Self-Inflicted Torture
It's official. After this book is done, I am never EVER writing another reunion story.Ugh. I'm losing eyelashes right and left.
Any other writers out there have trouble with these stories? Reunion stories are my FAV's to read. I love them. There's something magical about two people who found love, lost it and then found it again together. You can't help but root for a hero who lost the woman he loved and realizes she's the only one in the world for him. Writing them though? Ack! A whole different story.
The WIP is a classic reunion story. Lots of mistrust. Lots of heartache over something that happened in the past. Lots of misunderstanding that, had the hero and heroine really known each other the first time, never would have been an issue. Because I've read so many different reunion stories, I know there are as many varied ways to write a reunion story as there are reunion stories out there. Some writers use flashbacks. Some weave backstory in with "memory" paragraphs here and there. Some start a book in the past, write the past as the present for a few chapters then skip ahead to the present and the real story when they get back together. Still others weave the two together.
One of the most compelling reunion stories I read was To The Brink by Cindy Gerard. A divorced woman is kidnapped and the only man she can turn to to save her is her ex-husband. In order to understand their romance though and invest the reader in the story, the writer blended the past and present. She'd write one chapter in the present (as the hero's trying to save her), one in the past that chronicled their love affair. It sounds odd, but I found myself turning pages faster and faster. I needed to know what happened in the present and how he rescued her. I needed to know how they fell in love and ultimately what broke them up because his desire to rescue her in the present was so strong. I'd never read a book written that way, but it totally worked.
As I sit here working on my self-inflicted torture device (AKA: The book from hell), I'm seriously contemplating how I'm getting the past into the present. At the moment I have those pesky memory/internal paragraphs as each character thinks back about the other. I even have (gasp!) a flashback here or there. Purists will say both of these techniques slow pacing, but in a reunion story, I think you have to use what works. If your readers aren't interested in the characters' first love affair and knowing why it ended, they aren't going to be interested in the current one.
So, what's your preference...as both a reader and writer? Do you read or write reunion stories? What have you found that works? What have you found that doesn't work?
Labels: Elisabeth's Posts
posted by Elisabeth Naughton at 10:15 AM
2Comments:
You're right -- reunion stories are challenging. I've written three and each time, I've not told all of the backstory. It's there, in bits and pieces as the reader needed to know it, but in mine, it wasn't as important as the here-and-now story -- how they were coming back together.
Of my reunion stories, Del and Barb's was probably the hardest to pull off. I ended up rewriting extensively at my editor's suggestion, and just about all of the changes had to do with finessing the backstory to suit the current characters.
I'm not sure I answered your question. :-D
I loved To The Brink, too. She did a great job with the backstory, even though I don't think I could effectively write that way.
I love to read reunion stories, but I don't love to write them. I've written a couple, but I do find it tough to get in the right amount of backstory without going overboard.
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