Characterization: is there any guidance for writing "the romantic interest"?
I've recently been researching and discussing characters and character roles, mostly off the back of feedback on a romance story that described the "love interest" (if that is the correct literary term?) of my protagonist as "flat, uninteresting, where no one would care if they lived or died, death would be better because they wouldn't be so boring".
Whilst I understand that "character roles" in fiction are quite prescriptive and that following the rules verbatim yields a technically accurate and flat story, I also understand that you have to know the rules before you can break them.
So after a heated debate on love interests in novels, I would like to know if there any literary guidance for creating a "love interest"? Is it different for male, female, bi-sexual, British, American, young, old etc?
Within the guidance, are there any stereotypes other than "tall, dark and handsome"? For example, it's widely accepted in the western market that the male love interest is strong, dark and mysterious, including a long list of examples such as Edward Cullen, Tony Stark, Mr Darcy, any Hugh Jackman character and that 50 shades of grey mush that I actually can't stand but can't deny the reception.
Nowadays, this is borderline cliché, there must be more love interests out there over and about "tall, dark and handsome" right? If so what?
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Are you sure that that criticism came from someone who actually likes romance novels? I ask because "flat, uninteresting and no one would care if they lived or died, death would be better because they wouldn't bore me so much" seems to describe every character in a genre romance novel to anyone who is not a reader of romance novels.
The whole definition of genre, it seems to me, is that is accepts without question or establishment, a set of propositions about character, setting, and plot. In essence that it guarantees the reader certain things and in exchange asks the reader to take certain things as read so that it can get on with delivering the goods with messing about. The result is that it provides a very quick and easy fix to those addicted to its particular formula, and that it bores the rest of the reading public to tears.
So if you were showing formula romance to someone who is not an addict of formula romance, "flat, uninteresting and no one would care if they lived or died, death would be better because they wouldn't bore me so much" is pretty much exactly the response you should expect, just as it would be with formula fantasy, for instance, to someone who is not an addict of the genre.
For a mainstream character, on the other hand, the rule seems pretty simple. This is a real person who falls in love. We fall in love because we are incomplete, lonely, afraid, and desperately in need of physical and emotional support. Lovers are not (as the erotic fantasy would have us) two strong brilliant independent people coming together for mutual erotic satisfaction. We need someone because we are desperately lonely and sad when we are alone. Love is loneliness responding to loneliness. It is the particular quality of a character's loneliness that evokes our sympathy and our hope, and which engage us in their matrimonial prospects.
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Usually if the love interest is uninteresting, it's because the author isn't very interested in him or her as a character. There's any number of (often quite successful) books and movies where the love interest is basically a symbol, or a object, or plays a functional role in the story but doesn't have any inner life of his or her own.
It seems to me that going down an enumerated list of "attractive" traits is exactly the wrong way to solve this --if it needs to be solved. It may be that your story doesn't required a fully realized love interest for one reason or another. But if that's not the case, you need to create a character you actually find interesting --and NOT just because that person matches your own mental list of for a dream girl or boy. An interesting love interest would be interesting even if he or she wasn't the love interest.
Consider the love interest in Almost Famous. What makes her compelling is that she has her own story arc, even including a love interest of her own (that is not the main character). Her story basically stands alone without his. That's a lot of what makes her so attractive to the main character (a thinly disguised stand-in for the writer) and in turn to us, the viewer.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/25951. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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