Love is in the air

Valentine’s Day is coming up, and I thought that made for a good reason to talk about one of the biggest tenants of every story: love. It’s in literally every story written, even if you don’t think it is, even if readers don’t notice it’s there. But for a lot of us, love is what drives a story forward, it’s what keeps characters moving, what keeps them from falling into a pit of despair, and I think that makes for a very interesting topic, for today.

Why does everything revolve around love?

As you all well know, story imitates life. We’re trying to make our stories as close to real life as can be, even if our stories have nothing to do with real life at all. If the story doesn’t imitate life, then the reader has great difficulty following and understanding what the writer was trying to convey.

And, as we all know, love is a big part of life.

But here’s what you may not think of, in your everyday goings on:

Love is a part of every single thing you do, and influences nearly every decision you make.

Yeah, I know, that’s a really big statement, but it’s completely true. It’s scientifically proven that people who feel more loved by their parents, who don’t feel shunned and abused and unloved, are more likely to grow up into a more well-rounded and solid character. Those who feel unloved, those who are abused and hurt as children, have greater difficulty later in life because they feel they cannot trust anyone to love them, that they are unlovable. And this upbringing, this abundance or deprivation of love, will determine many things in a character's everyday life—whether they realize it or not.

You see, I’m not just talking about the happy side of love influencing us. It’s not all candy and roses out there, and neither is it for our writing. It’s also about the darker things, that people who have been told over and over again that they could not be loved, that there’s nothing about them that’s loveable.

That influences us more than we think.

See, we start to believe what we’re told, the more it’s told to us. It’s natural, from the start of our lives. So if Momma told you ain’t nobody gonna love you, then by the time you’re an adult, you probably agree. But if Momma told you people gonna be falling on their faces in love with you, that’s probably what you’ll expect when you’re an adult.

It’s the same for our characters. What happened to them when they were younger, the type of love they were shown, will influence the way they behave as adults—and the types of love they feel now, whether toward people or places or things, will impact the way they view the world as a whole.

We cannot afford to avoid love in our stories. To do so would be to deny a huge part of what life is, of the thing we’re trying to emulate through words on a page.

It doesn’t have to be all lovey-dovey. In fact, it shouldn’t be. But don’t forget to write about love. Don’t be so caught up in the things going on that you forget about the characters and what’s going through their minds. Don’t forget that we always think back to when we were little, to when so-and-so said such-a-thing that hurt our feelings and made us wonder every day whether it’s worth it to go on.

Because that’s how real people think, that’s how real people live, and we want our characters to be real, too.

[love]

{Rani Divine}