How to Write a Great Love Story

Hello, and welcome to the Story Grid Podcast. This is a show dedicated to helping you become a better writer. I'm your host, Tim Grall, and I am a struggling writer trying to figure out how to tell a story that works. Joining me shortly is Sean Coyne. He is the creator of StoryGrid, the author of the book Storygrid, and an editor with over 25 years experience. In this episode, we continue talking about love stories. Last week, we introduced this as the most important genre that you can be learning as a writer. And today, we are going to dive into exactly how to write a great love story. The obligatory scenes, the conventions, and what makes a great love story. Also, I want to mention here, before we dive in, that at the end of this episode, I have something really cool to tell you about. It's something Sean and I have been talking about for a while, and. And we want to introduce it to you first here on this episode. So make sure that you stay tuned until the very end, and I will tell you about it then. All right, let's get started.

So, Sean, last week I asked the question of if I had to pick a genre that was the most likely to work and the one I probably could master to spread across the most stories, and I asked that question. You said it was the love story.

And.

And so we started diving into that, and we didn't get all the way through it, but, you know, just give a quick recap on, like, what we went over last week and why the love story is so important.

Oh, okay. Well, the love story, I maintain, is. Is the first one everybody should consider mastering because love stories are the perfect thing to meld with other genres. For example, love story and horror. When you mash those things two together, you get Twilight. Right. And that's incredible. That's an incredibly commercially successful. Yeah, it's not.

Okay.

Yeah, it's done. Okay. Right. Like love and crime. You get something like Mr. And Mrs. Smith, which is, you know, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's, you know, legacy of their marriage. But it's a. It was a terrific movie. It's love and crime, where you have these two assassins who, you know are married. And then you have, like, love and fantasy. And if you ever saw the movie Splash, which is this fantastic movie Ron Howard did with Tom Hanks years ago, it's fantastic. It's about a mermaid. This guy falls in love with a mermaid, and it's love and fantasy put together. So if you are able to master love and you tack on, you know, the love and the war Story. You know that that's Ian McEwen's book. Oh, I forget the title of it, but it's a fantastic book. Set during World War I, right before the war. It's a love story that, you know, concerns war at the end. Anyway, you can take any of the major genres and mash it on to Love Story and create something that's extremely commercial, has extreme commercial potential. I'm thinking of that fantastic writer, did the Notebook. Sparks. Nicholas Sparks. There's a guy who understood the concept of being able to create really compelling love stories. And he's, you know, he's one of the most successful writers today in commercial fiction because he really concentrates on that genre specifically. And it's told with a male sensibility and a male point of view, and obviously it's commercially successful. So if you're interested in becoming a writer and commercially successful and somebody were to say to you, concentrate on one genre, the first one I would teach would be Love Story. Now, as we talked about last week, there are three major. Now, when I say love story, I'm not talking about the buddy cop story. I'm talking about love, meaning a relationship between two people with the potential for sexual intimacy. So it's the romantic notion of love where you find a partner and you settle down and get married, or you. When you're in a marriage, some challenges come along, infidelity, issues of trust, that sort of thing. These are the kinds of stories that I'm talking about between two people with sexual intimacy at their core. So of those stories, there are three major subdivisions, and there's the passion love story, which concerns the desire for sexual. Primarily, that's really what's driving the entire thing, or ownership of an obsession and ownership of a particular other person. Stories like the Great Gatsby, where Gatsby's obsessed with Daisy, are good prime examples of this. So the obsession, passion, love story is one. The second one is courtship, which is really the, you know, the basis of. A lot of. Most romance novels today are all about the courtship genre. And that one is really what can drive a lot of commercial eyes to a particular story. That is, when two people come together, are they going to, you know, commit to one another or they are not going to commit. So the central question is commitment. In the courtship story, are they going, go ahead.

And is this like pretty much every romantic comedy movie?

