Ever noticed there are more love stories than any other kind of stories on Earth? If any other type of story was done half as often, they would get the “cliché” tag stuck on them.

 

Ever noticed there are more love stories than any other kind of stories on Earth? If any other type of story was done half as often, they would get the “cliché” tag stuck on them. And yet, love stories persist, and they thrive because love is the most powerful force on Earth for both good and ill.

Any time you read a good love story (and I’m not talking about just Harlequin Romance novels here), you know it will be a powerful tale with many emotional possibilities. For with love comes the willingness to sacrifice, but also emotions such as anger and jealousy. Love can also get betrayed, and most of us know what that can feel like. Love is the core binding for the characters we write about inasmuch as their relationships with each other goes. Love is also the most complex emotion on this planet, and perhaps the whole universe. Love can also take different forms from familial to friendship, and that binding tie that keeps two lovers together (yet can also tear them apart).

Every time I read the old classic tales and even the fairy-tales of old, I’m fascinated by the concept of True Love. The kind of love all humans yearn and dream for, yet can become terrified of when it arrives. Because it’s powerful, uncontrollable, unyielding. It brings both joy and suffering, both hope and despair...especially when the one you feel True Love for does not feel the same for you. But its power and fickleness is what makes it so beautiful.

In these modern, materialistic times, True Love has been given different more scary words, courtesy of the real world’s version of Newspeak. The words remove the romance, mystery, and adventure out of it, take something awe-striking in its spiritual wonder and turn it into a “mental problem” to be “fixed” with therapy and medication. These days a writer doesn’t love to write, he has an “obsession” to write. Men and women aren’t in love with each other, they’re “sexually attracted” to each other instead. God forbid a man or woman should fall to one knee and recite a love poem in public. After all, it can’t be because said person is in love, said person must be crazy.

Amazing how all the things that make life worth living has been turned into a reason for psychologists to charge you $50 an hour for therapy sessions. And then they wonder why so many people today walk about like spiritually void zombies enslaved to Consumerism.

And yet, True Love persists in music, poetry, and storytelling. And people still yearn for that Fairy-tale Romance. If nothing else, the love stories prove that the human spirit cannot be denied. Without it, we are nothing more than machines.

While in the process of writing my recent novella, I noticed that two characters were starting to develop passionate feelings for each other. One is more than happy to lose herself in the romance, but the other seeks to deny his feelings for her, even to the point of spurning her advances. Readers who have read my short story, “The Souldrinker,” can possibly guess which two characters I’m talking about. They make a most unlikely couple, yet True Love can be a most unlikely occurrence in even the best of circumstances. As I progress on this novella, I’m intrigued by how this relationship will eventually play out. It’ll be a complicated one, that’s for sure. But when is True Love ever simple?

The story as a whole seems to be about Love and Hate. I didn’t intend it that way when I first started writing it, but it seems to be the overall meaning behind my desire to write it. Hopefully, I can give these meanings the attentions they deserve.

And now that I’ve yammered on about Love, can you guess what my next article will be about?