L is for Love

Margaret talks about characters falling in love

What else would I say L is for when I’ve been writing love stories for nearly forty years? There are lots of songs about love – Love is in the air, Love is all around, are two of my favourites. To me writing a love story is writing about what goes on every day of our lives. It’s part of human nature.

What is interesting is that I can let my imagination run riot. I create the characters, I create their situations, and I work out their problems for them. Or do I?

Very often the characters tell me what is going on. I sometimes shake my head in amazement and think, where did that come from? It’s not what I planned. So you see love happens. I don’t plan for my characters to fall in love (of course I know they will - eventually) Nor do I think to myself, it’s about time I put a love scene in here. Everything happens when the time is right, when the characters dictate it is right.

The build up to such scenes is probably more important than the scene itself. The emotions each character feels has been growing inside them for maybe the whole of the book up until this point. They may not have been aware of it but deep down inside something was happening. All it took was one trigger for both hero and heroine to give in to those feelings.

Nor does a love scene have to be the actual physical act. Closeness. Just being held by the person you have feelings for can be just as intense. Kissing is sometimes all that is needed. In the book I’m currently writing it took a long, long time for my characters to get together emotionally. And even then it wasn’t love they felt. Not true love. That came later, much later.

My belief is that there is no such thing as love at first sight. What do you think?