Yes. Yes. The romantic. The romantic comedy in films is the courtship story with a comedic sensibility. The courtship story without the comedic sensibility is the romance novel. And, you know, the one that I always look at is the, the one that started the whole thing is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which is fantastic. You read it today. It's as, you know, it's as fantastic today as it was back in the 1800s. So that's the second big genre, silo, sub genre of love story, which is courtship. The last one is marriage. When you have two people who have already come together, who have already committed to each other, can they take their relationship to the next level? And that next level is intimacy, where the two partners in the marriage, something external or comes between them. It's usually an issue of trust or infidelity. They are challenged to the point where they must recognize the true authentic being of the other person and love them for their true selves, as opposed to the masks that they wore during the courtship phase. The courtship stuff is great to make fun of in comedies and romantic comedies because we all pretend to be someone we're not in order to lure the person that we think, you know, would be our perfect match. So I love the, the word lure. Yes, exactly. Because we, we all fear, you know, revelation of our own personal strangeness and internal battles that we're all going through. So we, we really push that stuff. All that baggage we don't want the other person to see when we're in the courtship phase, which lends itself to great, you know, dramatic possibilities because when you're pretending to be someone you're not, oftentimes you make mistakes and you, you blurt out something that you shouldn't. And the other person, it's great, great, mistaken, you know, lies and all that sort of thing are, are the building blocks of a lot of the dramatic tension in the courtship dramas and the, the courtship comedies too. So the love story, to me, they have these three major subdivisions which are based on human desire. The first one is, you know, sexual desire. The second one is commitment, and the third one is intimacy. These are sort of the three stages of a relationship, a long lasting relationship that can make somebody feel part of something larger than themselves. And we talked about this very briefly last week. But, you know, everybody is born on this planet alone. And to live alone is, in a way, it's a damnation of sorts. And there's reasons why powerful political states put people in solitary confinement to break their spirits. So, you know, one of the primal needs that we have is to be part of something larger than ourselves. So the love story is a primal story force that, if you can master, is going to speak to every single person on the planet. So everybody, male, female, whatever, they all want to be part of something larger than themselves. And our romantic tradition is that once we find that perfect partner, we will, you know, one and one will become three. So this is why I think.

If somebody put a gun to my head and said, what's the first genre to master? I would say the love story. So after we went through those major three silos, we talked about, well, what are the global obligatory scenes of the love story? And we went through those last week. And I'll just go through them briefly now before we get into the more specific conventions of love stories. And these are all pretty much self explanatory. And a lot of times people ask me to, you know, Sean, when are you going to do the book where you just give all the answers to all the genres and lay out all the things that we have to have in each of the genre and you know, sure, I'll try and do that before I leave the earth, but you can do that yourself. And, you know, some of these things that I'm going to talk about in the obligatory scene category in the love story are obvious. Anybody who reads three romance novels or goes to watch three romantic comedies are going to recognize all these scenes. The first one is the lovers meet scene. You've got to have a scene that's interesting and innovative where the two people come together and meet. So that's number one. If they never meet, you don't have a story. Duh. The second one is sort of after the end of the beginning hook of your story. You usually get a moment of a confession of love where one of the one of the people involved in the story confesses to caring about the other in a way that is probably a little bit premature and causes a lot of stress and drama within the relationship because it seems as if this confession of love is just way way, you know, too early. There's a great scene in Pride and prejudice where Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth. Elizabeth thinks Mr. Darcy is a complete ass. And it's about the middle beginning of the middle build of Pride and Prejudice when he shows up, knocks on the door and tells her that he admires her and that he can't help himself, but he wants her to marry him. And she's like, I can't stand you. Why would I want to marry you? You're prideful and terrible and you treat my family like dirt. You've insulted me the very first time we met. No, I'm not going to marry you. And that moment is just this incredible moment in Pride and prejudice, where Mr. Darcy's pride is threatened and we see the prejudice of Elizabeth too, rise. So, you know, there's a reason why she called the story Pride and Prejudice. And it's, you know, those two characters, and I'll talk more of this in the conventions, those two characters really epitomize certain flaws that keep us from the person that we should be with. So the confession of love scene is a moment in love stories where one of the people confesses either directly to the other or to someone else and it gets back to the other person that they, that they're in love with them. That causes all kinds of dramatic, you know, stuff that to occur afterwards. Another obligatory scene is the first kiss scene. And sometimes the first kiss scene doesn't happen until after the story's over. Especially in, you know, the, the early romantic novels, there's no discussions of people kissing before they're even married. So those are implied. And usually those first kiss scenes are not so much literally about kissing as they are about the two people actually being alone and speaking frankly to one another. So there's moment, a moment of intimacy. It doesn't necessarily have to be a physical kiss, but it's a moment when the truth of one's feelings and the big reveal comes to light. So that.

