Hello, writers.
SenSho couldn't make it this week, so she flashed the Hack-Signal over Gotham, and I answered the call. (And yes, these tights are totally riding up.)
Tonight, because a novel without romance is like a fork without a tine, we're going to talk about love--or as they say in Czech, 'hrczynavci.' However, first I wanna know: do you love any novels that don't contain any romance whatsoever?
Now, while I know that much of what we do as writers consists of extracting emotions from our brains and splattering them willy-nilly on the page in the desperate hope of infecting the corpus callosi of passers-by, I'm wondering how we do that with love in particular.
The Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey romance is one of my favorites, yet Sayers very conveniently avoids showing Peter falling for Harriet. He just loves her. (And who could not? She's much too good for him.) So the fun of the romance is watching her teeter on the edge of love, until she falls in with a great splash.
So second, in how many of your favorite novelistic romances is one half of the sketch already in love?
Third, fourth, and fifth: What are your favorite literary romances? At what point to you believe that the characters are in love? Any love stories where you never believed it?
And tonight's challenge is ...
Love at first sight!
There's not much room in comments, but can you show two (or three, or eight, for that matter) characters meeting for the first time, and one of 'em falling in love? Bang. Just like that.
Not lust, mind you. Lust is too easy. Gotta be falling in love. Or at least falling toward love, that first shiver of possibility--or certainty--or however you wanna portray it.
And for extra credit, write the same scene from the other character's viewpoint and email to SenSho without explanation.
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