Longing

When romance writers start talking about the importance of obstacles keeping the two main characters apart or how they need to hate each other, I start to feel a little sick inside. It's not that I disagree in principle with this. It's just that I've read too many romances that create stupid obstacles, at least in part so that they can be waved away easily by the end. Real obstacles are not easily waved away by the end, and are created by worldbuilding, either fantastical or not, that is intense.

You have to believe that Romeo and Juliet's families are involved in a terrible feud and so much of the play is taken up with that feud. Very little is really the romance. Or take another favorite of mine, Buffy and Angel. She's a vampire slayer, he's a vampire. A vampire with a soul, but still a vampire. And in the end, they can't be together. It's a great romantic obstacle, only it's so great that there's no way around it and the romance has to end and Angel has to be on his own show. A romance with a great obstacle I think works brilliantly is The Queen of Attolia. But think how long it takes to set up the romance. The whole first book is simmer. Then the second book is more simmer. And it's not until The King of Attolia that I think any reader really believe the romance will work.

Just a few examples, anyway. But my point here is that romance writers are absolutely right when they talk about the importance of longing. It's all those moments when the two lovers stare at each other and know they can't have each other. That's what romance readers love. It's what makes us watch TV shows like Bones for season after season. It has to be subtle, really. It has to make sense for the characters you've created. Why they love each other and why they can't have each other. But once you set it up right, the moments of longing play out without much nudging.

Except when they don't. I was watching Two Weeks Notice recently with my kids. I like Sandra Bullock. She is great in While You Were Sleeping. And I love Hugh Grant in lots of things, from The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down a Mountain to Notting Hill and Sense and Sensibility. But at the end of the movie, I found that I didn't believe for an instant that these two characters were in love. Why not? Sandra Bullock's Lucy is smart, a little crazed with saving the world, clothing impaired, and seems destined to be alone. Hugh Grant is a playboy who has serial romances with girls he finds attractive and is uninterested in anything else from them--until he meets Lucy. He is willing to be led to better things, begins to really trust her, and ultimately realizes he can't live without her. And still, for me as a viewer, I could only see them as friends, really good friends maybe, but not more than that. I ended up analyzing this for a while and deciding it was largely an editing problem. And the thing I was missing most from the movie was longing.

We needed those camera close ups where she was looking at him and he wasn't looking at her, and then he looks up and she turns away and you can see they are in love with each other, but afraid to show it because they've been hurt before. And then, when there is a little hope, more camera close ups so you can believe that the longing is becoming something more than longing. Then a disaster and anger, and more longing back and forth until the sacrifice and resolution. But without the longing, as cheesy as it sounds, there is no romance.

It feels sometimes like I have to relearn this trick about longing with every romance that I write. I tend to get the lovers together too soon and let them deal with other problems, not just their love for each other. But there's no reason they can't deal with both at the same time and raise the emotional stakes for the reader. But you have to keep the glances back and forth. You have to play with the reader, toy with hopes and tease out the climax. A bit like the romance itself. Because in the end, the writer and the reader are lovers, too, and there is longing between them. The reader wants the promise that the book will be perfect, that it will give him what he wants and yet be surprising and wonderful. The writer wants the reader to trust her, but not to trust too much, because that would be boring. It's a striptease, isn't it, writing?

A romantic comedy I watched recently that did longing well: Love Actually. A friend of mine complains about the Colin Firth romance where he and she don't speak each other's languages and yet we have to believe they are falling in love. We the viewers get translations of what they are saying, but the longing is in the camera angles. We have to see them wanting each other, afraid to want, and then throwing all caution to the wind. But aren't we doing the same thing, wanting them together, knowing it's silly because you don't fall in love like that, and then hoping that maybe the writers will pull it off and make us believe. And then they do. Or they do for viewers who want to fall in love enough, who long for the happy ending.