Noticing Newbies
This week: Love/Hate Edited by: ember_rain More Newsletters By This Editor
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I am a stay at home, dyslexic, homeschooling mother of 6. I only ever wanted three things in my life.. A good husband, wonderful kids and to be a writer.
High School gave me the chance to find my husband . The Universe blessed us with a good marriage and awesome kids. WDC gave me a chance to at least feel like a writer. They embraced me with all my writing flaws and gave me the chance to do this newsletter every month despite my obvious shortcomings.
Friends have jokingly suggested that I drank the WDC kool-aide. I will happily agree. I did and I am so glad I did. Here is to all of our new members finding their writing home with us as well.
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So last month I talked about finding inspiration around you. This month with the newsletter so close to Valentines day I didn't want to add to the list of newsletters about love. As I was setting out to write this I remembered how my father use to preach sermons about the birth of Christ on Easter and his death on Christmas. Daddy always had to shake something up. So I thought, why not do one on hate. Then when talking to {suser;fufhff1} about it this morning before she headed out for the week, I remembered that love and hate are different sides of the same coin. The opposite is actually indifference. At least with hate, you care enough to feel something. So, with that we have the love/hate relationship.
When writing about love or hate you have to draw from experience. If you have never been in love, the only kind of love you can write about is familial love. If you have never hated someone, you won't really know how to add that in either. Of course, If your like me and dislike who you become and how you feel when you hate someone, you may also struggle to include that element in your writing. Unfortunately, in a lot of stories, you have to have at least a little bit of that to create your conflict.
There are three elements to this: Love, Hate, and love/hate.
Writing about love is easy for me. I married my high school sweetheart less than three months after I graduated. We have 6 kids and have been married 25 years. So, it's easy to go all sappy and write something so sweet that the little cartoon blue birds wrap blue ribbons in heart shapes around it and our members who avoid the romance genre, consider gagging. No problem there. The real problem is understanding unconditional love. The kind of love the Ancient Greeks called Agape. That is typically reserved for a parent to a child. Though romance can fall under it as well. It's what has kept Clanbear and I married for so long. I love him enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. Well that and every woman that ever hit on him was told the kids go with him. I'm not sure why that worked so well, but it did.
Writing about hate is not easy for me. I understand what its like to hate someone. The one person who ever actually put my relationship at risk, I have had those feelings about for years. I try not to think about her. It wasn't that she wanted my husband for herself. It was she didn't want anyone to be that happy and we were the closet to happy she knew. I am trying to let it go, after all I haven't seen her in 14 years. But, hate is powerful. She was, or so I thought, my best friend. It took me months to figure out what was going on. That the reason Clanbear and I fought when she was around was because she was subtlety instigating situations she knew would bring us into a place where we would fight and usually we were both saying the same thing just in different ways and not getting it. Writing about her is nearly impossible. Even now as I attempt this, I want to go back and do a sappy newsletter on love. I would rather think about the good times than the bad, but like so many of us, once I start thinking about the bad, it's all I can think about for days.
Hate in your story, can be that way. For me, its hard to write bad guys who are really bad people. I want to like everyone. The tightness I feel in my face and neck when I write about something I hate, the vitriol that is used to create a character everyone will hate is almost more than I can handle. It's why I've been working on the same novel for the last five years. I rewrite it completely every November because I just don't hate the antagonist enough to make the readers care. I love my other characters enough to make readers care but the conflict is missing which means, its pretty much a boring story of sappy sweetness. It's getting better, but it still isn't there yet.
Hate makes the world go round as much as love. The need to show someone you hate that you can do what they say you can't. The need to save the world, from the evil you perceive when others may not, is as much a part of writing as love is. I tip my hat to those who can write about the evils of the world and not get eaten by their own demons. I am still learning how. To me it's like learning to be a lion tamer without getting eaten.
The of course there is the Love/Hate relationship. "Do you know how much I hate you right this minute?"
"Good, sometimes you should. I don't particularly like myself either but it has to be done."
We have that conversation quite a bit. I actually do hate him in those moments but not so much that I can't get past it. Unfortunately that is just a blip on the radar of love/hate relationships. They often involve loving someone but hating their actions as I showed above but more often than not it is a case of loving to hate or hating to love. When you know your in the wrong relationship or you find yourself enjoying the nastiness you feel when someone is around. It turns you into something you aren't and a lot of times you can't even see it. That goes for either version of Love hate.
I have a friend who hated the fact she loved someone. He was abusive but she just couldn't walk away because she loved him. It took a couple of years of all of us talking to her for her to see that though she loved him, he couldn't even love himself, much less her. Then of course there is always that one person we all love to hate. For me it was a couple of cousins, male of course. They drove me to distraction and I am so glad that I never have to see them again. I didn't like who I became when they were around. The nastier they were the nastier I was until in some cases, someone had to leave before it broke down into a physical altercation.
These are the things that really make the world go round. We will spend every penny we have on people we love to help them, or on people we hate to make life harder on them. Money is the means to an end. It's emotional ties that bind us to the spokes of the wheel of life. So when you are writing, don't forget that hate and love/hate are as important as love.
Happy Valentines Day a bit early. I hope you all have a blessed one. If you don't have someone special go look in a mirror because the person looking back at you, seems pretty special to me.
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Once again some items from out newest members.
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