From Hopeless Romantic to Sceptical Cynic to Something Inbetween

When I was young all I wrote was romance. I was obsessed with the idea of love, with the beautiful emotions captured upon the page in a story that had a central romantic plot. My friends would tease me, commenting on how my works always (and I do mean always) ended up with happily ever afters and marriages and everything else in typical Disney story fashion.

And then the years passed. And something inside of me seemed to die.

Hopeless? I’d always been quite hopeful. In many ways it was as though the hope died out. But I suppose four years of college without a single boyfriend made me start to realize…made me start to wonder if I’d been lied to and if there was more out there than a wedding ring on the finger to signify ultimate happiness. And besides, out of the works I’d read in class, it was rare to find one that actually ended with the characters getting everything they wanted. And the few that ended somewhat happily usually were picked apart by my professors anyways.

As a result my works started to become more depressing. My fifth novel I finished ended in utter despair. Dead characters and the protagonist locked away in a mental institution. Part of me felt proud for actually having made some progress. Actually having said goodbye to the naive little girl who’d always written love stories.

And then over the summer I just stopped trying. I’d worked hard on my “senior thesis” a somewhat depressing novel that I had shown to several professors and fellow students for criticism. After having worked on that for so long I needed something new.

So I began working on fluffy romance. Things that made me smile and laugh and feel good again. I’d spent so long during senior year feeling depression build up over the inevitable end of the school year, that it felt good to relax a little. Write things that weren’t serious that I’d never send to a publisher. But there was more than that.

I had a friend who I was sending a few chapters to when I’d finish them. And she made a point of saying something to me one day that struck me.

She told me that my last two updates were both during horrible life moments. Apparently one came in right after her mother’s passing, and the next while waiting in the hospital. She told me “I actually laughed with happiness when my email came that you had updated, because I needed something lighthearted right in that moment.”

I cannot even express how much that meant to me. How deeply moved I was to think of this friend reading my cheesy ridiculous love story in the hospital and smiling.

But that’s the beauty of happy things. Sure, a depressing story might have some great messages in it, or be written beautifully. But happy stories have the power to make people’s lives better.

With this in mind I decided I might rethink the depressing college novel if I ever get started on it again. Because I know now that while there is value to a story that has tragedy and sorrow…there is also beauty in a story that helps other people remember to smile. I don’t think writers should forget that too quickly.

 

What do you prefer to read or write? Do you think there are advantages and disadvantages to comedies vs tragedies?

When a Writer Falls in Love

A few weeks ago a friend said something very interest to me. She quoted: “If a writer falls in love with you, you can never die. ” — Mik Everett. And this quote started to get my mind going. So I wrote this reflection of what happens when a writer falls in love. It’s a bit sappy, but anyone who knows me should already be aware I’m a hopeless romantic. Also, the writer is always referred to as a she or her simply because I’m writing from my own perspective, not because I have any beliefs that male writers don’t have the same feelings or anything of that nature. So below is my writing, feel free to comment on your own thoughts on this quote, but here is my reflection:

When a writer falls in love with you, you become immortalized forever. She is unable to do anything but write and think and dream. She tries her best to confine her heart in a prison of ink, and in doing so keeps you captured upon a page. You live forever in her works. And dwell forever in her heart. And as her heart and her works connect, you’ll find references to yourself all along the way.

She will write unendingly of your eyes. Blue like the free open sky, or brown like the rich earth, or green like the growth and life of plants, or grey like the stormy seas. And words forever will worship those eyes that first captivated her soul and laid her bare for all the world to see.

She will write of your voice, the way it lilts in certain places, the way you accent each word. She’ll write of how hearing it causes tears (though they never come till after you’re gone). Those soft tender words you speak will make her type away for hours on end, staring at a computer as though hoping that typing down each and every phrase might bring your voice to life upon the page. And though she may not show it, she waits and watches each time your mouth opens, hungry for more to feed her thoughts and fill her writing.

She will write of your laugh and smile and the way her heart twists painfully each time your happiness is evident. For though she doesn’t want you sad, your happiness confounds and undoes her, pulls her open in ways no other element could do. And sometimes those feelings hurt almost as much as any physical pain would, that tightness in her chest expanding into butterflies in her stomach, her butterflies fluttering into her heart to quicken the beat until she feels overwhelmed in the sensations. And she is unable to do anything but feel, torn between embracing it, or pushing it away, unable to distinguish how much the pleasure and the pain intermingle in one.

But more than anything she’ll try to write what she knows words can never fully express. She’ll wish she could write symphonies, paint masterpieces, find other ways to immortalize and protect the vulnerable emotions that extend through all aspects of her mind. She’ll write of feelings, of longing, of deep pining and wanting, and of things which the English language has boundaries in fully expressing. Her writing will be unable to fully satisfy what she so longs to give and to receive. For though a book is a dear friend for a while, it can never love her back the way a real person could. She’ll try her best to give her heart upon the page, but in reality it is a mere substitute for the longing she has to set free the truth and fully treasure the bond that she could share with you if only you would love her in return.

For when a writer falls in love with you, her words live on in paper, but the love lives on in her acknowledgement of her feelings for you in a way so many others can’t express. A writer prints a bit of soul and heart within her writing. And spreads before the world a portrait of the one who best opens her creativity. For you, her dear muse, have allowed her to marry her two loves into one, merge writing and desire into one beautiful molded masterpiece that remains in her thoughts even when the book is long forgotten and crumbles into dust. Even then she’ll still remember. Still treasure. And the words once printed on paper, remain printed somewhere deep within her, longing only to take up a home within your heart as well.