Tag: love stories

Finding your way around my blog

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To help you find posts from the past, I’ve added a guide to my home page, like a long list of contents.

In August and September last year, posts are about getting started (including things not to worry about), from late September to December we look at character, in January this year we started learning plot skills and from April posts are about what Stephen King calls the Box of Tricks: aspects of the writing craft.

This week, we’re busy rewriting, polishing to the highest standard, with a section to follow between now and the summer, about getting your novel out to the public.

Happy writing, everyone! More next week.

The course of true love stories – plot basics

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The best love stories are more than morality tales. They deal with fundamental questions about our community and what that community should fairly demand of us.  The greatest love story of them all is probably Romeo and Juliet, written by Shakespeare and enjoyed by lucky Londoners in the 1590s, about young lovers who fall in love on a glance and are kept apart by their warring families. Their deaths together shock everyone into accepting peace.

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Community requires obedience to the law in respect for others. Biology however likes a bit of variety and throws in some unexpected passion now and again to strengthen our genetic make-up. So, forbidden love, defying boundaries, has been with us for centuries ranging from Paris and Helen, Ruth and Boaz, Abelard and Heloise to, who knows, Eve and the snake.

What’s the essence of a good love story?

  • ‘Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again.’ Happy days. Notice that the lead figure in this old expression is the ‘boy’ or man. As I said last time, this corner of the fiction playground is not just for girls.
  • Falling in love is instant and overpowering for both lovers. If we go back to the classic story formulae, that moment is the ‘inciting incident’ compelling the story forward. Life can never be the same again.
  • The loving couple will give each other something of fundamental value for life, even if they can’t be together. Their love is a once in a lifetime chance for completeness without which the characters are lost. Austen’s Persuasion is a leading example of this.
  • The lovers learn that love is about more than pheromones. They genuinely ‘get’ or understand each other. This week I found myself watching Room At The Top, an 1959 film based on John Braine’s excellent novel. It’s not about shenanigans in a penthouse – the title comes from the phrase ‘There’s always room at the top’ for able people – but about how Joe Lampton tries to make his way in a world of connections and vested interests that are stacked against him. He plays two women against each other and ends up married to the young, rich one. Happy ever after? His climactic scene delivers him the insight that with the older woman he is truly known and could be lifelong happy. But he rejects it. As he and his young wife drive off from their marriage, we see years ahead of misery for them both.
  • A political context raises the stakes as well as bringing on a wider theme (Dr Zhivago, Dido and Aeneas, A Tale of Two Cities).
  • In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare used street violence between the young men to raise the stakes to life and death levels. It also challenges Juliet’s love to her core when she discovers that her darling new husband has just killed her beloved cousin Tybalt.

Why do we warm towards love stories, whoever we are, wherever and whenever we live? They reinforce the happiness we’re blessed with? Soothe are our loneliness, remove briefly the disjointedness in our lives? Are an antidote to cynicism?

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Types of love story

We love it whenever we hear that Grandma and Grandad fell in love at school, stayed married for seventy years and died within a month of each other. That satisfies our deep need for stability. But in fiction we like obstacles, preferably ones that raise our heart rate good and high. This is where forbidden love comes in:

  • Love triangles – tried and tested from the earliest times (Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Iseult, anything with Zeus in it) through the 19th century (Anna Karenina) and 20th (Brief Encounter, Bridges of Madison County, Doctor Zhivago), still alive and well today;
  • Sleeping with the enemy (Romeo and Juliet and all its derivations);
  • Love that is socially, politically or morally impossible (Pride and Prejudice, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra, the story of Frankenstein’s monster and his bride);
  • Love rejected when one rises in status and rejects the real love (Wuthering Heights, Gatsby);
  • Love otherwise torn apart by circumstances (Jane Eyre);
  • Unconsummated love (Gone with the Wind, A Tale of Two Cities, The Snow Goose);
  • Two characters who meet through work or similar, can’t stand each other and learn to love each other (African Queen, Guys and Dolls, The Philadelphia Story, Austen’s Emma and its marvellous film spoof Clueless, anything with Jennifer Aniston in it).

That last one fills cinemas regularly these days. See how small a part it plays in the whole picture?

It’s all what you want to make of it. Go ahead, try a new mix.

What about structure?

Set up the characters in their unfulfilled lives. Bring the lovers together. They notice each other and their connection becomes apparent. Their love faces whatever obstacles you can think up until both characters reach the necessary climactic insight about themselves as part of the process of deserving each other. They come together again – happy ending.

More about The Odyssey

Homer’s Odyssey is the story of an old soldier’s quest for home after a decade of dreadful war. His tests vary from keeping his ships safe from crashing rocks to escaping the clutches of a love goddess. Escaping a love goddess? Yes. There’s a marvellous bit where he explains to the goddess that, for all the delights of living with her, what he actually needs and wants is to be with his wife Penelope. He longs to grow old with her and watch the mortal furrows spread on her face.

