Falling In Love | Like A Writer

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Hey Guys x

Welcome to the next instalment of 'Like a Writer' - this time, I want to talk about falling in love with love interests!

Now, the love interest is such an important role in so many books and movies - and it's the one that most people watch to see!

However, I've found that these characters are the hardest to write.

This is because, as well as having to make these characters as realistic as possible (just like the rest of the characters in the book), you also have to write a character that your readers will fall in love with.

And that's hard!

As I've been writing 'Lou's Novel', I have so many love interests, so many! I guess mine is kind of unique, but even so, I'm trying to write between 4 and 8 characters that I want my reader to fall in love with, and right now, it's seeming like an impossible task!

This is because, romance in itself is the most cliché thing on the planet!

Every romantic line has been said a thousand times and is now, more than anything else, something to make fun of.

And as someone who loves these clichés, it's really hard not to use these in my work - to make my characters sound like all the other romantic interests out there.

In addition, romantic characters are so important! They're just under the importance of the main character(s) but more important than any other secondary characters. This means that we need to treat them as the important people that they are.

No one's going to fall in love with the main character if all the dialogue you have is between your main character and the main's best friend - they need time to develop.

Of course your love interest can have flaws, all real people and characters do! But if your reader can't understand why your protagonist is in love with the love interest, then it will stop them from falling in love too.

And if we look at popular books and movies, the most popular love interests are the ones that everyone collectively loves - Augustus Waters, Jack Dawson, Christian Grey, all the men in love actually, they make us want to be the girls in those movies, and we can totally understand why they are treated in such high regard and loved the way they are. And this makes them so much more coveted and realistic.

One thing I find interesting is to not fall into the trap of making your love interest the good guy, the cliché guy who your character sees after they date a whole series of awful guys.

Instead, I like when I'm not sure about a character at first. With Augustus Waters, at the beginning, he was so smooth that he had me on edge - why was he acting like this? Is he really saying these things? - and because of that, although I did fall in love with him, I feel like it was because of the lack of other male characters rather than an infatuation with Gus (who, by the way, I do love!)

But when a character is kind of bad at first, whether he's an arsehole or smarmy af, I like being able to warm to the characters rather than falling in love from their first words. But that's just me!

I hope this post interested you and helped when developing your love interests!

Thank you for reading

Comment below some of your favourite love interests in books and movies!

Keep Smiling - Lou xx

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