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}