When Odysseus arrives home, his old dog Argos’s last act is to snuffle around Odysseus’ feet in recognition of his master, and fall dead at his feet. Does this convince Penelope that he is her long lost husband? No. She is being tormented by gangs of ‘suitors’ who are taking over the place, being nothing but trouble, and the last thing she needs is another one lying to try and jump the queue. Odysseus might have a chance if he could tell her something that no-one else in the world knows but the two of them. She asks him, seeing as he’s standing there being useless, to do her a favour and move her bed for her. He replies that he made their marital bed himself from the living oak of a single tree, and built their bedroom and their house around it. Now she has no doubt who he is and welcomes him home.

They have already been married at least twenty years. They are not young. She did not run to him the moment he staggered through the door, as he probably hoped. He had to win her over afresh and did it not with his charm or strength but with that wonderful secret about their love. All exquisitely romantic and not, in my view, bettered by any other writer since.

Time and again we use stories to explore what is the best, sustainable kind of love and what isn’t. And how far wealth brings us happiness – which is where love stories overlap with another great plot structure, Rags to Riches. More of that next week …

Happy writing.

Tell me the truth about love stories

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Ah yes, our poor, barnacled hearts.

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We might as well start with Cinderella

Cinderella has been loved and retold all over the world for over 3000 years among humans of all kinds and genders. In Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen gave it a makeover during the Napoleonic Wars (taking a comic side-swipe at some lazy romance stories around her at the time). The film Pretty Woman (1990) rebooted it, Bridget Jones gave it another contemporary twist in 1997 (having started as a newspaper column) and since 1999 the play and film Mamma Mia has been showing that it can work for middle-aged people too. Any good plot structure can stand another version.

The genius of the Cinderella story is most explicit in Pretty Woman. No, I don’t mean the scene where the snooty shop assistants are obliged to grovel to her, though that’s part of it. It’s at the end where the Richard Gere character arrives at her flat (top storey of course, like a fairy tale tower), he climbs up her fire escape with flowers and jokes that he’s come to rescue her. She skips out of the window and down the steps to hug and kiss him. ‘Your white knight is here to rescue you,’ he goes, ‘what happens next?’ Julia Roberts gives him a level look and says, ‘She rescues him right back’.

In this Cinderella it not just that she is rescued from the kitchens (or in her case street life) by all his princely money. It’s that they rescue each other, and are right for each other, regardless of their places in society.

But love stories have not always taken that shape. The Ancient Greeks had a strict formula for their romantic stories: a heterosexual young couple, both equally beautiful and aristocratic, fall in love. Before they can marry, each of them must face a series of tough tests of mind, body and spirit (equally tough regardless of their gender). Only when they’ve been tested enough and are seen to deserve each other does the genre allow them to marry. Happy ending.

The Three Drinks

In an Irish folk tale called The Three Drinks (Sinead De Valera, Irish Fairy Tales, 1973) a mother of three sons hears that a rich, local beauty called Ina the Fair has launched a singing competition to find a husband. An old woman turns up at their home asking for hospitality and offers a magic potion as her thanks, saying that the potion will guarantee success with Ina the Fair. She makes it clear though that the potion only works if the person who takes it works hard.

The sons line up to try the potion and have a crack at the singing competition. With the potion each one is left a list of chores to do.

The eldest is idle: having taken the potion, he just laughs at the list of chores. Off he goes to sing for Ina and everybody laughs back at him. The next son is distracted by all and everything; he downs the potion and off he goes. But on the way, he sees a rugby match and can’t help joining in. Next he’s off helping somebody else. Nice lad but it doesn’t get the chores done, does it?

The youngest son faithfully does his work before he goes to sing for Ina the Fair. Happy ending? You’d think so but … He does indeed sing like a lark and everybody’s impressed, but Ina won’t have him. Why? He’s too poor! (And maybe he should have had a wash after doing all those chores.) Away home he goes, heart-scalded, and decides to better himself. In no time he’s a rich man, doing well.

The old woman turns up at his door again. She has some important news for him, that Ina the Fair rues the day she sent him away and is miserable without him. He thinks for a moment what to do, then he takes off his brocade jacket with gold buttons and his finely tailored breeches, puts on some old rags and off he goes to sing to her again. This time she’s dying to marry him, rags and all. He’s chuffed to bits and agrees. She’s even happier of course when she discovers that he’s a rich man now; money always helps. But the point is this: it’s not until they’ve both survived their troubles that they deserve each other.

Tristan and Iseult

Many of these ancient stories took form long before they were written down. The love story credited with being Western literature’s first is Tristan and Iseult.

It is a remarkably complex story with too many shafts of painful reality to be rooted purely in ‘legend’. Like all the oldest tales, there are several versions that blend in and out of each other. Its origin is generally credited to two French poets in the twelfth century but early echoes have been discovered all over the place from Ireland to Spain to Belarus. I’m a great fan of Rosemary Sutcliff’s version written with enormous tenderness for children in 1971.