Yeah, because I can think of movies that are both like what, you know, you're talking about where, like, it's set the past and where they didn't even touch or were barely alone. But there's also love stories that, you know, open up with them having like a one night stand and then it turns into this other thing. So it's not even. So the first kiss is not so much the action taken, but this. The significance of the action.

Yeah, exactly. And what you'll find. And the other thing that I would suggest to people who are considering writing a strict love story is to think about not setting it in contemporary life unless you're going to do a comedy. And the reason being that.

Contemporary life is very unromantic today. And when I say it's unromantic, what I'm saying is that the old sort of romantic notions about love are sneered at today. A lot of, you know, the sexual revolution of the 60s and the 70s, the tensions between the sexes, the male and the female, have gotten to a place where the old romantic notions of courtship and this magical moment when lightning strikes and two people see each other far away from a crowded room and they understand, oh my gosh, that's my partner. That's the One I'm supposed to be with for the rest of my life. Those notions are kind of archaic today, and a lot of people approach love and marriage as almost in a cynical, contractual way of sorts. And, you know, even people get married today, they always say, well, you know, things don't work out, no, we can always get divorced. So back in the romantic age, and I'm talking up until probably 1970 or so, before these barriers sort of started being attacked by contemporary society, these notions of, you know, there's only one love in the universe. For me, that is a romantic ideal that, you know, arose over the romantic period in the 1500s to 1956 or whatever, whereby we believe that there's only one true love for us. When we mate, we mate for life. When we become committed to one another, we become a better person. The union of us forces us to have a moral shift in our character from a moment in time before, you know, when we're sowing our wild oats to when we're a committed adult and we have a committed relationship. So today these notions are seem. They seem kind of cheesy. And the other elements of romantic love, and I'll get into this in the conventions, are rituals and courtship rights between two people. So back in the olden days, you know, there were very specific things that a man would do to let his intentions be known to the family of the woman that he wanted to marry. And he would write letters and he would send flowers and he would call at a certain time, and he would be very proactive about expressing his admiration for somebody. If you did that today, you would probably get a restraining order. Women are completely turned off by that aggressive sort of, nobody's writing poems that I know of to get the favor of another person. Instead, it's a lot of texting and a lot of app.

That's not what they're doing on Tinder. I thought that was.

I don't even want to know what that that's about. But it's not about romantic love. It's about probably releasing, you know, passion. So anyway, my suggestion is if you're going to do a straight courtship love story, this is why most romance novels are set in another era or they're set in an extraordinary circumstance like a war zone. There's a lot. There's a sub genre of romance now which features, you know, like Navy seals and guys who are in the military who have romantic relationships with. With people. Because there's. There's a life and death component to the storytelling. The ritual is not Sneered at in the way that it would be if it was just, you know, straight boy meets girl story. So I know I've gone off track here a little bit, but, you know, my suggestion is if you are going to write a strict love story, this is right. Nicholas Sparks, most of his love stories are set in, you know, quieter times. The Notebook was a romance from another era where it was discovered in an attic. So, anyway, back to the obligatory scene. So after the first kiss scene, another scene is. And this usually happens. And again, these obligatory scenes can all sort of be in one moment. So like the lovers breakup scene, another obligatory scene that could be combined with the confession of love scene, as I described in Pride and Prejudice, when Darcy says to Elizabeth, I can't get you out of my mind. I'm going to surrender to your charms, even though your family is a bunch of boorish losers. You know, I can't help myself. So, all right, I'll marry you. And Elizabeth's reaction is like, I don't want to marry you. You're a prideful jerk who insulted me the first time I met you. So they literally, the romantic relationship is severed and they break up in that very moment as the same moment as the confession of love. So these obligatory scenes can be mished and mashed together in a way. But you do have to deliver these moments to the reader. These are, you know, obligatory scenes and conventions. Just to take a step back, these aren't just made up things that I came up with. These are story traditions that have evolved over hundreds of years, especially in the love story, that are what people are requiring of the story to get satisfaction. So.

