The Tamesis
Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with a new story released every day during the week of Valentine’s Day. For this year’s installment, Fashion A series of essays and excerpts celebrating the art of romance fiction has been published in partnership with publisher 831 Stories. So break out the chilled wine and silk pajamas and read on.
Like most people with big dreams, I knew early on what I wanted to do. When people started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had a clear answer: writer. Obviously.
Everyone around me thought I had what it took: I was an early reader and read very quickly. In elementary school, I developed a reputation for being an excellent speller. The teachers were full of praise for my prose. Yeseveryone around me agrees. Of course you’ll be a writer.
I was grateful for their trust, but I was hiding a terrible secret: I didn’t know how to finish a story.
That’s how I always started. In second grade, I was trying to turn a short story writing assignment into a full-length mystery about a group of teenage equestrians who discover a gang of horse thieves in their small town. But I don’t know how to weave clues into the narrative, probably because I also don’t know who actually stole the horse, let alone how. In the final draft, the girls discover that their missing horse wasn’t actually taken away, but just… escaped from their ranch.
I remember this because it was the first time I felt a peculiar twinge of dread in my stomach—the realization that my appetite had outgrown my abilities, that my gift for putting riveting sentences on paper had little to do with the instinct and imagination required to craft a compelling narrative. I love my sentence, but it’s story I desperately wanted to tell.
Things changed toward the end of elementary school when I discovered a whole new genre of stories: fan fiction. This was around 1998, and I fell deeply in love with Hanson, a group of boys a little older than me who had similar interests. (Their debut music video showed them rollerblading in an empty parking lot.)
When I clicked on the hand-coded Geocities web page, I accidentally walked into heaven. The girls who make these sites aren’t just scanning and transcribing interviews from magazines and collecting music video Easter eggs; they’re writing stories, too. The story tells what it’s like to meet, flirt, and even kiss these beautiful golden boys.
Little did I know that immersing myself in this kind of fan fiction—the kind with a romance theme—had also taught me the standard rhythms of Western story structure. Almost everything I read started out as an ordinary girl in normal circumstances: roller skating in her suburban neighborhood or calling a radio station to win concert tickets. They are the inhabitants of what Joseph Campbell, in his theory of the hero’s journey, called the “ordinary world.” Their call for adventure (or the inciting incident as it’s sometimes called) is clear: they’ll meet the Hanson brothers. Then everything changes.
In conversations about narrative, there’s a lot of emphasis on the importance of character goals and desires. The girls in these stories want simple things, but they want them badly, with a kind of stakes only possible in teen melodrama. Breakups always happen in the rain, and the sky cries for the heroine’s lonely, broken heart. Sometimes, makeup kisses take place under those same stormy skies, with rain now symbolizing renewal… and also because we’ve heard clothes are sexy when they’re wet.
