Dear tearsfortea,
Here is a story of a time Lover and I fought. In this tale, I was 19. We had only been together for a few months. I don’t want to say we were dating, because although we spent at least part of every day together, we never did proper dates. We did all the things that best friends did, like random road trips and sleeping all day after college classes or work shifts and playing video games until 2 am and setting up and photographing 40 foot long dioramas of plastic pigs taking over the world. We did not date. Dating is pointless when you’re in a relationship with someone who can’t sit still in a restaurant.
Let’s fast forward to the fight.
It was Valentine’s Day. I have always and ever despised Valentine’s Day, as I think if you’re aren’t lovin’ and treasurin’ each other every day, you should be trying harder the rest of the year and leave February 14th out of it.
Lover said he had made plans for us. It turned out that he had arranged for us to go to a sentimental dinner and dance, complete with candlelight and romantic music.
I was furious.
We fought.
He said, I THOUGHT THIS IS WHAT GIRLS LOVED?
I said I HAVE BEEN WITH YOU FOR SIX MONTHS PREVIOUS TO THIS! IT’S NOT ABOUT WHAT “GIRLS” WILL LOVE! IT IS ABOUT WHAT MAGGIE WILL LOVE! I ALREADY LIKED WHAT YOU WERE DOING YOU DON’T HAVE TO PROVE ANYTHING DON’T MAKE ME DANCE YOU ASSHOLE
I tell you this tale, tearsfortea, not to make you feel bad if you are someone who enjoys dances, but to point out that love is specific. People are specific. What is romantic to one person is decidedly not to another. How one person falls in love is very different from another. Although I write by stealing, it’s very difficult to truthfully steal one aspect of someone’s love/ romance without stealing the entire person. Even little gestures are impossible to steal effectively without also stealing their context. For instance, the most touching thing Lover did this week was to give me a washcloth. The context around it was complicated and specific; it all added up to me being touched in my heartparts by the gesture. But how would I possibly steal such a thing?
In fact, this is my pet peeve with the love stories in many novels — I adore love stories, but I hate when I feel like I’m being fed something untrue. Something generic. I want to feel that I know both characters really well, like real people, and then I want to see their relationship unfold in a way that could only happen to them. My favorite relationship moments in my books are when I feel I’ve pulled that off — hand lotion, or a telephone call from a humid garden, or the bringing of bread. If I ever feel I’m writing a scene where the characters are going through the motions — being forced like paper dolls to attend a Valentine’s Day dance — I scrap it.
The only concept that I use from real life is my certainty of what love means to me. Lover is my best friend, and I just don’t see the point in love without that. In the author’s note of FOREVER, I wrote: “Mutual, respectful, enduring love is completely attainable as long as you swear you won’t settle for less.”
I see that again and again in the successful relationships in my life. And that’s what I steal for my stories.
urs,
Stiefvater
PS Valentine’s Day can still go piss up a rope
Day: June 6, 2015
Up all night, Lucas DeShazer
I’ll turn him into a flea. A harmless little flea. And I’ll put that flea in a box. And then I’ll put that box in another box. Then I’ll mail that box to myself, and when it arrives, I’ll smash it with a hammer! It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, I tell you! Genius, I say! Or, to save on postage, I’ll just poison him with this!
me watching cookies in the oven.
One more bit of adulting advice
Don’t hate-read. You know what I’m talking about. Are there blogs or people who automatically make you clench your jaw and roll your eyes? Or always trigger a reaction of “Oh dear angels and spirits, not them/this AGAIN?” Stop reading their stuff. Don’t seek it out, no matter how much ranty entertainment you feel it may be.
Hate-reading is a drain of your time and energy.
(Note: I am posting this as a REMINDER TO MYSELF, because I fall into that trap, too.)
Please don’t take your pets for granted. Even if you’re frustrated that your dog has been barking all day or your bird has been screaming for attention, remember you are all they have in this world. Give your fish that extra water change. Give your dog or cat that tummy rub they’ve been begging for. Chop up some fresh fruit as a treat for your rodents or reptiles. Just spend some time with them. Be compassionate to your animals. They are living creatures that are alive simply because you wish them to be. They may only be a small part in your life, but to them, you are their everything.
A solitary fisherman’s home keeps watch on quiet Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, Canada, 1974.Photograph by Sam Abell, National Geographic Creative
it’s so cute when a really fat bumblebee comes and bops against the window and immediately bumbles away like oh deary me I am terribly sorry that wasn’t where I should have been going oh what a silly sausage I am
It’s like this…
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character – because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned – and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character – Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him – this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo – enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.
No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.
kototyph 