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Those OTHER Relationships
Romance is about relationships. No matter the genre, if you write Romance, you're writing about relationships. The obvious focus is the relationship between your hero and heroine. But there are many other relationships in our stories. And one of the most complicated, sometimes more complicated than the one between a man and a woman, is the relationship between female friends.
In my WIP, my heroine's best friend plays an important role. As the relationship between the hero and heroine grows closer, the heroine and her best friend grow further apart. It starts with the heroine not completely confiding something to the best friend, and of course, the best friend knows right away she's holding back. We always know. It eventual spirals into the best friend saying horrible things to the heroine and then seemingly doing the worst thing imaginable. Lets just say, without the best friend, I wouldn't have a black moment.
Then there's the relationship between family members. Friendship is complicated, but we all know you can walk away from a friendship and the result is you're no longer friends. You can walk away from family all you want, you're still family. There's an invisible connection that cannot be severed. It can be frayed down to a single thread, but it's almost never broken.
This is the one area of a story where I believe real life experience comes into play. If you've reached the age of six, you've experienced both friendship and family ties. In most cases anyway. I admit the best friend in my story is based partially on a real person. And the problems with the friendship are based in reality. In another story I have planned, there's a difficult relationship between two very different brothers. All kinds of reality will go into that one.
Do you spend a lot of time on these kinds of relationships in your stories? Or do you stick solely to the hero and heroine and not think much about the secondary relationships? Is there an author you think does these kinds of relationships well? I instantly think of the amazing groups of female friends and the sisters that Eloisa James creates.
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37 comments:
Aren't all of our characters based at least a little on people we know?
I use friendship a lot. Our friends help shape who we are, and I know for Jinan, she wouldn't have accepted her place amongst the 'harem' girls if she didn't have 'sisters' to see her through each step of the way.
EJ is awesome at femme friendship.
Terri, you've made me realize none of my heroines have close ties to anyone, including family. They've been isolated for various reasons and have to cobble together their own support system. Hmm.
Ter, I absolutely love all the other relationships in the books I read. I also think it's very good at showing different aspects of the hero or heroine's personality. People always behave and speak differently to those closest to them (family or friends) than they do to potential love interests. I think it's a great tool to use to flesh out the characters.
I'm finding that doing it right is a lot more complicated than it looks. Writing about the hero and heroine and their conflict is hard enough, but then throwing in the extra relationships in a concise and seemless manner and making every encounter push the story forward is tricky.
Tiff - Most characters probably are but for me it's more of a subconscious thing I think. It's only after they show up in the story and I've written them for a while that I realize the similarities to people I actually know. And my guess would be the relationships between the women in a harem would be fascinating!
Maggie - That is an interesting revelation, especially when you have such a great, close-knit family. Any ideas why you seem to write that way?
Irish - you hit on the exact word I was thinking of - TRICKY. The main relationship between the hero & herione is almost easier for me to write. The conflicts and feelings are more straight forward and easier to find, but with the female friends, it's like tiptoeing through a mine field.
For me, my heroine and her best friend have been together for years and they know each other really well. They know each other's issues and history and most importantly, their weaknesses. So when a female friend betrays another, the fall out is that much bigger.
I never seem to write characters with parents around, but my heroine has a sister and a friend who is like a sister. The hero has an aunt who is like a mother. That's pretty much all my close relationships.
I think writing parents well looks really difficult, I think that's why I haven't attempted it yet.
Maybe these things are more difficult because of the history. And of all the secondary relationships, the one with the parents is likely the most revealing about the main characters. Or at least how we portray that relationship is the easiest way to explain why the hero/heroine behaves the way they do, or makes the choices they do.
We've all talked on other blogs about how easy it is to fall back on the hero having a terrible mother and that's why he's a jerk or whatever. Creating a healthy relationship with the parents is harder IMO.
I know I repeat myself, but I like context. I want the H/H relationship to be central if the book is labeled romance, but it takes an extraordinary story to make me believe in totally isolated characters. How many of us really live our lives without connections?
Female relationships are key in EJ's novels; mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, teachers--she makes great use of them all, but she does less common relationships well too. Part of the charm of the Essex series for me is Mayne and Griselda's relationship and the sisters' relationships with the BILs. Nora Roberts is another who makes family and friends an integral part of her stories. I love the sleepover scene in The Jewels of the Sun because it rings so true.
