Tag: true love
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How to Catch a Man 101: Show More Affection Than You Feel
AKA Dating Advice from Dear Jane Austen “There are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement,” [said Charlotte]. “In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like…
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Real-life Romance: The Scholarly Professor and Edith
Real life is better than fiction sometimes. More unbelievable than fiction too, but that’s another topic. This post is the second of four to mesh two of my favourite blog topics: romance and history. Because I realized, when I thought about it, that I knew at few stories from history that were eventful enough to…
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No Thanks, to the Guy Reciting Poetry Under My Balcony
Or, Romantic Reality vs. Fiction If some of the things that happen in romance novels happened to me in real life, I’d probably run the other way. It might make sense in the tightly structured, well-plotted world of the novel, but in the messy real world, not so much. After all, real life doesn’t have…
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The Missing Ingredient in Too Many Romance Novels
The Over-stated Role of Attraction There are a couple typical plots for romance novels, but most of them go something like this: Girl is frustrated at being single/sick of dating jerks/doesn’t have time for romance. Girl and Guy meet cute. Girl and Guy hate each other for some contrived reason (usually one of them…
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Tolkien’s Take On True Love
Since we’ve been talking about romance, here’s Tolkien’s take on the subject. He actually wrote an astoundingly long letter on the marriage to his son, in typical Tolkien style: “But… only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were ‘destined’ for one another, and capable of a…
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Healthy Romance Makes Bad Novels
What’s a Novelist to Do? I come up against this problem all the time when I try to write a romance about two healthy, well-adjusted people – what on earth should come between them and prevent happily ever after? This is related to ‘The Trouble with Modern Romance.’ In the good old days, the couple…
Hmm... 