Writing about love

That's an interesting problem. If we write about love, we have to navigate all sorts of shoals, including the insipid. It is hard to put emotions into words. I can write something that might scare you, that is, I might be able to arouse an emotion within the reader, but I would be much harder pressed to create a scene where a character is scared. The former is a matter of elementary narrative mechanics, the latter is a matter of artistic writing skills, which are much harder to master. A film analogy might be when we see the menace over the unexacting victim's shoulder or the lights go out or a door slams. Basic stuff.

Love scenes are similar. We could probably come up with the mechanics of characters falling in love without necessarily stooping to the pornographic, but how do we express the emotions? For that matter, if we want to discuss the art of love-making, can it be done without it being mechanical and predictable and pornographic? On the other hand, how do we separate the ephemeral—the beauty of being in love—from the mundane—trite expressions that simply relate that being in love must be beautiful?

Kurt Cornutt addresses some of this on the Oxford University Press blog in an article called The Love Songs of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald aspired to greatness in his novels, but meanwhile he pumped out a lot of short stories, simply for the money:

For Fitzgerald, the short story was a means to an end: it allowed him to finance his novel writing, which he considered the preeminent art form... He also resented the story market for enticing him to prostitute his talent. To command courtesan prices, he had to know how to his please his audience – and that meant recycling familiar themes, employing stock characters and scenarios, and tugging the heartstrings. What more artistically he might have accomplished, commentators lament, had he not been so dependent on this dirty money.

Cornutt examines some of Fitzgerald's love-story writing, and even compares it to Brian Wilson's love-song writing. I'm taken by the underlying question of portrayals of emotion, but I also have to admit, I liked learning about this side of Fitzgerald's career.