My writing is the opposite of Maggie's. I keep adding characters. At last count I had twenty-two live secondary characters and three dead ones. Some of this obsession with connection comes with my Southernness, I think, and some it comes from small-town living. I subscribe to Faulkner's idea of perpetual Isness, and I knpw from experience that in small towns the mail carrier may turn out to be yout third cousin once removed and the bank teller may be that girl Aunt Emma Lou's sister-in-law's brother married.
And, as usual, my post reveals another regional characteristic--discursiveness. :)
I really like secondary relationships. I think that tells you a lot about the H&H by the way that they interact with other characters. More so than just being in their POV. I don't know how to answer this question since writing in first person there's no one else's POV to go to so you get a different feel about the heroine.
I really think JR Ward does great secondary characters and relationships. And Kim Harrison too. And Eloisa James. Lisa Kleypas. Cathy Maxwell.
Janga - how could I forget Nora? She's a MASTER at these other connections. And I'm like you, no one lives there lives never seeing or interacting with more than one or two people. But you make a good point by bringing up the southern thing. You could probably write an isolated heroine living in NYC. I haven't lived there but I'm guessing you could be as invisible as you'd like with little problem. But it's much more rare to find a heroine living in a southern town and being invisible. I can tell you from experience, it's impossible.
Sin - I think writing in first POV can enhance the insight into these kinds of relationships. And your talent for deep POV brings the troubles, conflicts, and complications to life even more. I haven't read Ward or Harrison, but you hit it on the nose with the others. Kleypas does a great job in the Historicals in and the contemps.
Thanks for the compliment, although I don't feel like it's deserved. I have more of a talent for getting myself into POV problems that could be easily solved if I could write in third person.
Ward does third person, but it's a deeper kind of third person that I wish I could accomplish. Harrison writes first person with that ability to see in her heroine's mind and the ability to feel like you're reading everyone else's POV but you're not. I don't know how to accomplish that.
I'm all about the friendships! This is so timely since the development of the friendship is really key to me right now. I don't know if I'd be able to write a friendship betrayal, tho. Terri you're so friggin' brave! I think it would be way too hard for me to do.
Um, btw, I want to read this so badly! Wow it sounds intense.
No, if I didn't have friends and family, I wouldn't have conflict in my stories. My characters are too attracted to each other to resist each other for long without the "moral compass" other people provide. I'm sure this makes me a weak plotter. Or a big fan of sex, I'm not sure. Probably both.
Sin - You need to stop beating yourself up about this third person thing. I can't pull of first and I don't worry about it. There's lots of things I can't pull off. So you make what you can do (and you do it WELL) work for you. No harm, no foul.
I can read one sentence of your writing and I'm sucked into it. That's a God-given talent and if you don't start believing you have it, I'm getting stilts and kicking your ass.
:)
Steph - I'm not sure I realized how hard this was going to be when I created this story. It really all kind of came to me and I'm just writing it down. But I can tell you, this blog topic came out of actual events in my life over the weekend so I'm very in-tune with the deterioration of a long standing friendship. This will likely be easier for me to write than it would be for some people. Lucky me I guess. LOL!
Hellion - You have a character driven story set in a small town. You can't write that without all the interactions with family and friends. The people we spend time with shape our worlds, and that goes for our characters. Heck, I'd say part of out world-building is building in those other characters.
Worldbuilding with Small Town Characters...that's a blog right there.
Sin, I think you can get a lot about other people even if you don't have their POV. How other people behave...or what they react to (something that wouldn't bother anyone else)--hey, that's a big deal. It says a lot about their relationships, even if you never find out their particular backstory.
More importantly, you spend your POV determining how those people are important to the main character. You can have a cast of a thousand, but everyone really wants to know about the heroine/hero more than anyone else.
It takes skill to reveal the POV of an outside character when you're in first POV--and I think you do that.
You should totally write that. LOL!
God, dare I say it, I've actually been working on a regular romance novel set in a small town. I feel ridiculous writing it but it wouldn't leave me alone long enough to write on anything else. So I figured, for the time being since I'm not going to make the GH cut off, I'll work on this and see where it goes. I wasn't going to say anything about it because let's face it, I'm not the romance writing type of girl.
