Our hearts are bursting! Our lashes are fluttering! Butterflies in our stomachs! Love is in the air…and so are a lot of clichés and sappy, chocolate-covered metaphors. When we write about love, we risk enducing eye-rolls from our readers with talk of swelling hearts and sparkling eyes.
Love is so central to our lives and to our stories, so why is it so hard to write about it with honesty and sincerity? In honor of Valentine’s day coming up this Friday, this week we’re talking about how to write about love and the human connections we form without all the sap and cheese. Love, unfortunately, is one of the most difficult subjects to write about without coming across as sappy or overly serious. Let’s use today to talk about all of the ways that you can avoid the clichés, and lean into the things that will make your writing about love really sing.
You’ve got the story, you’ve got the idea, you just don’t know the steps in the process. If this is what’s holding your memoir back, I have got the solution for you. The memoir method checklist is going to take you through every single step you need from idea, to published marketable book, and you can download it now at pageandpodium.com/checklist.
Memoirs are stories from our lives, and love will inevitably be central to so many of those stories. There are all forms of love, familial, love of community, long friendships, and of course, romantic love. Romantic love, especially, is difficult to write about. For one, it’s been written about a lot. For another, romantic love is so very personal. When we write about love, we are sharing some of the most intimate moments and thoughts from our lives. It’s easy to fall back on the recognizable phrases and metaphors from all the love stories we’ve ever read, but that only makes our story predictable and flat.
This is a difficult trap because since love is such a universal feeling, and after all we often tell you how essential it is to find the universal in your story. How you recognized the feeling love was probably influenced by everything you’ve read or watched in movies or TV shows. It so hard to avoid pulling in those same clichés because you probably recognized those clichés strongly in how you felt. Suddenly, the love song makes a bit more sense. We suddenly get that Shakespeare sonnet we read in tenth grade. So how do we tell our unique love story?
We love love, we hate clichés
The last thing we want is to have anything that marks our books as an amateurish effort. Clichés are one of those markers that can send readers off to find something else to read. Clichés about love are so prevalent that it can feel like trying to navigate a mindfield trying to avoid them. How do you describe the time your hands first touched, your first date, when you knew they loved you, too, or any of those recognizable landmarks of a love story without straying too deep into that mind field?
It can help to remember why clichés become trite over time. They are familiar because they speak to so many of us and remind us of moments where we have felt the same. It’s not boring to feel like your heart has skipped a beat. But it is still boring to read, because we’ve all seen it so many times. What we want to do in this case is reference the familiar feeling without relying on the familiar words. Most of the clichés surrounding love are bodily metaphors. Your heart doesn’t really skip a beat, so how else can you describe that feeling? If you close your eyes and put imagine yourself back in those moments, what is happening in your body? Tapping into that feeling can open up new ways for you to share those exciting (and often scary!) feelings with your readers in a way they can both recognize and enjoy as a novelty.
Conflict drives story
The second thing to remember when writing about love is that all stories need conflict to drive the forward stories, even love stories. “You met, you fell in love, the end” would be a very boring story–or even a scene–indeed! It is also unlikely to give a full picture, because our lives are always filled with complications and complexities that get in the way of the simple, smooth path to happiness. Some form of conflict needs to be present in each scene, so it’s a good time to refresh ourselves on the types of conflict. There are many ways to categorize story conflict, but for our purposes today, we’ll stick to a simple three.
Person versus self
Also called “internal conflict,” sometimes conflict is something inside yourself. When we are struggling with a difficult decision or fighting negative feelings like fear and self-doubt, that is an internal conflict. Falling in love is wonderful, but can also be scary and come with a lot of questions. What we you be giving up to make a life with this person? How will you handle it if your feelings aren’t reciprocated? These questions can give us pause and cause the needed conflict we need to see. It is also a very honest way to talk about memories of love. While we tend to remember the best feelings the strongest, painting the full picture requires showing the conflict, too.
Person versus person
Interpersonal conflict can also drive a romantic story forward. It may be that it was not love at first sight, or that despite your shared feelings you had important disagreements and hurdles to overcome and compromise. However, it doesn’t have to be conflict between you and your loved one for interpersonal conflict to keep a story moving forward. Conflict can exist between you and a third party altogether, which adds a level of complication to the narrative.
Person versus nature
This global kind of conflict can be explored in so many different kinds of ways. It might not be “nature” as we often think of it (though a bad snow storm has surely complicated a few Valentine’s days!), but the circumstances we find ourselves in that are largely out of our control. Societal expectations, financial needs, and physical challenges can all add complexity and complications to our story and show the relationships in the greater context of our lives.
Lean into the details
Did you know that when you look at someone you love, your pupils dilate? It’s true, and it might explain why the one you love seems to “light up a room.” Your eyes literally take in more light when you see them! So, how do we use this to show our readers the feelings of love we have felt for those in our lives?
We show our loved ones through our dilated pupils. When our pupils are dialated, we are seeing more details and everything is bright and vivid. When you’re describing someone you love, go into another level of detail about them. The way they hold themselves, their physical presence, the lilt of their voice, the little imperfections of their face. We see all these details when we love some because we are taking them in on a different level than other people in our lives. We can these use those very same details we have noted and imprinted on our minds to show how we have felt in their presence.
Memoirs often havedifferent levels of dialogue than novels, but when writing about love, leaning into the dialogue can recreate the specific back and forth between you for the reader. Through dialogue, you can show the chemistry between you more clearly than relying on your interior thoughts alone.
Write about love with vulnerability
One of the essential things that makes love so hard to write about is that it is so intimate. It can feel like speaking to an audience completely naked. But if you shy away from being vulnerable about sharing your story, you’ll find yourself leaning on those terrible clichés we have been trying to hard to avoid. What makes a good love story is leaning into the specifics of the love, you and your person. Don’t be afraid to show the moments that weren’t graceful or easy. Don’t be afraid to show the silly moments, either. Vulnerability doesn’t have to mean getting heavy with your readers. Often it’s exactly the opposite. We can poke fun of ourselves and bring lightness to the page.
Be vulnerable, be open. Think about the conflicts, the complications, the nuance of the situation, and lean into that. Don’t worry if you feel like you’re going a little long. We’re going to need a little bit of page space to make sure that this doesn’t come across as silly or cliché or self-indulgent. Get in there, write about your love story. I hope you all have a really happy Valentine’s Day and of course, happy writing.
