• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Writing Love

The love that I write about is often [for lack of a better word] 'agape' love. Not just to strictly adhere by the 'four loves' idea, what kinds of love do you guys write about [if any]? I'm curious to see how wildly different other peoples' approaches to writing love [or perhaps how similar] are to mine.

Just off the top of my head, I made a list of many kinds of love:

romantic [same gender or opposite gender or no gender], platonic, family [maternal, paternal, fraternal, and so forth], sexual, passionate, friend/comrade/partner [nakama, as they say in Japan], agape...
 
Last edited:

Heliotrope

Staff
Article Team
Hmmmm, never realized it before but the motivating factor in every one of my stories is love. All kinds of love. Every character in every one of my stories is in one way or another motivated by love. I wonder what that says about me lol? I'm an INFP personality type, so it makes sense I guess.

In my wip it is love between daughter and father, but I've done mother/son, boy/girl romantic, girl/girl romantic, agape....
 
In my two fantasy books I've done...ho boy. *deep breath* daughter-father [two fathers], daughter-mother [two mothers], girl/boy [the boy later becomes a girl], girl/girl [so many of my characters are lesbian! :eek:], agape several times [through reincarnation], girl/girl/girl, boy/boy/boy, seven genderless beings all in a symbiotic relationship, and now my head is scrambled so I can't think properly...:p
 
^I find that such a ludicrous term. :rolleyes:

I am highly against teenage slang/internet slang/whatever ridiculous stuff people are saying nowadays. That makes me feel old. :p
 
I'm not a romance author, but romance (generally hetero to this point) has figured into the character arcs of almost every one of my stories.
It's generally either a background situation, or a plot element. One time the romance shocked the crap out of me, because I'd toyed with it the entire story and was certain it wasn't going to happen. Then my lead character jumped her partner's bones.
 
Last edited:

WooHooMan

Auror
Every kind.
I don't see much of a difference between writing any of them. Writing love is like writing anything character-related: there's motivation for it, development, payoff, a resolution and so on.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I shy away from categories. Categorically. I avoid them both instinctively and deliberately. If someone else wants to categorize the relationships in my stories, that's fine and dandy. One advantage of not categorizing my own work is I don't get annoyed with others because they have got it wrong. They're always right.
 

Insolent Lad

Maester
All sorts and shades of love do show up in my work. One thing I probably do too frequently is kill off the loved one to increase the tragedy and motivation. Have to watch that tendency in me --- it can become too easy a way to move things forward!
 
I've never really thought about it as categories. Love can be such a complicated thing I think about it on a character by character basis, because of how one person's feelings are not always the same kind of love as the other person's. I guess I am slightly tentative about writing romance, mostly because I haven't tried writing it much, at least not as a central plot point. If I write romance it tends to be more background or character development, to the plot. I don't want to fall into the cliché of writing romance as too 'perfect', so no doubt as I get more life experience my writing will be more realistic. If I can talk about Star Wars for a moment, I actually thought it was really poignant in the Force Awakens, how Han and Leia's relationship had not turned out great, despite the fact they still loved each other. To me that's more believable.
 
Ooh!! This is a cool topic!!

I think all stories are love stories. To be meaningful I think they all involve love, whether it is the love between people or a character's love of power, etc... Love is so fundamental to being human that a story cannot exist without it, I think. RELATIONSHIPS!! I love relationships and they are the centerpiece of anything I write.

What kind of love do I write? I was just thinking about this the other day. I think that, hands down, by favorite kind of relationship to write is that between siblings. Sibling relationships are so rocky and full of conflict, but they are SUCH a strong bond. You've been together forever, you know everything about each other, but you definitely didn't choose to be this way...you're stuck, at least until you've come of age, but even then you can't help being related...Having three siblings myself, I relate to stories about siblings a lot. In one of my WIP's my two MC's are siblings. They fight and bicker constantly and are constantly hurling sarcasm and insults at each other but each would lay down their life for the other in a heartbeat. He's the older brother and is a troublemaker and kind of dense, but with a heart of marshmallow, she's the little sister and much quieter but thinks a lot and tries to keep him out of trouble. He's the protective one, but really it's she who's doing the protecting. Lol. Their personalities tend to clash hard but they are SO close.

