A Rant on Writing Romantic Attraction
Short version: The world won't end if you don't put a romance in your stories, and if you can't do it right, you shouldn't do it to begin with.
Few things are quite as painful as reading a "love story" that has all the passion and sensitivity of buying fish from a particularly untrustworthy salesman. We've all run into this before.
Presumably (my personal experience on the matter is limited), falling in love is a powerful experience. The rush of emotion, the uncertainty of acting on your attraction, the joy of success and pain of rejection - there's a reason poets talk about it so much and a reason "Love" is in the name of more Beatles songs than any other word, to the point Cirque du Soleil used it to title their show. And yet authors keep fumbling that ball.
Perfunctory romances are the bane of both readers and video gamers. TV Tropes has a trope, "Strangled by the Red String", for those romances that just plain don't work in fiction. Sometimes it isn't given enough time or attention to be believable, sometimes the characters in question have given us more indications that they want to stab each other than kiss, sometimes the author makes you laugh more than admire.
Harry Potter fans could probably hold up a dozen examples of Harmonian fiction that truly exhibits all the passion and heart of a tax rebate form... not that the base series is much better. (There's a reason they make so many jokes about the "chest monster".) But a true master of botching romance in fiction, and they're going to hang me for this, is Terry Pratchett.
I'm sorry, folks, I liked the Discworld series as much as anyone else, but Terry Pratchett couldn't write two people in love if you wired him directly into the brains of a newlywed couple. Any time there's an onscreen relationship, he shoots himself in the foot. The only relationship even close to being believable that's gotten any screen time is Carrot and Angua, and that hasn't moved an inch in six books. (I suspect Pratchett knows this, which is why so many of his characters get married offscreen.)
Another name I can name (and will likely get me skinned): Joss Whedon. I can't lay Season Six of Buffy at his feet, but Season Seven didn't do a hell of a lot better. Even before that, there's so little chemistry between Buffy and Angel that, in hindsight, I can't help but wonder what the point was. (How much of this is Jossy-Wossy's fault and how much is Sarah Michelle Gellar's rather limited range is a good question.) And as for Firefly... no, I'm already in "send the assassins after me" territory.
You may wonder why I went with that example instead of The Series That Cannot Go Unmentioned Here and its knock-offs. Well, it's in large part because far too much magnetic ink has already come into play on Twilight and friends, and in small part because I've never actually read the whole things (just excerpts). And in addition, YA authors have had this problem since the beginning of the young adult fiction market.
But I can't let it go unnoticed that there's a new, scary dimension to the problem: the male halves of romances in YA fiction aren't just unsavory, they're getting downright abusive. Again, I think zelda_queen would have more to say on the subject than me, but Edward Cullen hath wrought a terrible curse.
I'm not sure if I've said anything of substance here instead of just ranting about authors I don't like, but I think you get the point. I've read plenty of stories that don't have romances and do well regardless. If you can't do them, then don't do them.
Few things are quite as painful as reading a "love story" that has all the passion and sensitivity of buying fish from a particularly untrustworthy salesman. We've all run into this before.
Presumably (my personal experience on the matter is limited), falling in love is a powerful experience. The rush of emotion, the uncertainty of acting on your attraction, the joy of success and pain of rejection - there's a reason poets talk about it so much and a reason "Love" is in the name of more Beatles songs than any other word, to the point Cirque du Soleil used it to title their show. And yet authors keep fumbling that ball.
Perfunctory romances are the bane of both readers and video gamers. TV Tropes has a trope, "Strangled by the Red String", for those romances that just plain don't work in fiction. Sometimes it isn't given enough time or attention to be believable, sometimes the characters in question have given us more indications that they want to stab each other than kiss, sometimes the author makes you laugh more than admire.
Harry Potter fans could probably hold up a dozen examples of Harmonian fiction that truly exhibits all the passion and heart of a tax rebate form... not that the base series is much better. (There's a reason they make so many jokes about the "chest monster".) But a true master of botching romance in fiction, and they're going to hang me for this, is Terry Pratchett.
I'm sorry, folks, I liked the Discworld series as much as anyone else, but Terry Pratchett couldn't write two people in love if you wired him directly into the brains of a newlywed couple. Any time there's an onscreen relationship, he shoots himself in the foot. The only relationship even close to being believable that's gotten any screen time is Carrot and Angua, and that hasn't moved an inch in six books. (I suspect Pratchett knows this, which is why so many of his characters get married offscreen.)
Another name I can name (and will likely get me skinned): Joss Whedon. I can't lay Season Six of Buffy at his feet, but Season Seven didn't do a hell of a lot better. Even before that, there's so little chemistry between Buffy and Angel that, in hindsight, I can't help but wonder what the point was. (How much of this is Jossy-Wossy's fault and how much is Sarah Michelle Gellar's rather limited range is a good question.) And as for Firefly... no, I'm already in "send the assassins after me" territory.
You may wonder why I went with that example instead of The Series That Cannot Go Unmentioned Here and its knock-offs. Well, it's in large part because far too much magnetic ink has already come into play on Twilight and friends, and in small part because I've never actually read the whole things (just excerpts). And in addition, YA authors have had this problem since the beginning of the young adult fiction market.
But I can't let it go unnoticed that there's a new, scary dimension to the problem: the male halves of romances in YA fiction aren't just unsavory, they're getting downright abusive. Again, I think zelda_queen would have more to say on the subject than me, but Edward Cullen hath wrought a terrible curse.
I'm not sure if I've said anything of substance here instead of just ranting about authors I don't like, but I think you get the point. I've read plenty of stories that don't have romances and do well regardless. If you can't do them, then don't do them.