Roses are red, violets are blue

[author_by_night]

 Good morning, afternoon, whatever time it is for you when you find this post!

In honor of Valentine's Day, I thought we might talk about writing relationships. A few questions:

• Is there anything you find challenging about writing relationships?

 

• What do you love about writing relationships?

 

• Have you ever tried writing for a ship (or even just a trope) you normally don't? What was the outcome?*

 

• Favorite tropes/tags/themes to write?

 

• Any other observations?

 

*In case it needs to be said, this isn't about yucking anyone else's yum. It's about our own experiences trying to write particular things, without judgment towards others. 

I've provided my own answers in the comments.

Comments

[igenlode]

I don't write relationships -- as in, I don't set out to pair characters together in cold blood for the purposes of creating a romance. If I'm writing about a relationship, then that's because it already exists as part of those characters' canonical situation; if it's central to the story, that's because it's central to the canon.

(But that's not quite true, come to think of it; I've created OCs whose backstory came with relationships of their own, and even a couple of OCs who have fallen in love with canon characters, although never requited, since that character clearly doesn't love them in canon. It wasn't so much a question of 'what character can I create to pair off with my favourite' as of 'how would this character's actions induce a change in the canon plot'. All the same, I *don't* deliberately take characters and set out to write a given 'pairing'; it is, as always, a matter of 'I have a given character and a given situation; what happens?' And if all that happens is 'the characters go to bed with one another', then for me that isn't a useful plot outcome...)

What I appreciate about writing romantic relationships is that it provides lots of possibilities for angst among the characters -- it was years before I wrote a relationship that didn't end with one or other of the characters dead and/or suicidal, and I still remember the uncertain feeling of trying to navigate my way through the unknown territory of happiness!

I have, as mentioned above, ended up writing a story in which the viewpoint character ended up falling in love with a canon character (without even realising that this is the case until the final chapter, and in the full knowledge that the emotion is and will always be unrequited, since the character is canonically in love with somebody else and this continues to be the case...) I think it did come out quite well, both as a piece of angst and as an AU variation on the canon relationship through the eyes of an external observer, but after I'd finished I was more than ever convinced that I could never write a Mills & Boon romance, something which I'd always assumed!

I also wrote, as a conscious challenge, a "Split up your favourite pairing" story, which featured a couple who *do* split up tragically in canon, an outcome for which I'd written several AUs (and some canon-compliant angst). It was a slight cheat since I used the split to achieve a happier ending for both parties, who both come out of it alive and friends -- and, as required by the terms of the challenge, very definitely single rather than 'jumping ships' to an alternative pairing as in canon :-p

Looking back on what I've written, one of my favourite tropes is probably relationship *within* marriage, as opposed to the 'get-together fic'; because as a rule I'm writing people who already have a known existing relationship in canon, it's not a matter of 'how to make them get there' but of 'how did they get to here', and with different backstory details (while remaining consistent to any known canon details) every time. Which I suppose is a sort of backwards get-together :-)
More generally -- well, angst! People who love each other but lash out and hurt each other out of their own pain (as opposed to Enemies to Lovers); people who have lost or destroyed something that they now understand to be irretrievably valuable. Sex, where it exists, that is almost totally subliminal (the characters may well be thinking about it, but not explicitly, or even doing it, but not explicitly). I almost never use the word 'love', either, whatever the characters are feeling; they don't talk about it in those terms, and they certainly don't *say* it to one another save as an extreme bald devastating statement.