Fiction After Marriage

Romances usually build up to a climax. And you know which climax I mean. Or maybe you don't.

The classic romantic story is about falling in love -- following the ups and downs, ins and outs, togethers and aparts, of a couple as they approach physical and emotional intimacy. They may have one or the other, but until they both lust for and love each other, the romance, for the novelist, is not "consumated."

I love romance, and I love this traditional formula for creating romantic tension and satisfaction in fiction. The formula is not just a part of the romance genre, but usually also helps structure the story arc of any genre fiction -- fantasy, adventure, espionage, action, mystery. I want to emphasize also that I love genre fiction and don't use the term "formula" as a derogative, any more than I would use the word "sonnet" as a derogative term in poetry.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I had a fight with my husband, whom I love. And, poor man, his foibles and mine inspired me, and I outlined a scene from Dindi Book 2.

Now, here's one advantage of writing a book/series over a long period. This tale is a braid of several intertwined plotlines. The main story line, which I wrote first, is a Coming of Age story. It follows a fairly conventional fantasy trope of a young person coming into her power and falling in love.

Another strand of the story, however, follows another couple (a generation earlier), and though their story also starts with them falling in love, I wanted to continue to follow them after their happily ever after. That isn't as common, though two books I've read recently which did do this are The Time Traveller's Wife and Michelle's Cinders (*cough* go buy it, *cough*). In genre, this is okay to do with secondary characters.

(After I wrote most of this post, I discovered that Courtney Milan had blogged about how to to this in the Romance genre, by having a previous hero/heroine show up in a new heroine/hero's book.)

Since the after-happily-ever-after story is so unusual, it opens up a lot of possibilities. One choice is to make it all about falling out of love, which leads to a dismal story, unless the protagonist is saved by falling out of love with the wrong person and falling in love with the right person. But in that case, it's really just a story about falling in love, isn't it?

The other possibility is tragedy. Of course, in many dramatic traditions around the world, a love story is always a tragedy. You realize you love each other and are finally together -- thanks to the motherlovin' sword piercing you together like pineapples on a shishkabob! *Wipes tear from eyes. Sniffles.* So beautiful.

And so not for me. Sorry, I just don't enjoy dramas ending in divorce or death.

So what does that leave? Comedy, as always. Almost all sit-coms are about married couples and/or families, aren't they?

Nah, still not what I'm looking for.

What I wanted to write was the opposite of the Coming of Age/Falling in Love story, but not a simple (depressing) opposite. I wanted to write a Coming of (Older) Age/Falling (Deeper) in Love story. Dindi, the heroine, has to learn to transcend her limitations, to find her own power and to realize that the man she loves is better than she has been led to believe. Vessia, the other, has to learn to live with her limitations, to sacrifice some of her power, and to accept that the man she loves is only human.

I promise it doesn't end with a shishkabob. I don't promise it won't be bittersweet.