Well, and that's. I was going to ask, like, are they more obligatory moments than scenes? Because scenes almost make it sound like it has to have its own scene, like it gets its own set of 1500 words. Or is it just more like you have to hit these marks otherwise the story won't work?

That's a really good question, and I think you make a good point there, especially after just thinking about what I just said about the. The lovers kiss and the lovers breakup scene. They are moments. But the important thing to remember, and the reason why I call them scenes, is they have to be on the page, meaning the reader or the viewer has to witness these moments. So people oftentimes, writers will say, oh, I hit that obligatory scene. I had, you know, that. That character come in and explain what happened the previous Thursday when the two people kiss for the first time. And what I'm saying is that, no, no, no, no, no, no. That won't work because that is such an important moment in the love story that if you have another character report it happening, it doesn't count, and your reader will get mad.

So we're probably diving too deep. But I'm trying to. You know, these are. This is one of those things that feels like I know it and then I get into it and I don't know it. So, like, for instance, if there was a scene where the heroine of the story, her friend comes home and the heroines crying, and she's like, what happens? Like, we broke up and then tells the story, but we didn't actually get to see them break up. That's the problem.

Yes. Okay, now you could use that setup, but then you would have to do, you know, like Jane Austen often does, is here, read his letter, right? And then you. Then you read the letter that shows you in the moment. So you need. You need to hear from that character as opposed to somebody reporting, he sent me a letter and it was. And since then, we've broken up. So what I'm saying is that you can use that setup, but you have to either do a flashback, which doesn't necessarily. It seems forced. My recommendation is always try and keep. Always make it actively on stage so that we, as the reader or the experiencer of the story, experience the emotional moments.

In the same. At the same time that the characters do. Because if you're looking at characters, because what we do when we read or we watch a film is we are attach. We emotionally attach ourselves to the character, so the character literally becomes our doppelganger in the story.

So we. Once you. You make that connection with your reader, and your reader is attached to that character, you don't want to break that. You want them to continue to feel as if what's happening to the character is happening to them. So when somebody reports something that's happened to, you know, it just feels. It breaks the connection. Because if somebody reports that, oh, well, they broke up because she caught him cheating, and we don't see her actually catching him cheating, and you're attached to the protagonist of the story. It's no good. It feels like you robbed the reader of an emotional moment that they want from the story. The reason why we love love stories is we experience love through the story vicariously so we don't get hurt, but we get the emotional feeling of being hurt because we've attached to the character. So it's a way of separating ourselves from emotional distress through a story. So if you Ever are writing and you try and spare the reader that emotional distress, you're making a very large mistake.

I feel like the whole point of writing the story is to cause emotional distress.

Yes.

I mean you're, you're trying to get them involved emotionally in what you're doing.

Exactly. So reporting events as opposed to putting them on the page, you can report events that, for example, in your story, in the last, you know, the last time we talked about, there's a revelatory turning point. And I think around chapter four where one of the characters says, oh, you don't know you got 25 years to life in prison. Not, you know, that was your sentence. So that works because we don't need to see the scene where the judge says 25 years to life. Instead, what you chose to do was to use that information as ammunition to turn the scene from a positive to a negative in a way that was unique and organic. So that the character said to the other character to get her to see the truth. No, here's the truth. So that works. Reporting information to the character because we as the reader are attached to your, your protagonist, not the person who gave the information. I know we're getting deep.

Yeah.

I don't want to like take it off on my own thing. So we hit the lovers breakup scene. I think you had more left.

