By blood

Hi everybody, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by. If you’ve been hanging with me for a bit, you know that this month we’re taking some time to talk about love. Love in its many forms, all of which become catalysts for the vast majority of good books on the market. There’s always love, in some shape or form. It’s always there. It’s always a major plot point—whether you realize it or not.

So that’s what we’re discussing this month. We’re looking at some of the various forms of love, and discussing how they fit into our writing, and how we can use them to better our works. Why? Because everybody loves to love, whether they’ll admit to it or not.

Today, one of those I’m sure you thought of right away (and could probably name a million examples of, too):

Friendly Love

We’re talking the love you share with your best friend, the bond you have with the people around you, the people close to you, but the people who are definitely not related to you. Yeah, those relatives get their own special little love box, and it’s nowhere near this one.

Friendly love, brotherly love, whatever you want to call it, is a love that drives… oh, I don’t know, a million billion stories forward?

Think Lord of the Rings. That story is filled to the brim with friends, and has very little in term of family. Sure, Pippin and Frodo are distant relations, Elrond and Arwen are father and daughter, and Boromir and Faramir are brothers—but none of those are the primary relationships that are drawing the story forward.

No, the primary relationships are those of purest friendship.

Think of Frodo and Sam. Sam loves Frodo, Frodo is his very best of friends, to the point that Sam is literally willing to die for Frodo. That’s a kind of love that readers adore. It’s a kind of love we hope we’ll feel one day. We all want to be a friend like Sam (and really, we all want to have a friend like Sam, too).

I’ll go one deeper though. Ever heard of blood brothers?

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “blood is thicker than water,” but did you know that it’s not actually intended to mean that your familial relationships are stronger than the friendships you make outside your family? It's derived from blood brothers. It means the brothers you choose, the brothers you make a vow with, are the strongest relationship you’ll ever have. It means that this bond you have with your friend, that’s blood. And every other relationship is like water in comparison.

That’s the kind of friendly love that drives a story forward, compelled by purest love, that readers just can’t get enough of.

It’s a love that never leads to lust or romance, a love that never strays from what it was at the start, a love that chooses again and again and again to fight for each other, because blood is thicker than water.

And if it’s not a love you’ve written before, you’d better get on it. Because everybody needs a Samwise Gamgee in their life, even if you have to be the one to create him.

Next week, we’ll start talking about some kinds of love that you’ve probably never considered as kinds of love before—and I’ll even explain why you should use them more often!

[love]

{Rani Divine}