LOVE STORIES CAN SAVE THE WORLD Katherine Center

LOVE STORIES CAN SAVE THE WORLD

Katherine Center

One year, for my birthday, I got a historical romance novel as a gift.

After ages of studying creative writing and Serious Fiction in school, I had never really read romance before. But I pushed past the decidedly non-literary cover and opened it up to the first chapter to “take a look” at it.

Three hours later, I was in the car, driving to the bookstore to get another one.

I felt like a person who’d spent her entire life eating boneless, skinless chicken breast . . . and I had just discovered chocolate cake.

That book was delicious. It was blissful. It was life changing.

It redefined reading for me. And fun.

It kicked off a blissful—and profoundly freeing—process of literary desnobbification that’s been the writing epiphany of my life. 

I mean, I knew I loved love stories. I’d been raised on Nora Ephron, after all. But those were movies. Movies were entertainment. Books, in my head at least, were work—not play.

After that first gateway romance novel, I spent the next several years reading historical romances in a blissful haze.

Did I say “reading” them? 

Sorry—I meant “devouring” them.

I put duct tape over the chesty man-candy on the covers, but I kept reading. In the bubble bath. At stoplights. While stirring spaghetti sauce on the stove.

There it is. 

I fell in love with romance novels.

For a long time, if you’d asked me why that was, I’d have shrugged and said, “Because they’re fun?” But now, after much overthinking it, I’ve figured out—at least in part—why they’re fun. 

It’s because love stories really are unlike any other kind of story.

All stories have an emotional engine that drives them. Mysteries run on curiosity. Thrillers run on heart-thumping adrenaline. Horror stories run on . . . horror. 

The fuel for those engines is anticipation. We piece the clues together and predict what’s going to happen, and we feel emotions—sometimes very strong ones—about what we’re predicting and how those predictions turn out.

Most stories use a fair bit of what’s called negatively valenced anticipation: A sense of worry. Dread. Anxiety that things will get worse. 

You know: You’re reading along, picking up the breadcrumbs of foreshadowing the writer’s dropped for you, and you’re like, “Oh, god. That kid’s going to go to jail.” Or, “Ugh, that man’s going to have a heart attack.” Or, “Bet you a thousand dollars he’s cheating on his wife.” You worry for them and keep turning pages.

But guess what kind of anticipation romance novels use?

Positively valenced.

Romance novels, rom-coms, nontragic love stories—they all run on a blissful sense that we’re moving toward something better. Percentage-wise, the vast majority of clues writers drop in romance novels don’t give you things to dread. They give you things to look forward to. 

This, right here—more than anything else—is why people love them. The banter, the kissing, the tropes, even the spice . . . that’s all just extra.

It’s the structure—that “predictable” structure—that does it. Anticipating that you’re heading toward a happy ending lets you look forward to better things ahead. 

And there’s a name for what you’re feeling when you do that.

Hope.

Sometimes I see people grasping for a better word than “predictable” to describe the experience of reading a romance. They’ll say, “It was predictable—but in a good way.”

I see what they’re going for.

But I’m not sure it needs pointing out that over the course of a love story . . . people fell in love. I mean: Of course they did! That’s what the story was for.

In fact, this idea we’ve never questioned that all endings have to be surprising—that any ending that doesn’t surprise you is somehow a failure—is a fundamental misunderstanding of how love stories work.

Must an ending be a surprise to be good?

That depends very much on what the story is trying to do to you.

A love story isn’t trying to surprise you.

More than that, it can’t. 

Because the main job of a person writing a love story is to create an exciting, rising, shimmery, magical, delicious sense of anticipation as the two leads get closer and closer to the moment when they overcome all their internal and external obstacles and get together. 

And guess what? 

Anticipation and surprise are opposites. 

Like, by definition: You cannot anticipate a surprise—and you cannot be surprised by something you’re anticipating. 

It’s one or the other, but not both.

To be clear: Other things can—and should—surprise you in a love story. You can have a surprise avalanche. Or a surprise evil twin. Or a surprise kiss.

The details should be endlessly surprising. Characters should say and do surprising things, think surprising thoughts, wear surprising clothes, work at surprising jobs, encounter surprising obstacles, and on and on.

But what shouldn’t be surprising in a love story . . . is the love story.

It’s not possible to write a satisfying romance where the leads unexpectedly, out of nowhere, shock the hell out of everyone by falling in love. 

If you’re surprised in a love story when the leads get together, somebody wasn’t doing their job. 

What love stories live or die on—and what we should evaluate them by—is not the destination, but the journey. And the blissful, mouth-watering, oxytocin-laden, yearning-infused, agony and ecstasy-riddled, relentless build of anticipation along the way. 

That’s the point of the story. That’s the reason it exists. That’s the cocktail of emotions we all came there to feel.

It’s not “will they or won’t they?” because—Oh, they will. They always will. It’s never where you’re going in that matters a romance. It’s always how you get there. 

