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}