a few disjointed thoughts about writing relationships

(mostly romantic relationships but also other relationships)

(these are my entirely subjective thoughts, as usual)

(also don't read this if you happen to hate disorganized rambling)

(maybe just stop reading this blog if you hate disorganized rambling, actually)


Okay. Disclaimers over.

I was talking to my sole friend this one time, and we got onto the subject of relationships in fiction. Specifically, we were talking about romantic relationships in writing and all the ways it seems to be done wrong, and all the ways we longed to see it portrayed.

So here I am, talking about relationships in fiction and all my many weird opinions about it.

First off, I'm just going to ignore how relationships work in our society at the moment because that's what I want to do. But I will just say that for all the fascination we have with human relationships in our writing we should really as an entire universe learn to depict it better.



Thought One: 

So many books now completely butcher the idea of romance (my friend pointed out Twilight as the obvious famous literary culprit). The characters in the stories, which tend to be ridiculously popular and read, have absolutely terrible relationships. These relationships range from obsessive to abusive, and I can't really think of a single good, healthy, pious example of a romantic relationship in mainstream fiction.

The Twilight characters, which are quite typical for characters nowadays, have a notoriously bad relationship. It is abusive, and I'm not even going to bother listing the factors that make it abusive because you can just Google it and find out yourself, easy peasy.

Twilight is also a great example of lustful relationships, overly obsessive relationships, and sort of boringly written relationships. The characters have a very bad habit of looking over each other's faults.

The really terrible part about fiction showing this junk positively is young people are learning to accept and even want that kind of relationship.Let me just say right off the bat: NO. DO NOT WANT.


Thought Two:

Romance is something that seems to be very poorly handled in general-- poorly plotted, poorly developed, and just generally all-around poorly written. Even romantic subplots are boring and house dull characters.

I personally feel like romantic relationships could be much better written if they were character driven rather than plot driven. (Goes without saying that if you are writing something like Dirk Pitt or something you should just ignore this advice, and probably all advice on this blog, because if you are writing Dirk Pitt it means you are writing full on action with no time for real character development. That's okay. You can give your books to my sister, she loves that stuff.)

I digress.

Most of the romance I see (and have written, ugh) is not really character driven. I have characters, they have to fall in love within a certain period, they have to follow this sort of vague plot... yeah. Pretty much 100% of my romantic relationships. Shoot me now.

Also like 90% of all the romantic relationships I have ever read.



Thought Two Part Two: 

Let us think for a moment about human relationships without romance: how a character meets, becomes friends (or not-friends), and how they interact all rests on the individual characters' personalities, habits, backgrounds, speaking style, etc.

Now let us ponder all the aspects of a healthy awesome character: they have a certain personality, certain thoughts, ways of expressing themselves, beliefs, families, friends, general lives.

Now romantic relationships, keeping these things in mind: two characters, who have individual personalities, habits, backgrounds, and modes of expression, meet and decide to form a relationship, which is either immediately or eventually romantic in nature.

So okay. Basically what I'm saying is that your characters need to actually... you know... be characters.

Or, to put it a totally different sort of way, your characters should not exist for the sole purpose of being in love with each other. They are individual characters first, lovers second.

Put it a third way: CHARACTERS ARE SO COOL GUYS

LET'S MAKE CHARACTERS

AND THEN SHIP THEM

Because the problem with writing the romance first and the characters second is that the characters will never be allowed to develop outside the story. If they can't do that, then it will be so hard to make them seem like anything more than two little cardboard cutouts with no lives and no chemistry.

(PS. This was hard to write, because this is basically me hitting myself over the head. Totally preaching to myself on this one.)


END PART ONE OF THIS POST (part two coming like Saturday or something)