Love in Literature

This week, my brain's been in overdrive.  I can't yet give you a reason as to why, though spend enough time thinking about why you're thinking and you'll come to some interesting conclusions.

My brain forcing me to spend unhealthy amounts of time thinking about everything in my life wouldn't be such a bad thing if it were letting me follow these extremely long trains of thought to something that I can actually post here.  Unfortunately, my brain is train hopping.  Before it gets to a depot, it hops onto a passing train and heads off in a different direction.  It's very disorienting.

One of the things my brain finally settled on was an unfortunate almost promise I made to someone this summer.  I said that I would attempt to write a love story.  Oh.  My.  Gosh.  It should not be this difficult!  Unfortunately, love itself has basically become a cliche in our society and is so expected in stories that I can't abide it.  When we meet a guy and a girl in a story, we immediately start trying to figure out how they're going to end up together.  You can try to subvert expectations in so many ways, but love in literature is as disgustingly predictable as a dog peeing on a fire hydrant.  It's just what you expect.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Some people have very unpredictable lives and need escape from that in the stability of a cliched story line with stock characters you already know.  This is why there is a genre of movies called the chick flick and a genre of literature known as "the marriage plot" which, unfortunately, I took an entire semester studying.  Trust me.  It's cliched and boring.

Before you scream at your computer screen and say that just because something is cliched doesn't mean it's boring, I completely agree with you.  I am not suggesting causation, merely correlation.  In this case, romance stories are not only cliched and not only boring, but cliched AND boring.

I finally came to the realization today that this is exactly why I have so much trouble writing love stories.  They're predictable.  I don't like writing predictable.  I have been desperately working today to try and find a way to make the story unpredictable (particularly the ending) but as soon as I introduce a guy and a girl, the first thought of everyone who read love stories is, "O-M-G!  They would be SOOOOO cute together!"  (Insert wrist flick here.)  I honestly thought for a while about doing a guy-guy or girl-girl love story for the pure unpredictability of it, but I just couldn't bring myself to write it.

Giving up on the possibility of being unpredictable, I went for intentionally cliched.  That ended up not being much better.  I got so bored with it that my narrator ended up doing a linguistic commentary on the phrase "once upon a time" which, despite being very interesting, did nothing to move the story along and was really rather boring and pointless when I reread it.

I haven't given up yet.  I still think it's possible for me to write a love story, it'll just take some time and lots of tries.  To the person that I said would get it as a birthday present:  Sorry.  I know I missed it a while ago, but you're going to have to wait for Christmas . . . possibly Christmas NEXT year!

I'm open to suggestions on a way to go about ways to make a romance unpredictable.  If I ever come up with a love story that I'm happy with, my readers here will be among the first to know.

In the interest of leaving you with something other than my frustrations (and instead leaving you with frustrations of you own), ask yourself this:  Is there something in your life that has become so predictable it's boring?  Are you ok with that?  Can you change it?  Should you change it?







P.S.  I got an email today from my Cyberstalker that had an attachment on it with the first submissions for the challenge I submitted a little while ago.  For those of you that forgot, I'm looking for writings about writer's block.  It can be poems, stories, prose, or anything else you can think of.  I'm working on a page for my website on which I intend to include any and all submissions I get.  It's not too late to submit (especially seeing as how I only just got my first submissions).