Yeah. Then there's the, the big moment. In every, every major genre, there is the big climactic scene that has to be in the scene and usually is the, the big thing that turns everything in the story and it's going to resolve all of the problems. And this is the scene in Love Story, it's called the proof of love scene. This is a moment when one of the lovers proves how much they dearly love the other by making a proof that is a self sacrifice.

So I'll just use Pride and prejudice again. Mr. Darcy, after he's rejected by Elizabeth, he kind of has to come to terms with the fact that this low rent girl in the country, he's this big guy who's got this huge estate in northern England, he's wealthy beyond all understanding of us. And this country girl has basically thrown him aside and said, no, you're not for me. You're prideful and terrible. So he has to come to the realization he's not going to win her back, but he still loves her. And so as he comes to this realization that, you know what? I still love her, and she was right, he changes his entire worldview from the beginning of this story until the End. And the person who does that for him is Elizabeth. And because he discovers that about her, he proves his love to her, knowing he's never going to get her. He doesn't think he's ever going to win her love, but he still loves her so much that he's willing to sacrifice, make a self sacrifice that will enable her to have happiness. I don't want to get into the full depth of the circumstances. What he does is he sacrifices part of his estate to this cad who, you know, runs away with one of her sisters, which would destroy the reputation of her family and thus ruin her chances of finding true love in a marriage. So he sacrifices part of his estate to make that go away so that she will be able to marry somebody else and be happy perfectly well, knowing that he's probably never going to end up with her. So that is a proof of love that changes everything in the story. It's the critical moment that Darcy becomes a different person.

And you say it fixes every like, every story has the like obligatory scene that fixes everything. What do you mean by fixes everything?

Well, it's, it's the moment that everybody who's reading the story or watching the story is waiting for. In the thriller. It's the, you know, the hero at the mercy of the villain scene. This is the moment. And John McClane and Die Hard is, you know, he's in trouble and there's no way he's gonna seem to get out of it. And he somehow gets out of it. And it's usually around the climactic moment of the third act. It's, it's often the payoff of the entire story, especially in the thriller. In the proof of love scene, it comes at, in Pride and Prejudice, it comes at probably the end of the middle build. So it kick starts the ending payoff of the story where Elizabeth and Darcy come together again at the very end. So the proof of love scene is the thing that will get us to the inevitable but surprising conclusion of our story. It's sort of the turning point of the global story in a love story that will get us to our resolution. Okay. If that makes sense. Okay, yeah, yeah.

No, it does.

Then lastly, we have the lovers reunite scene. And this is the moment when they come back together and say, you know what? I love you and let's get married. So it's the commitment scene when it's, it's the resolution of the courtship drama romance when the two people come together at the very end and declare their love for, for one another. It's usually, you know, the ending payoff. You know, after the proof of love scene, the. The one who has proved their love, you know, what they did is discovered by the other. They say, oh, my gosh, look what they've done for me. And then they fall in love with them. So the lovers reunite is usually the resolution of the global story. And, you know, even in the marriage drama, like a Kramer vs Kramer, the lovers reunite story is at the very end of the movie when Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep come together and they don't get back together, but they do reunite emotionally. They're more intimate now than they were when they were married. So even though they don't get back together, it's a marriage drama that ends in a happy way. Because now Mr. Kramer, played by Dustin Hoffman, understands his wife, his ex wife. He understands that she does not, you know, want to be married to him anymore, and he loves her for that anyway. But they come together at the end and reunite for the benefit of their son. And she makes a sacrifice saying, you know what? Our son is now home with you. His home is with you, Mr. Kramer. And I'll be the one who comes to visit, because to break you, what the two of you have together is too good for me to get in between at this point. So even in the marriage drama that ends in a sad way, ironically, there's a. There's a sadness and a happiness at the end. That's dramatic irony. Where isn't it ironic that these two people can't come back together even though they both love their son so much? And that's what makes it so upsetting at the very end of the story, we're happy that Dustin Huffman and his son are going to be together again, but we're also sad that that family is never coming together again. And that's a marriage drama. Okay, so those are the obligatory scenes or moments, as you. You suggested. We refer to them, which I think is a valid thing. They don't necessarily have to be full scenes. They can be meshed together. But the very important point that I'm trying to make about them is that you need to put these on the page. We need to witness the scene. We need to see these moments. So with those major turning points of scenes and moments, there are also a lot of conventions of love stories, meaning these are sort of characteristics of the love story that we all come to appreciate and observe and want. When we go see a romantic comedy or we read a romance novel or read a love story and you know, a lot of these things, again, are. If I. When I say them, you're going to say, yeah, of course. Duh. You know, if I read a couple of these love stories, I'd be able to pick them out. But you would be surprised when you're cranking out your work and you don't have a checklist of the things that you know need to be in there. Oftentimes you're going to admit something and, you know, your reader or an editor at a publishing house reads the book and says, hey, it was good, but there was something about it that I just, you know, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief. And usually that means you've left out one of these conventions or one of those obligatory moments or scenes that, you know is destroying your story. So it's a good idea. Go ahead.

