falling in love, but not for real

So, as I was doing dishes, I was thinking about my WIP (work-in-progress). Specifically, I was trying to think of a good model for my heroine. There are actually a few real-life people she reminds me of, but I need a different physical model.

I read an interview recently where an author said that when she copies her friends’ personalities for her characters, her friends never notice unless she copies their looks too. As soon as she copies their looks, they say, “hey, that’s me!” But if she just copies their personalities, they never know it’s them.

I thought that was really funny.

Anyway, that’s part of the reason for finding a celebrity to serve as my heroine’s physical model. But here’s the creepy part (at least, when I discovered that this was true, I thought that it was a bit creepy): to write a romance, you have to be half in love with your characters. I mean, you have to be able to think like the heroine enough that you fall in love a bit with your hero. Otherwise, you can’t write her emotions properly. And you have to think like the hero enough to fall in love a bit with your heroine. The creepy part? Trying to fall in love a bit with a character that you’ve based on someone you know just feels really weird. Hence: the celebrity model.

(quick interjection here: my current hero and heroine are NOT based on anyone I know. For me, that's just too awkward, because if I truly based a character on a friend, how could I ever answer them if they asked? But they do remind me of a few people.)

But then I got to thinking: if it feels weird to fall in love a bit with someone you know, shouldn’t it feel weird to fall in love a bit with someone you don’t? with that celebrity model? Or, even more pertinently, with your character? Isn’t that a bit odd?

I suppose the first answer is: it's not really falling in love. It's just something like falling in love.

But after having said that, I don't think I have a good answer, at least not without defending fiction itself as an enterprise. The whole point of stories is to identify with the characters. You get scared alongside the hero, gird your loins for the battle when he does, groan at his defeat, wince at his stupidities, share in his triumphs – all this as if they were your own. Your arm is seconding his at every sword thrust.

And fiction, as such, seems pretty defensible. Parables, at least, are. And don’t we find ourselves there?

Which brings me back to my hero and heroine. The first point of novels, I think, is to entertain. Drawing you in is the point. Otherwise, you’d just read essays. If a novel is a message book, it’s a failed novel. Let’s get that clear.

On the other hand, if the novel has no message, it’s probably a failed story. But the message should come out of the story. The point is, that we live life. The point is, if we learn nothing from our life, we’ve lived it badly. It’s the same for our hero and heroine.

So, what about romances? Well, part of the point of reading romances – aside, of course, from the main point: reading a good story – is learning a bit more about what it is to love. How we ought to desire, to woo, too win. How to begin as we mean to go on. How to be begin at all. How to begin again.

(Which is part of why, btw, a certain variety of romance is crap. Because the answer of “how do I order my desires aright?” is not “by taking a thuggish brute, having lots of implausible s** with him, and thus turning him into Dad of the Year.” Yeah. No.)

Romance is the glory of finding someone utterly Other, nonetheless loving him, and shaping yourself round so that you can live happily together. It’s surrendering a life where you put yourself first, and committing to – ever after – making someone else’s good your good too. It’s self-sacrificing to the level not just of your soul, but of your body. It draws you out of yourself and at the same time gives you a reflection back at yourself so that you can see the beauty you didn’t know was in your own face.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

p.s. I finally decided that the person my heroine resembled most physically - though she's not quite right - is Robin Wright Penn, as she was in the Princess Bride.