NaNoWriMo Day 10
If today seems like an odd place to talk about this subject, it’s because I’m writing this on my anniversary. On 10-10-2010, the love interest of my life’s story finally became the happily ever after.
I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in a story wins his true love, that’s the end of the tale, even if World War III is about to begin, and the sky is black with flying saucers.
—Kurt Vonnegut
Well, there’s one solid answer for you. It’s easy to say that romance writers would strongly disagree, but they more than anyone know how much a love story overshadows everything else. Casablanca was a movie that had such a wonderful depiction of life under the influence of the Nazis: Victor Laszlo fighting for freedom, the jovially corrupt Vichy Renault, street vendors, nightlife vs. day life in wartime, and so on. But all anyone remembers about it is the romance between Rick and Ilsa.
Sometimes that’s a good thing, but Vonnegut’s warning is true. If you don’t want the love theme to take over, you have to write the rest of the story 3x, 5x, or even 10x better. And, to make it even more complicated, writing about love is just like living a life: doing it is easy, but doing it well is hard.
In my own case, when I sat down to write my first NaNoWriMo book, I was going to take Vonnegut’s advice (even though I hadn’t read it yet) and avoid the topic altogether. I didn’t intentionally add a love interest: Eileen walked on and I saw that she was what the story lacked. Karl had a clear motivating driver (even if it’s not revealed until the end), but Richard didn’t. Falling in love with Eileen (and her doing the same, although she wouldn’t admit it to herself) complicated things in a good way. It gave everyone something to want.
But Vonnegut was right: her entrance didn’t just shift the focus of the book, it changed all of them that would follow. The second one became a story of how Eileen slowly learns to love and be loved, the third one carries that theme through and adds a layer of how far Richard will go to protect the love of his life, the fourth one is love lost, and the fifth one (her memoir) is all about the first two loves of her life (yes, she had two firsts), the love of her family, her love of her art, her love of both of her countries, and meeting Richard. Her dying is actually a minor part compared to the others.
None of these books were supposed to be about love, but, to be honest, I doubt any one of them would have existed without it. (And I agree with Vonnegut: if I ever do decide to end their series, the last chapter will be their big wedding. Like he said, once they win their true love, the story’s over.) In my particular case, it worked out well, but that doesn’t mean that adding a love interest will do the same for yours. It’s your book, and only your book knows what’s best for it.
The reason there’s so much conflicting advice on how to write is because the only thing any author can ever give is what worked for them. You’re not them. Your book is not theirs. The only generalized advice I can give is that adding a love interest merely for the sake of a subplot rarely works; it almost always looks and feels superficial.
Other than that, the only advice I can give is advice that applies to anything you’ll ever write: The best thing about being a writer is that you have the freedom to do anything you want, if you’ll take it. The worst part about being a writer is that you have the freedom to do anything you want, and you’ll take it.
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