Where do we go from here?

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. Today, as you likely know, is the last day in our series on love. It’s the one where we bring it all together, the one where we tie everything up in a package with a neat little bow on top, so we’ll all know where to go from here.

This month, we’ve talked about many different kinds of love: three positive ones and three negative. We’ve discussed romantic love, the love between siblings, and the impenetrable bond that forms between blood brothers. We’ve talked about lust between characters who don’t belong together, desire between a character and the thing they covet, and fear, the absence of love in its entirety. And now, let’s figure out how we use this information in our writing.

Love, in Story

I talk about this a lot, but I want to mention it once more, here: 

If you want to be a good writer, you need to make a habit of studying people. 

You need to know what makes them tick, what goes through their minds, what emotions they’re feeling and why—every little thing that might matter to your characters, you need to have at least a small understanding of it. It’s not enough to just use your own personal experiences. Some of your characters have lived through things you can’t possibly understand. Some of them understand things you don’t. And that’s what makes it important for you to make a study of things like love, so you’ll know how and why it works in relation to your characters.

In story, it’s usually best to blend a few of the different forms of love, in order to round out your story more fully. Remember, most people experience all six types of love we’ve talked about this month. But, I’d suggest choosing one or two to be the main focus of a single story.

Let’s consider a story we should all know pretty well (and if you don’t, then I think I might have to take away your writer card, sorry): The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, there’s a reason why I always refer to Tolkien, when I’m talking about story tenants. It’s because everyone knows Tolkien, I can refer to characters without having to fully describe who they are, and because the writing is solid, even today.

Within LOTR, we see each of the different forms of love, and each one propels the story forward in a different way. We see romantic love between Arwen and Aragorn, sibling love between the hobbits, blood brothers in Gimli and Legolas, lust (albeit mildly) between Eowyn and Aragon, desire for the Ring from Gollum (among others, like Boromir), and fear intermingles through it all.

In this case, the strongest loves Tolkien focuses on are those of fear and of blood brothers. The Fellowship is created out of companions who now declare themselves loyal to one another, to whatever end. They are brothers now, by blood, a stronger bond than even their own family. Fear weaves through every part of the story, as each character struggles to face the loss of the life they knew, the love they’d lived in prior to the story’s beginning. For the hobbits, this fear is especially strong. Mordor had not reached the Shire, when the story began. They knew nothing of this kind of fear, before leaving their home.

See what I mean? While each of the six forms of love is required to push the story forward, to round it out and make it the epic saga we all know it to be, two forms of love are the ones to push it to its pinnacle.

And that’s how our writing should be. That’s how you take love and turn it into a story that no one would think of as a love story—though when you break it down, The Lord of the Rings is one of the greatest love stories ever written.

There’s a reason why I got a Lord of the Rings tattoo.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Trembling

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. This, as you well know (or should know, if you’ve looked at a calendar recently), is the last week of February—and therefore, the last week in our series on love. I’m both relieved and sad, because I’ve had a lot of fun with this series, but I’m looking forward to finding out what comes next. Haven’t quite nailed down next month’s theme yet. ;-)

All month long, we’ve been talking about the many shapes love takes in story. We’ve talked romantic love, sibling love, the love between friends, and negative twists on the subject, like lust and desire. Today, I give you the last negative twist on love, before Thursday’s discussion on how to use these forms of love in your writing.

This one, I’m willing to bet, you’ve never thought of as a twist on love. But, that’s because it’s technically the opposite of love.

Fear

I know, I know, some of you will say that hate is the opposite of love, but you would be wrong. Anger is the opposite of happiness, joy is the opposite of hate, and fear, well, fear is the opposite of love. It’s the lack of love, and it makes for a very interesting story.

I think it’s safe to say that fear rears its head in every story ever told. There always has to be something to fear, something to dread, something that’s the opposite of love. We’re so used to it, we probably didn’t all realize that it was going on. Fear is developed through tension, which we all know is something writers have to amplify in their work, in order to keep readers’ attention.

In story, fear takes shape when a character is without love, when they desire love. Fear takes place when love is stolen, when love vanishes from a character’s mind. Starting to see it now?

Think of Narnia. Everything’s hunky dory in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, until Edmond goes missing. Everything’s alight with joy and wonder and a newfound love for this world the children have discovered (edged with other emotions, of course), but upon their brother’s disappearance, that love is stolen away, leaving room for little but fear. The children are afraid now. What can they possibly do, to rescue their brother? How can they survive this harsh new world? Suddenly everything beautiful and wonderful seems strange and unfamiliar, suddenly everything seems dangerous. Fearful. All because that love was stolen from them.

That’s what makes fear such a powerful thing to play with, in story. It’s the absence of the thing we’re all looking for, the lack of that emotion everyone wants to feel. It’s life without love, which many people can’t even imagine ever feeling—and it draws readers in, in the hope that these characters will find their love again, will learn to live beyond this fear.

And that’s why it’s a shape of love that we should never stop writing. People love to read about love, yes, but one of the best ways to write about love is for our characters to experience an absence of it. Once our characters know what it is to live without love, to live only in fear—and once our readers experience that life along with them—it makes the finding of love all that much more poignant.

Everyone knows what it is to fear.

Everyone knows what it is to love.

Our stories benefit from remembering that, and from using it in any way we can.

[love]

{Rani Divine}

Unending Want

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m glad you stopped by. It’s been a fun month of learning about love, and I hope our last three topics will be as much fun for you as they’ve been for me. I love writing about love, in its many shapes and forms.

This week, as you’ll know if you’ve been with us for a bit, we’re talking about some of the negative spins on love. Loves that shouldn’t be. Loves that aren’t as pretty and happy and wonderful as the ones we talked about earlier in the month. Loves that you might not even think of as loves, if we’re being honest.

Today?

Desire

This is a kind of love that bothers me, in story, and yet it’s also one that I’m fond of reading from time to time. It can be negative or positive, but it’s always fairly unique to the story being told. At least, in the times I’ve read it.

Where lust is a love between two characters who should not be together, desire is a love between a single character and a thing.

Yep, this time we’re talking about a one-sided love, in that it’s a love between one thing capable of loving and one thing incapable of it. Think Han Solo and the Falcon. He loves that ship, but that ship is in no way capable of loving him back.

That’s a positive spin on it, however. It can also go badly.

Think of Gollum and the One Ring. Gollum loved that ring, to the point that he was willing to kill literally anyone to make sure the ring was his and his alone. His desire for that ring burned through every last bit of his former self, until he forgot what he’d once been.

That’s the power of desire, in story. Desire will get a character the thing they want (maybe), but it doesn’t always work out the way they want. It’s the kind of love that longs and yearns and is willing to break the rules to get its way. And it’s a kind of love that I highly recommend writing (as I have with all of them, really). Why? Because it's a love that exists in life, a love that compels, a love that draws intrigue and interest to itself.

Desire is one of those things that will take over a story, if we’re not careful with it. It can take the entirety of a character’s mind and twist it into something new, and it can do it when you’re not paying attention, to the point that you won’t even notice it happened. That’s how powerful desire can be, if it’s well written. Because of that, it can take extremely powerful positive or negative twists. It's hard to say which one will come out on top until you get a good deal of the way through the writing.

And that’s why it can be really fun to read—but also really annoying, when it gets that negative spin.

Next week, we’ll talk about the big one. The final negative twist on love. The twist you’ve probably never thought of before.

[love]

{Rani Divine}