In brief, the ‘courtly’ version is as follows:

A war between Ireland and Cornwall is settled when Tristan kills the Irish champion, the Morholt, in single combat. He is healed of his near-fatal wound by an Irish princess but he doesn’t get to see her face. We readers know that she is Princess Iseult. Back home in Cornwall, Tristan’s uncle King Mark is set to marry her to seal the new peace and, now that he’s well, Tristan is sent to collect her. Among her wedding gifts is a magic potion to drink with her new husband to seal their love and marriage. During the voyage from Ireland to Cornwall a storm threatens them all. Tristan and Iseult drink the potion together (who wouldn’t?) and fall in love …

Brimming with new love they may be, but Iseult has no choice but to go ahead with her arranged marriage to King Mark and tries to forget Tristan. But there he is at court, large as life and ever so handsome, and in time they can’t help but start an affair.

Mark’s knights find out and the lovers are sentenced to death.

Tristan is locked in a tower before his execution and, hero that he is, manages to escape. Iseult’s sentence is to be thrown among lepers and then burnt at the stake. Just in time, Tristan (disguised as a leper) saves her and they run off into the woods together.

There they live together for four years. This is an odd section of the story – they live on berries and love in a non-world of their own making – until King Mark passes by on a hunting trip. He visits their hut while it’s empty and leaves a trace to show Iseult that she’s been discovered. She decides she has no choice but to go back to Mark and be his wife again.

Tristan is married off by arrangement to a Breton Princess. She is another Iseult, known as Iseult of the Fair Hands, and Tristan starts life in Brittany. Tristan and Iseult stick with their marriages, although we learn that Tristan is unable to make love to his wife.

There are several versions of Tristan’s death. It’s clear that he was one of the bravest warriors and was never going to make old bones. My favourite is that Tristan joins in sword play with his brother-in-law and is mortally wounded. No-one but Irish Iseult (Mark’s queen) can save him as her healing skills are unmatched, and she is begged to come and heal Tristan in Britanny. Her ship is to show a white sail if she is on board, a black sail if she has refused to come.

Tristan lies dying. His wife Iseult of the Fair Hands keeps watch on the horizon. A ship appears. Tristan asks what colour the sails are. She tells him they are black.

It’s a lie. Iseult arrives with her bag of herbs and potions but Tristan has already died broken-hearted without her. Iseult throws herself on his corpse and breathes her last. They are together at last in death and are buried together. Tradition has it that columbine grows from her grave and honeysuckle from his (or vice versa, or it might be hazel) entwining for the rest of time.

What traditional elements of Western love stories are established here?

  • The couple falls instantly and helplessly in love and remain in love with each other all their lives – the coup de foudre is an over-powering, once in a lifetime event;
  • Their love faces a series of obstacles, in this case the lovers’ duties to their arranged treaty marriages and their communities. They try to do the honourable thing and stay away from each other;
  • Life is incomplete for each of them without the other and always will be (‘Ni moi sans vous, ni vous sans moi’);
  • Only in death can they find perfection together.

Mark and Iseult of the Fair Hands are innocent victims in this story but lose our affection when they commit appallingly callous acts: Mark’s sentence on Iseult for her adultery and Breton Iseult’s black sail lie.

Prepare for a shock:

In many of the world’s communities even today, falling suddenly in love – the coup de foudre – is not seen as the route to happiness at all. On the contrary, it’s reckoned to be a temporary madness which can threaten everything the community holds dear. The fundamental question for Tristan and Iseult is whether they should serve the needs of their communities or of their own hearts. That is why their period of isolation in the forest is so important: without your community, life is fundamentally arid. The difficulty is that without love, life is arid too. 

Tristan and Iseult don’t need to earn each other’s respect: for them, being slave to the potion is enough. It’s our respect they must earn before they can unite in death.

If you have characters who are in love, try inviting them – separately, in turn – for a scribble-chat. That’s where you get together like old friends and you let the character chat loosely with you while you write it all down, as deep, free and wide as a river without editing at all. Let yourself be surprised by what comes.

Your character is in love with X. Ask your character these questions:

  • Why did you first notice X? What was it about X that made you linger?
  • How did you first make contact?
  • How did X behave during your first meeting?
  • List the things you love most about X, in order of importance to you.
  • Is there a place that’s special to you both? Real or made up? Describe it please.
  • Do you have any code words or nicknames just for the two of you?
  • Do you own anything belonging to X? Describe it.
  • What would you say to X in a love letter? Your letter is entirely private and may never be sent: what would you really like to say?IMG_2377
  • How would you like your future together to be?
  • How do you see things really panning out?
  • Have you been in love before? If so, how does this time compare? If not, is love how you thought it would be? What’s different?
  • How do you think other people see you? Your parents? Your friends? X’s friends? Strangers in the street?

You can have a scribble-chat like this with your lovers at many stages of their love. One of the dynamics of story-telling is dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the characters, and you can play with your characters’ and readers’ expectations to roll your storyline around. In One Day, David Nicholls uses missed opportunities and timing to break our hearts. The Rhett and Scarlett storyline in Gone with the Wind does the same. There are countless examples.

In today’s Western world, love stories have come to be seen as ‘chicklit’ or female fodder but that is a late twentieth century development. Throughout the centuries there has been no shortage of smitten male protagonists ready to die for love, from Tristan and Lancelot through Sidney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This corner of the fiction playground is not just for the girls.

More about Romeo and Juliet next week. Happy writing!