I propose we stop asking ourselves if romcoms are “predictable”—and, instead, start talking about anticipation.

As in: “This love story really created fantastic anticipation.”

Structurally, thematically, psychologically—love stories create hope and then use it as fuel. Two people meet, and then, over the course of three hundred pages, they move from alone to together. From closed to open. From judgy to understanding. From cruel to compassionate. From needy to fulfilled. From ignored to seen. From misunderstood to appreciated. From lost to found. 

Predictably.

That’s not a mistake. That’s a guarantee of the genre. Things will get better. And we, the readers, get to be there for it. 

We get to watch people get good at love.

We get to witness infinite ways that characters master the pro-social behaviors that make all our lives better—how to listen, and learn, and connect, and nurture, and care-take, and trust, and appreciate, and savor. We get to see people overcome their prejudices, change their minds, forgive each other, and sacrifice for something larger than themselves. 

All things, by the way, that are essential to human happiness—and routinely undervalued.

No type of story gets more eye rolls than love stories. “They’re so unrealistic,” people say, as they start another zombie apocalypse movie.

What is that? Is it self-protection? Self-loathing? Is it pretending not to care so we aren’t disappointed? Is it some sad, unexamined misogyny that we as a culture really need to work on?

I think love stories are deeply misunderstood—in part, at least, because they don’t work like other stories. 

Love stories don’t have happy endings because their writers didn’t know any better. They have happy endings because those endings let readers access a rare and precious kind of emotional bliss that you can only get from having something that matters to look forward to.

Yes, misery is important. 

But joy is just as important. 

The ways we take care of each other matter just as much as the ways we let each other down. Light matters just as much as darkness. Play matters as much as work, and kindness matters as much as cruelty, and hope matters as much as despair.

More so, even.

Because tragedy is a given, but joy is a choice.

Romantic fiction thrived during the pandemic, and there were lots of theories about why. People thought we were lonely. We needed escape. We wanted some laughs. 

All true.

But I think, more than that, it’s because love is a form of hope.

We all sense it deep down, I suspect—past the snark and the tough-guy exteriors. 

Love is healing. It’s nourishing. It’s unapologetically optimistic. It’s the thing that leads us back to the light.

So I write stories about how love does that.

And in a world where so many of us are struggling so hard to find ways to be okay, that seems like a genuinely valuable thing to do. 

And if those stories happen to lift us up, and make us laugh, and give us that blissed-out, longing-laden, magical, tipsy feeling you can only get from a good romance? 

Even better.

I used to take the position that romance novels were no worse than any other kind of novel: no more ridiculous than wars in the stars, no more unrealistic than superheroes in bodysuits, and no more nerdy than wizards in the forest—as well as no more ‘predictable’ than the sleuth who solves the mystery, the team that wins the game, the hero who saves the day.  

All genres have their clichés, after all.

Romance is no different.

But now I’m changing my mind. Maybe it’s not just that love stories aren’t any worse than other kinds of stories.

Maybe they’re better.

Maybe stories that help us see our best possibilities are more valuable than we ever thought. Maybe stories that stand up for love tell a better story of humanity.

Because that’s the truth: Believing in love is believing hope. 

And doing that—choosing in this cynical world to be someone who does that—really is doing something that matters.

From HELLO STRANGER by Katherine Center. Copyright © 2023 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

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BookPage calls Katherine Center “the reigning queen of comfort reads.” She’s the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, including her newest, Hello Stranger. Katherine writes laugh-and-cry books about how life knocks us down—and how we get back up. She’s been compared to both Jane Austen and Nora Ephron, and the Dallas Morning News calls her stories, “satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way.”

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HELLO STRANGER

The glorious new novel from the beloved author whose bright, hopelessly romantic New York Times bestsellers have been called “My perfect 10 of a book” (Emily Henry) and cheered for their “speedy pacing and sexual tension for miles” (People).

Love isn’t blind, it’s just a little blurry.

Sadie Montgomery never saw what was coming . . . Literally! One minute she’s celebrating the biggest achievement of her life―placing as a finalist in the North American Portrait Society competition―the next, she’s lying in a hospital bed diagnosed with a “probably temporary” condition known as face blindness. She can see, but every face she looks at is now a jumbled puzzle of disconnected features. Imagine trying to read a book upside down and in another language. This is Sadie’s new reality with every face she sees.

But, as she struggles to cope, hang on to her artistic dream, work through major family issues, and take care of her beloved dog, Peanut, she falls into―love? Lust? A temporary obsession to distract from the real problems in her life?―with not one man but two very different ones. The timing couldn’t be worse.

If only her life were a little more in focus, Sadie might be able to find her way. But perceiving anything clearly right now seems impossible. Even though there are things we can only find when we aren’t looking. And there are people who show up when we least expect them. And there are always, always other ways of seeing.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing