“
Oh, I don’t care much for
romance.”
Those are words that romance
writers – and readers – often hear. The funny thing is, it’s
hard to find a good story without it.
Last night my husband and I watched
a classic ghost story, “The Uninvited.” A man and his sister move
into a haunted house. Sort of an unusual domestic arrangement. Why
are they brother and sister? So the brother is able to become
romantically involved with Stella, the young woman who’s the target
of the spirits in the house.
Why is that? Because storytellers
recognize that most of us are driven by the need for romantic love. A
story may not be billed as a “romance,” but you’ll find romance
at the heart of most stories.
Think of the classics, and you’ll
find that the desire for romantic love is usually a prime motivator
for the characters, even if that pursuit is misguided. In “The
Great Gatsby,” the title character builds a new life for, and is
finally destroyed by, the pursuit of love. In “Casablanca,” the
story hinges on the lost love between Rick and Ilsa. “Gone with the
Wind” without the passion of Scarlett and Rhett? I don’t think
so.
What about action films? Let’s
talk “Spiderman.” In the 2002 film, Peter Parker tells us in the
opening narration: “Let me assure you, this, like any story worth
telling, is all about a girl.” How about film noir? The leading man
in “Double Indemnity” may be motivated by lust rather than love …
but he’s built it up into something pretty important by the time
he’s willing to kill a guy for it. In horror, the mummy is after
his lost mate, and all the Frankenstein monster really wants is a
bride. Comedy? Even in something as light, silly and just-for-fun as
the “Anchorman” films, Ron Burgundy’s gotta get the girl (or
get her back).
Love – the need for it or the
lack of it – makes everything more important. It raises the stakes.
It’s something we all want. Storytellers, readers and moviegoers
are instinctively drawn to it, whether they realize it or not.
Most romance readers and writers
simply recognize that need more consciously, so we go after it more
directly. Someone may be getting killed, something may be getting
stolen, a career may be at stake … but whatever our characters think they’re after, we can be darned sure there’s a
happily-ever-after at the end of it.
And that’s a story worth telling.
Champions of good spelling, grammar
and punctuation have a new hero: Weird Al Yankovic.
At the risk of making Weird Al cringe: Who’da thunk it?
The biggest media attention-getter from Weird
Al’s newest album, “Mandatory Fun,” has been “Tacky”
(his parody of Pharell Williams' “Happy”). But meanwhile, my fellow
writer friends on Facebook are geeking out over “Word Crimes”
(set to the tune of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”). I’ve
seen it re-posted about a dozen times in the past two days.
You can watch it here.
It’s wonderful. The guy who’s
made us laugh for 30-plus years now has English language fans hooting as he
shares our agonies over the misspellings and horrible punctuation
that populate the Internet. Al shows his smarts about less
versus fewer,
whom
versus who and
the Oxford comma (although he'll let you slide on that one).
He even tries to educate
the masses about the correct use of the word it’s.
It may be a hopeless cause, and I
know a ton of people hearing the song are saying, “HUH?”
But for the grammar geeks out
there, it’s 3 minutes and 45 seconds of “Amen!”
Thanks, Al.
"Oh! So THAT's how you two
met!"
When I told people that my first
novel was a romance set at a radio station, I got that reaction a
lot. Yes, my husband is a disc jockey; yes, we did work at the same
radio station together for seven years. But that happened after we
were married.
I borrow from my life. I freely
admit it. My stories are filled with first and last names borrowed
from family members and friends. The afghan my aunt crocheted for me
is in the first chapter of "Love on the Air." And that
radio station is filled with small items and incidents from the
station where I worked. We really did have a CD player we had to
stick a butter knife into to rescue a disc that got stuck. And a
break room where there was always danger of coming around the corner
and crashing into someone (a perfect accident for my hero and
heroine!).
I plant pieces of myself into my
stories, and I love it.
But if people were to assume that
everything in my books really happened to me ... brrr! That could
open a can of worms. If my next hero were an auto mechanic, what if
people started thinking I had eyes for the guy who fixes my car? Come
to think of it, we have been seeing a lot more of each other lately,
as my car gets older.... See? Instant gossip!
I wonder if people who write murder
mysteries run into the same reaction. Do people realize it's fiction,
since there are no bodies turning up on the author's doorstep? Or do
friends start eying them uneasily, wondering if a character who
resembles them might turn up as a victim in the next book?
Of course, no one ever said writing
fiction was for the faint of heart.
The beauty of writing, as with
reading, is that we get to escape into another world and experience
it vicariously. Writing can have a tremendous advantage because we
control this universe. On the other hand, sometimes it sends us down
blind alleys or requires us to cause pain for those characters we
love so much.
When I'm doing my job right, I
experience the story every bit as much as my readers do. There's
great joy in taking just a pinch of my favorite things, a dash of
personal experience, and stirring it into a great big bowl of
fantasy.
So, if any of you notice a
good-looking grocery checker in my next book, why, pay it no mind.
