The Path of True Love

Once upon a time a man met a woman and they fell in love and lived happily ever after. Yawn.

I was chatting to a non romance reader recently who naturally assumed that all romance novels were about two people meeting and falling in love and having their HEA. Well, I suppose they are if you strip them back to bare bones, but how boring would that story be? Real life is where we want the path of love to run nice and smooth with as few bumps in the road as possible. In a romance novel we want to get off-road right at the start and then trek along the stony path, take a diversion down the winding lane, speed down the highway and then climb a cliff face for good measure before arriving at the final destination.

I always plot my romances as a journey strewn with obstacles and I don’t think I’ve written one novel without using the pathway analogy somewhere. Thinking in terms of pathways and journeys reminds me as an author that the characters start at a specific point in the novel and when they arrive at that final destination they need to be different people, changed by their journey. And because it’s a romance they need to arrive at the end tired, but happy and relieved. Sometimes the characters travel the road to true love together, sometimes there’s a fork in the road and they take different paths for a while. The latter is harder to pull off because readers generally like their romance hero and heroine together rather than apart.  My novel In the Dark With You has the hero and heroine walking different paths for the first seven chapters of the book, but you can hopefully see them drawing closer and closer to the point where their paths cross and they go on together. Seven chapters is a long time to keep them apart, but it’s a long book (originally 150 thousand words) and I wanted to show some build-up and where each character was coming from, which in turn made the meeting more dramatic. In a shorter novel length I definitely think an early meeting is in order. I can’t imagine writing In the Dark in any other way, but I generally do opt for the early meet these days because I want as much together time as possible for the characters. Once they’re on the same road you can add the necessary drama by moving the characters at different speeds, having one stop to admire the view while the other is full steam ahead. Have them backtrack to solve a problem before throwing another huge boulder in their way.

You can do the classic three-arcs by having the characters set off at a trot, (falling in or out of love), slow a little as the path become stony (the obstacles and problems part) and then having them race to the finale (big drama and resolution, otherwise known as, now I realise how much I love you.)

The path can be in the author’s head, be literal, or appear on the page as a metaphor or analogy. I wrote a short piece a while back that best illustrates my love affair with pathways in romance. Here’s an excerpt, the hero is a vampire, the heroine a human.

…… I've never minded the misses before. I have all of eternity to get it right. Or so I thought. For the first time since I was made, I see life as a path, stretching far into the distance. We might travel that road together, with our easy companionship, the gently teasing banter. The dangerous undertow. If you could only see it, we might fall in step, oh so easily.

I'd take your hand, and you'd smile. Have I ever told you how much I love your smile?

Then our footsteps might slow and we'd meander, stop to admire the scenery. I'd steal glances at your face, while you stared, intent, at the view. Will it be like that? Me looking at you, looking at the world? It doesn't have to be. Just say the word. I'm here. All you have to do is see me.

You're hiding, in plain sight, behind unbreakable glass. But don't you know I can see beyond that? That, as we walked along that road, I'd be chipping away at the façade, bit by bit. Moment by moment. One thing I've learned over these long years, is patience.

What you don't know, is how short your stroll through life is. You think this slow dance will last forever, but one day, the orchestra will call time and it will fall silent. And I'll be there, in an empty room. Alone again. One day you'll come to a junction in that road and I'll have to take one path and you another. Parting with sorrow is inevitable, but parting with regret is a choice we make.

Give me something to sustain me as I walk that path to eternity. A touch. A look that says I want to. A kiss that says I will.

I met a traveller on the road. She's blonde and feisty with a bad-ass attitude. But she makes me smile. She makes me feel. She makes me yearn and pine. She'll leave me memories to warm my cold flesh. The sound of her voice. The feel of her skin. Pictures to hold in my heart. I'll carry her with me until infinity.

Sometimes a story just wants to be written

I've been interested in the paranormal for some time now. Back in the early noughties I was a member of a paranormal investigation group that tackled and discussed all sorts of interesting subjects ranging from hauntings to dowsing, alian abduction to psychic phenomena. The group closed after a few years, but a year or so ago a new group opened in my home town and I was first in line to join. This group is focussed on investigating haunted places in as objective a manner as possible and to date we've spent nights in haunted railway stations, hotels and mansions and museums. Have I seen a ghost, yet? I can only say almost. Not sure what it was that we saw, but we all saw it at the same time. The big question, of course, is, how scary is all this? Well, I've been with group members who have almost jumped out of their skins at some of the phenomena, but for some reason I don't find being in a dark old haunted building in the dead of night particularly scary. That might seem like an odd thing to say but for me, we're there to investigate and for the evening to be worthwhile you want things to happen. No good calling out and when something goes bump, dying of fright. I will admit to one girly scream when someone or something knocked on the door of an empty room behind me, but I have done lone vigils and have managed not to run in terror. It really is a matter of keeping the mind fully grounded rather than letting it run riot and start a panic.

So, what does this all have to do with stories that make you write them? I'm not psychic, but I do believe places have atmospheres and store memories of the past. About seven years ago I went on an outing that took us to a disused world-war two airfield where the kids went go-karting. While they were doing that, I went for a walk across the stark cracked concrete through which grew clumps of grass. A few newpapers were blowing about in the wind and some of the old air traffic control buildings were still there, empty, sad, disused. I've read a few real-life reports of hauntings of these places and as I walked around the story for my World War 2 romance Waiting For Eternity started to form in my head. By the time the kids were ready to leave I had a full blown story and couldn't wait to get home to write it. I've never written a story so fast, and never cried so much when I got to the end. I remember the husband coming in to see what the wailing was all about and had to sheepishly tell him it was all right, I was just writing a new story. I think he did an eye-roll and hastily left.

As authors, we're always racking our brains for new story ideas, for unique twists on well-worn plots, but sometimes some magic happens and a story is gifted to us just from being in the right place at the right time. Maybe my interest in the paranormal, combined with my love of stories that transend time all played a part in bringing Waiting For Eternity together, but that old disused air-field was undoubtedly the trigger that set things in motion. I still can't think of the place without a shiver going down my spine.