Writing about love / emotions

This might have been talked about a lot, but I'm gonna start a post about it anyway. Just close it if it's already mentioned.



Writing about love and emotions is very difficult I think.


I am currently working on a story were a OC person is starting to fall in love with the other main character. I am still not sure if that love is gonna be requited. Do anyone have any tips for me when writing about characters developping romantic feelings towards other characters? I don't want to rush it, but it is often difficult not to rush it.

 

Well, my first advice is to decide what kind of love it is. You said that it was not rushing into love, but is the character you're writing an impulsive person in other things? Would this be an exception for them? Would they be more cautious or have no fear of what they're getting themselves into? Also, don't keep the attraction on a single level. You can't (despite what people think) go "This dude is HAWT!" and have that be the basis of love.

 

I agree with Ish.

Also, if you want the love to grow slowly and naturally, don't make entire scenes with the sole purpose of romance. That'll make it way too obvious. Intersperse the attraction amongst events, making it grow over several chapters before you actually come out and admit it completely.

 

I agree. In addition, outside of really badly-written romance novels, real life doesn't usually have all-romance scenes.

 

the all romance scenes are rather rare, honeymoons being one of them (or they should be). just be natural about it and intersperse little hints about it. don't let the character even admit it to themselves at first. denial is often one of the possible initial responses. but that does depend on the character. and definitly do NOT have it only based off of looks. that's about the worst type of "romance" you could have. it's fake, basically only lust. love goes far beyond looks, you love what the person is, the way they do things, the decisions they make at times. seeing the person smile, that kinda thing. just a brief touch here or there that sends an unexpected shock down the persons arm might be a good place to start. that can be worked into just about any scene.

 

So far I've had the male OC in one scene discover that he has begun noticing things about the female character that he hadn't noticed before like the colour of her eyes and things like that. He has tried making up some sort of reason for this besides love but doesn't really believe what he is telling himself.


He is kind of the arrogant type, but has begun to loosen up and seeing beyond his own ego and longer than the tip of his nose.

 

sounds like you've got a good foundation laid then.

 

You may have already done this, and if so disregard the following. It helps to know at least one character inside and out from the very beginning. What are his/her values? Hopes? Emotional strengths and weaknesses? What's the character's sense of humor like? What does he or she consider "normal" in terms of family life? These are all things that RL people take into account, consciously or unconsciously, when they start to find someone else attractive.

If you have a well-developed canon character and a still-in-progress OC, you're at something of an advantage, since you can deliberately design the OC in such a way that s/he "picks the lock" on the other character's heart. If you've got two developed characters whose personalities aren't malleable, you'll have to find those areas where their hopes/needs/emotional styles overlap, and emphasize those. Basically, what you're doing at this stage is setting up character chemistry. Characters are like actors in that some pairs have chemistry, and some don't. If you've got a couple with great chemistry, you'll have a hard time getting them to keep their hands off each other.

Tickle.com used of offer all kinds of personality and romance tests that gave you advice on who you were attracted to, etc. Since human beings generally know who they're attracted to and who they aren't, the best use I can think of for this site is to take their tests as if you were your fanfic character, and use it for character developemt. I haven't visited the site lately, but it used to make you sign up for a free account and then send you basic test results for free. If you wanted more in-depth results, you had to pay them--I don't think it was a lot, but maybe anything is too much for fanfic. The stripped-down test results would likely be enough, however.

If you have a character who's a really tough nut to crack (not to say that s/he is a "nut," per se, although all mine are ) it might help to place him/her in a situation where it is almost impossible not to reach out to another person--then make your target the other person in question. In "The Cell," Obaona plausibly pulled off a post-RotS Obi-Wan/Padmé romance by simply locking the lovers-to-be in a dark cell together and not letting them out until they'd bonded with the only other person "in sight"--so to speak.

I find that if you do careful work "up front," before you've even started your story, your characters will naturally do what you want them to do, and you won't have to worry much about how you're going to get character A to do X with character B. (Or should I say, do C with character B. We don't do X on TFN. )

 

In this case we have the following characters.

The OC is a pompous rich spoiled Diplomat

The other is a Jedi Padawan on one of her first solo missions.

 

Sometimes when I'm at the absolute beginning of character development, I look at one or more established characters from somewhere else and steal--er, I mean, "start brainstorming." For some reason, the characters that "feel right" for my stories tend to come from films, but characters from novels, comic books, etc., or even real-life people can work too.

For the last romantic relationship I wrote, I cribbed a lot from "The African Queen," which is an old Bogart/Hepburn movie. I wasn't lifting the characters' personalities per se--more their type of chemistry and some ways they related to each other.

Theft is the most sincere form of flattery.

 

I'm a big big movie geek myself and the African Queen is a great movie. Boggie dragging the African Queen through the muddy water and getting teaks all over his body is one of the movie scenes I will never forget.