Back in June, a friend did me one heck of a solid. It happened the way such profound things do: by accident. This was at our Sisters in Crime chapter meeting, and the speaker said the first thing about storytelling that surprised me in a while: That great stories needed romance.
To Clay, romance isn’t a genre or a love interest angle, though it can be both–and might sell books. He means romance in the gestalt sense, a story and characters in love with its world. Love of a partner, love of family, love of nature, love of being alive. The writer, too, can be in love with imagery and the power of words to convey emotion. The Romantics chose lofty ideals and natural forces, often violently at work. I conjure up Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an amazing novel about ambition and nature of all sorts.
The last time I remember parsing romance as an -ism was in college (liberal arts, represent). That was a while ago. Maybe Clay’s idea hit me because of that time-lapse, or maybe romance was what I needed to hear.
I’ve written here and elsewhere about the pandemic and its impact on creative processes. Mine, for sure. My home space once a go-to for creative brainstorming is now my work perch. The mojos are different. My sleep patterns and biorhythms are different. My daily commute is about twenty seconds most days. I’ve been reading differently, through a filter that might forget to revel. That’s no idle matter. You can’t write well if you don’t read well. Reading well means maintaining that spark of wonder.
I’m a structure nerd. I used to take apart novels and short stories to map their plot dynamics. It got so bad that I made myself knock it off and be a reader again. It doesn’t always work. As for old movies, you might not want to watch one with me. I’m liable to point out inciting incidents, plot and pinch points, and the Dark Moment. Analysis is itself exhausting and might’ve left me a little jaded. Maybe in all this mess, I fell into analysis for analysis’ sake and away from why I love a good story. For their characters and their journeys.
I’m a structure nerd. I used to take apart novels and short stories to map their plot dynamics. It got so bad that I made myself knock it off and be a reader again. It doesn’t always work. As for old movies, you might not want to watch one with me. I’m liable to point out inciting incidents, plot and pinch points, and the Dark Moment. Analysis is itself exhausting and might’ve left me a little jaded. Maybe in all this mess, I fell into analysis for analysis’ sake and away from why I love a good story. For their characters and their journeys.
While Clay was talking, I found myself going back through stories that stuck with me. Raymond Chandler is never far from mind. Now there was evocative prose and a love of wordsmithing. His story world wasn’t beautiful except maybe in that noir slant, that the here and now are all we have. Story after story, a Chandler character wants to suck their here and now dry.
I thought about Agatha Christie’s constructs and, a personal favorite series, Colin Dexter’s Morse. Those mysteries are full of suspects trying to angle this or that from life, trying to get theirs. Poirot and Morse are fussy and often lonely creatures, but they crave their time on this stage. For his part, Morse loves his car, his music, and his pints. Dexter loves Oxford as a canvas, and it shows in the cleverness and depth of the novels.
The Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is no one’s good guy. That Wolf loved being alive, though. He loved the forest and testing his wits. Caesar loved being Caesar, and it got him assassinated. Kubla Khan loved his stately pleasure dome beside that violent river. Core folklore tales and historical adaptations go back millennia. The works endure because they evoke important things about our world, about who we are and our embrace of being alive.
Clay is on to something. I stumbled onto it, but I’ll take joy-bringers where they come.