But I love when Hellion writes small town characters. Hers are so true to how it is and it's so easy to get sucked into the story.
And you two are being uber nice to me today. I feel a plot underfoot.
You're keeping secrets and we're the ones plotting something?! I don't think so. LOL!
You've caught us, Sin. We're trying to kill you with kindness. So we can inherit your uber-secret spy toys. And your uber-fun sex ones as well.
I LOVE writing the relationships-and the pain/joy therein- that are outside of the H/h.
I must say that, knowing your black moment, I think that friendship is over and *sniff* that's okay by me.lol.
Captain - why'd you go and ruin our plan by telling her?!
Kelly - that's another one of the tricks. It's not really over. You'll have to wait and see. 8)
I think that sometimes other characters step into parent, sibling roles. Some friendships in stories are as strong as brother/sister relationships. And sometimes a caretaker becomes as good as a parent.
Sin - you're working on a small town romance? Is it first or third person? (Though I assume 1st, one never knows). I'm sure you're going to do great!! Oh, and I second everything Hellion and Ter are saying about your writing. It's brilliant and absorbing. Compelling (but not in the made for TV movie way you accused me of last week).
I'm kind of freaked out now thinking about connections. Eden loves her sister but she dies. Laurette has a maid who gives her what-for and a daughter she can't claim. Charlotte has a sister, but she's a courtesan. Maybe because I was an only child the solitariness creeps in. Calling Dr. Freud.
In real life my girls are my bestest friends, and they are each other's. Do you know the three of them all went to the New Kids on the Block contest in Boston and screamed themselves hoarse? They haven't grown up yet, LOL.
I loved New Kids on the Block growing up. :) I'm jealous of your daughters.
Marn - That's a great point. Sometimes a person not related to the character at all takes on the role of family. In many cases, shared struggles is what creates bonds, not blood.
Maggie - You might be onto something with that only child thing. And I loved NKOTB when I was a teen. At 17, I saw them in concert in a club in Pittsburgh. I was on the floor in front of the stage surrounded by most 12 & 13 yr old screaming girls. When one of them threw his sweaty towel into the audience, it was a frenzy. I ended up with one little string - which I hung on my rearview mirror. LMAO!
Yeah, that's concert instead of contest. My two older girls saw them in person when they were in middle school I think, but the youngest was practically a baby so this was a first for her. My oldest still has a box with all of her NKOTB stuff---posters, jacket, etc.I remember the walls in her room. Jordan was everywhere. Yuck.
My student worker doesn't know who NKOTB are. She wasn't born yet.
Oh, I was a Donny girl. Had to be the bad boy, you know. LOL! But it's not quite the same now. If they have new music, I haven't paid enough attention to hear it. It's just not the same when they're...you know....old like me. LOL!
But those first crushes are hard to part with. Rick Springfield was recently here in concert and I was so tempted to go. LOL!
Hmmm. First crushes.
Josh Brolin & Ty Miller were my first main crushes. Okay, they're the ones I remember. I'm sure I crushed on someone prior to then. I crushed on EVERYONE. But I have their pictures framed somewhere in my TRUNK of KEEPABLES.
Pretty sure I was in love with Richard Marx and Bon Jovi...and, yes, yes, Bret Michaels (though I never would now! Holy crap!)
Did you HAVE to remind us all how old we are? And my first crush I can remember might be Loverboy. The dawn of MTV altered my childhood severely. LOL!
You're welcome. Goes with my Red-Eye Demon-Moody nature and all.
In that case, my first crush was Johnny Horton, followed closely with Roy Rogers.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Blast From the Past because I can identify SO WELL with Brendan Fraser's character. I feel like I was caught in a time warp of pop culture. Only I'm like a hybrid of him and Alicia Silverstone since I've got her snarky attitude.
Friends are the family you choose. I think that even if we don't identify our relations by conventional terms does not make our ties threadbare.
My books feature three female chefs who went to school together. They, in turn, form friendships with secondary characters in the books. One of which crosses the pond to be with her. And family is very important to them and the people they love. No great surprise there.
Santa - With your background of the big Italian family, I'd imagine those kinds of relationships would be your forte. And now I'm curious about the one who crosses the pond. Which book is that?
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