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}