An Emotional Journey Into Writing Romance

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
William Shakespeare
‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson
“Curse on all laws but those which love has made! Love, free as air at sight of human ties, Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.”
Alexander Pope
“Love looks not with eyes, but with the mind.”
William Shakespeare
So many authors write about love so what is it about love that makes a writer write about it.
Romance and love stories are not my usual genre, or I first thought. But looking back over my work I have come to realise that indeed much of my own writing encapsulates love in some means or other, whether that be the love of my parents, my pets, things, or my husband, they all have a presence in my work. This has led me to ask why?
If we are truthful with ourselves I think we could all say that for the most part we write for ourselves. A book that we don’t enjoy writing won’t come across very well and why would others read it if you didn’t like to read it yourself? But even deeper than that what makes an enjoyable read for me be enjoyable to anyone else? Emotion!
As human beings we all experience similar emotions in our life, anger, pain, happiness, nervousness, love, fear, expectancy. They are our feelings, they are what make us unique, the way in which we express these feelings are unique to our character, but the actual feeling is universal. In writing about these feelings we are invoking empathy in others, we are reaching out to our readers with a knowing that they will have probably experienced a similar feeling in a similar circumstance, the reader will understand, will know how that feels or can imagine it because we are all familiar with the same emotions and feelings.
In direct relation to a universal relationship with these feelings and emotions we also want to be taken away with a story, to be transported to the exotic location of the book, to be swiftly driven to that far away city, netherworld, time. Why? Because by being transported elsewhere means that we do not have to concentrate on our own time and space, for the time spent ploughing through the pages of a thrilling read we are not washing the dishes, we are not hanging out the clothes to dry, we are not on the train to work, we are not turning off the alarm clock, separating the kids from a fight, not arguing with our partner. For that moment we are in Paris having a romantic meal with Cecil and Genevive, in London riding the London Eye with Peter and Jayne or in an Elven city with Sputnik and Juniper. Wherever we are we are not in the mundane chores of our own lives. And yet not we can understand our character, we can sympathise, because we can draw on our own experiences.
Bronwyn Jameson writes “I thought about what experience the romance reader was after. I discovered that “emotion” wasn’t about writing emotion, it was about evoking emotion in the reader. Emotion of many and varied kinds. “