was. Now think of your favorite book or story. Does romance feature pretty heavily even if it really isn’t the main focus of the plot? Chances are yes, it does.
We as young writers are inheriting many things from our predecessors, chiefly among them being the mandatory romantic interest. If you have two main characters of opposite sex who are not related, the first thing people are going to think is that they’re going to end up together by the end of the story. The readers expect it, and if your reader isn’t happy then you’re out of a job. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, love became a central theme in literature for a reason; it’s good stuff. However, people like myself have to be very careful when writing because of this expectation.
Perhaps the most common phrase of writing advice that has been quoted to me over and over again is this: “write what you know.” It’s a smart bit of advice. I’m not an expert on ancient Chinese culture, so you’re not going to see a lot of it in anything I write, because it would be crap. The writer is not some supreme being that knows everything there is to know about anything he or she want to write about, we have to research this stuff. I’m primarily a fantasy writer so I have a bit more freedom but I’m still going to have to research a lot of medieval weaponry and war tactics to make my writing convincing. When I do step my writing into the real(ish) world it’d be a safe bet to say that I’ll be writing from the perspective of a young white man from a middle class background- because that’s what I know and can write well.
So now we get to my point. Love. Because it’s expected, we always try to write it. It’s painful sometimes to read stories about love written by high school students, and more painful yet to read such stories and poetry that you have written yourself. I’ve done it, it’s not fun. This is where we get things like Twilight. Mrs. Meyer is married, so I don’t know what her excuse is, but that is what occurs when somebody who really doesn’t understand how something as complex as love works tries to recreate it in a story.
I am a teenager still, I have not experienced the true love that we expect from stories, and so it is not going to feature in my stories. My main characters, who are often derived from aspects of myself or amplifications of myself, will not fall deeply in love and get married. Some of my minor characters may do that, but it will be from the outside perspective as that is what I, and probably everyone reading this, has experienced. If later in life I do find the right girl and experience that love myself, then my wife will act as my muse and love will enter my writing.
I urge any of you in my situation to do similar. Don’t force love into your writing, there are other options. If you have experience with failed relationships, write about that. If you’ve felt envious of those with love and longed for that connection, write about that. If you have experience with unreciprocated love, write about that. All of these and others are satisfying substitutions for a faked love story. Don’t waste your time on things you can’t do justice when your life is so full of other experiences that you can properly share. There will be time to write about love later. For now, stick to what you already know.
Nice essay. But on this strain of logic--would this mean you'd have to take all the dozens of instances of violence out of your writing as well. You write about people killing each other the time, and yet you, in your personal experience, could never come close to knowing the immediate or long-term emotional or physical of ending life with your own hands. If you can only write what you know, how do you justify the violence in your plot lines?
ReplyDeleteOooo, good call. I hadn't thought of that. I don't have much of a good answer for that one. In my mind, for my stories the violence is central, and I really think it is a much more easily accessed thing than love. As complex as killing someone might be, I think love is more so, and I- having the knowledge of hatred and violent urges and the like- think I could make the leap to killing fairly easily. The hardest part in it for me will probably be having good characters reconcile the killing they do. I guess it boils down to what is necessary in the story. For mine, violence is necessary, but a love side-plot is not.
ReplyDeleteTo shorten that a little: I know violence well, and killing is kind of an enhanced form of that violence, whereas love is more complicated than just an enhanced crush. I will be lacking the most realistic reconciliation of violence out there, but I think I can come a lot closer to that than love.
Huh, thanks for bringing that up!