I also like to write friendship, which I think is downplayed in modern stories. I especially like close, platonic male/female friendship that never turns into anything romantic. (Since I have a lot of guy friends, and since I just get along with guys more, I wish it was more clearly exhibited in books that a guy and girl CAN be just friends.) Older stories have a lot of very compelling friendships in them (Frodo and Sam immediately springs to mind, and I think Sam is my favorite literary character ever) but in newer stories almost all relationships that close are made out to be romantic. I think its lost on the modern audience that a friendship can be EXTREMELY close without being sexual.

Third, I do really like romantic relationships. Having almost no experience with romantic love myself, I must say that I don't always feel entirely comfortable writing it, especially the physical side of a relationship. Romantic love hasn't been much of a main focus in my stories recently. Partly because of that, and partly because it tends to distract from rather than build upon the plot. But I do enjoy writing them.

Stories where you explore the interactions of many different kinds of relationships and how they change...absolutely my favorite. In the story I mentioned above, both my MC's develop close friendships and also romantic relationships. They experience the pain of loss too. My villain's relationships shape him too...mostly with his abusive, sociopathic mother, his wife (who he's in an arranged marriage to and who cheats on him) and his little sister. He becomes a father later on and I end up exploring a lot his ability to love, or lack thereof...I think he wants to love, but his ability is twisted and broken.

(Twisted, broken love, imperfect love between people who are broken, tends to take center stage in my stories.)

I absolutely must mention that I love any Slytherpuff (Slytherin/Hufflepuff) relationship. It's awkward to mention this to my Slytherin friend (who's a guy), lol.
 
Hmmmm, never realized it before but the motivating factor in every one of my stories is love. All kinds of love. Every character in every one of my stories is in one way or another motivated by love. I wonder what that says about me lol? I'm an INFP personality type, so it makes sense I guess.

In my wip it is love between daughter and father, but I've done mother/son, boy/girl romantic, girl/girl romantic, agape....

I'm an ENFP :D
 
In my current WIP, Red Nights, my MC's arc basically revolves around love. Basically, she's an extremely hard, closed-off person and through the story she learns to care about people that aren't herself. She explores her own ability to love...she's wondered before if she's too broken. Friendship love takes the main stage in this story.

In my other current WIP (which I'll start working on again soon) the main story is centered around the relationship between a father and his daughter (the MC.)

I even like writing about the love between a person and their pet. I have a dog I really love, but I'm also really fond of cats, and I've always loved animals and it just comes out in my stories. :D
 
I've decided to do something a little different in my next book. Normally, when a character or characters die in a story, they've died before the story begins, or somewhere in the middle, or at the end for a dramatic conclusion. In my next book, the main character's wife and daughter die entirely by accident at the very beginning of the story, and as the main character reflects on their lives together, you learn more and more about them, and then you learn the reason for her journey: to see if she can contact [not bring them back, but contact] them somehow.

In the fun, whimsical book I'm working on right now, the three main characters are all in a relationship, but their love is multi-layered and unusual. Also, there's lesbian kissing, which is something I haven't done before. [The narrator accidentally paralyzed herself with a library book [long story], and the other two are wondering how to un-paralyze her, so they try kissing her to see if 'true love's kiss' thing actually works.

Cat love features often in my books. :D
 
Last edited:
C

Chessie

Guest
I write mostly romance at this point, and it's really the only kind of love that's been at the center of all my stories. Boy meets girl, they fall in love, there's trouble, they break up, they realize that they can't live without each other, they give something of themselves to be with the other, they make up and live happily ever after.

There's a myriad of options here. It's essentially the same story but it can be new and fresh every time. I'm a romance fiend. It's pretty much all I read. Mulder and Scully have the greatest romance of all time in the Sci-fi/Fantasy genre imo. Lol. But yeah, I love seeing my friends fall in love and live happily ever after. The romance with my husband was like in a book, too haha. We met and I hated him for 3 months. But he slowly won my interest with a gentle and kind approach, always treating me with respect even though I was often mean to him (we worked together at the time). When we started dating, we fell in love really fast and married within months. I'm a romance die hard so that's what drives me haha!


EDIT: Wanted to add that I'm talking about romance as a genre here, which mixes fantastically well with fantasy and that's why fantasy romance is my favorite subgenre in all the world. There's just something fun and fascinating about watching people falling in love to me, and writing about it is an intimate experience with my imagination. It's not about sex. It's not about kissing. It's about learning to trust someone with your heart and your life. A big deal. :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It sometimes feels like there's not enough girl/girl or boy/boy relationships in fantasy. It's mostly just school/slice of life related.

[I'm a romantic, too, but I'm oddly picky about the types of romance I read.
 
Top