Which sad love story left the deepest impression on you? DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, THE WAY WE WERE... TITANIC are three that deeply affected me.
Why is that? Why do some books/movies tug harder at our heartstrings than others? I believe it is because they involve us until we absorb the characters - in a sense becoming them, thinking their thoughts, feeling their anguish.
Drawn into their world, we forget our own for a while and live in another's skin. This has especial potency if their life is colorful and exciting, as fictional lives tend to be. And if that is true for the reader, how much more true might it be for the writer?
Many authors have described reaching the end of a manuscript as a kind of bereavement. Suddenly, the characters exist in their own right. Their story is told and they can now stand alone, abandoning their creator.
A sad day, but also a happy one, for the work is done. The romantic novel has at last been written. No longer a work in progress, it has taken on a life of its own. Where will it go? Who will find it and read it... and share in the feelings of the people populating its pages?
Of course the hope is that it will reach a wide audience and that the enforced isolation of the writing process has been in a good cause. Otherwise, why write? Then again, it sometimes seems as if there is no option but to release the plot churning round and round in one's head!
Where does the plot come from? That depends of course on who the author is and where they look for inspiration. Victoria Wood, true genius that she is with words - whether these be written, spoken or sung - seems to find hers everywhere. She writes from life as she sees it and while her work is usually funny it can also be very poignant and moving.
Joanna Trollope is such a wonderful observer of human behavior that her 'aga sagas' give a great insight into contemporary life, and when she writes as Caroline Harvey her historical novels too have the absolute ring of truth. Joanna's plots are found in the present, Caroline's in the past, yet both are essentially from the same source! One can only marvel at such versatility.
While writing recently with a sad love story theme, I had the strange experience of the characters totally taking over from me. I had created them (or so I believed) and yet from a fairly early stage they seemed to be making their own choices and leaving me simply to record these! At times I was even shocked by their wayward behavior and felt I should perhaps rein them in...
I wondered whether my grandmother was in any sense responsible for this phenomenon. You see, back when I was a child at her knee she told me that some day she'd like me to write her life story. Long after she had died I recalled her wish and set out to fulfill it. But having too vivid an imagination to be a biographer (and in any event she was no longer there to answer my questions), I decided to take a tiny thread from her life and embroider it lavishly into a work of pure fiction.
So did she help me from beyond the grave while I was writing about a charismatic actress who had inexplicably abandoned the London stage for a bizarre castle in Czechoslovakia? My firm belief is that she did.
