Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great Valentine's Day (if you celebrate it) or just a good day in general yesterday. My day was spent waiting for that guy I live with to get off work, so I played with my new phone and watched Harry Potter. I consider that an entertaining day off if I do say so myself.
In order to stick with the holiday theme, I thought I'd take a look at romance writing today. Now because you jump in and say 'OMG you're going to talk about lady pr0n!' you're incorrect in this assumption, so if that was what you were expecting, you may want to stop reading before you're disappointed. I will not write that kind of romance, mostly because I can't bring myself to do it, something about being shy or whatever.
No, the type of romance I'm talking about is just the general boy-meets-girl, or what have you, kind of stuff you see in movies and books all the time. This involves a love interest and such, and doesn't necessarily mean they just have a physical relationship. It involves them having one on an emotional and intellectual scale as well.
The reason I'm bringing this up is because there are going to be times when you may be worried you're focusing on it too much. At least that's a worry I'm currently having right now with one of my projects, and I'm trying to get through the beginning of a new one just so I can get away from it for a moment. I keep getting told that it's fine, but you know, the self consciousness is hard to get by sometimes.
Anyway, when you're going to be having the relationship 'blossom' as it were, throughout your story, the best way to do it is to make it feel natural. Don't shove it down the readers' mouth and make them choke on it. The way you do this is by having their interactions just seem like a normal conversation, and have their body language or tone change throughout the story to show a growing level of comfort. It's important, just like in real life, to make them friends as well, if it's just about romance it won't seem real, and the reader won't be able to relate to it. It's fine when they're first introduced for there to be physical attraction, mostly because they don't actually know anything about each other yet, and the first thing they get is the look at the person. Just make sure it grows from that.
Now there are many ways things can be done with the progression, some choose to have it get to it's 'we are in love, so now we have everything we ever need, to the bedroom!' stage somewhere between half and 2/3 of the way through the story. Others, decide to have it come to a similar stage at the end, when all of the conflicts or drama has been resolved, since the characters finally have time to focus on the tension. You also don't NEED to have them have sex, this isn't a requirement at all, at the very least you don't NEED to write it out so the reader has something they can reference. If you set things up, the reader will know, and it doesn't, again, need to be shoved down their throat. You also don't need to have the characters have a conversation about sex using euphemisms or double entandres (I'll admit, I have no idea how to spell that word, no matter how many times I tried to figure it out.), mostly because I realized that people don't actually talk like that, at least not in private company.
I hope this helped but some minds at ease when it comes to writing out the more 'sappy' parts of their stories. Don't be afraid of them (like I am sometimes), if they make the story and the characters seem more like real people, go for it (like I'm trying to!).
I look forward to seeing everyone back on Friday for my review. I hope you all have a good rest of your work, until then!
No comments:
Post a Comment