What's the difference between a convention and an obligatory scene?

Well, a convention is more like, for example, it relates to cast, meaning people. Like, for example, I'll just give you the first convention of a love story. You have to have a third party rival, right? So there has to be somebody else in the mix who is trying to get the attentions of one or more of the lovers in the story. So if you just have these two people who meet and there's no other alternative for either one of them to marry in a courtship drama, it's boring. You've got to have a triangle of relationship where there's another quarter, another person who is interested.

Well, in Kramer vs. Kramer, would the third party just be his job?

Yes.

Okay, so it doesn't have to be a person.

Well, now it wouldn't really be his job. That would be more of a societal pressure on him that he has to overcome. It's, you know, it's a force that's in his control. And that's another convention. There has to be forces that are pushing the lovers apart, that are in the control of the two parties, the two people who are trying to come together. And one of the forces in Kramer's control. Mr. Kramer's control is his job. And the wife says to Kramer, in no uncertain terms, your job is causing a rift in our marriage, and you've got to do something about it. And he says, no, I don't. I'm going to become a big advertising executive. So that's not really a rival. That's a force from society that pushes on one of the people that's in his control. He can change his job, but he chooses not to out of selfishness. Now, a rival in Kramer vs Kramer is the man whose third party who was mentioned after Meryl Streep comes back and she's seeing other people. And that drives Dustin Hoffman crazy. And there's a scene in a coffee shop where they're both having a glass of wine, and Dustin Hoffman goes in thinking his wife has come back to him. So he's there and he's pretty confident, like, yeah, yeah, the old lady's coming back to me. Yeah, things are going to be okay. You know, I just nipped it at the bud. Things are going to be okay now. And instead she says, oh, no, no, no. I've been seeing other people and I'm starting to feel better about myself. And he's like, what? And he actually, at the end of the scene, and this is a famous moment because he didn't tell Meryl Streep he was going to do this. He slaps the glass of wine and it hits the wall and crashes. And wine just. And glass just go all over Meryl Streep. And it's that moment when the rival comes into the equation. And the rival is the other men that Meryl Streep is interested in. She no longer wants to be his wife. And that rivalry is that. That is the moment when they made the scene when the screenwriter decided, you know what? We need a moment when a rival is in here. Because if we don't have that rival moment, the marriage drama isn't going to work. Now, Kramer vs Kramer is also a love story between a man. It's not a technical love story because I always talk about the love stories that we're talking about are the prospect of sexual intimacy. There's a love. A communal father, son love story that's really the hardcore driver of the middle build of this movie. But the marriage drama is the inciting incident and the ending payoff. If you've seen the movie, you'll know what I'm talking about. The inciting incident is the wife leaves the husband and she doesn't take the son. The middle build is, how is this man going to, you know, react to this? Is, is he going to let his marriage drama destroy his relationship with his son? Is he going to farm out his son to a bunch of nannies? Or is he going to change himself and understand himself more by forming a bond with his son? But the ending payoff is the marriage drama again. Will they come back together again? And the moment when they meet in that. That wine shop and they're having the glass of wine is when the rival, the convention of the rival is introduced that sets Dustin. It's a revelatory moment. It's a revelatory turning point. In the scene when she offhandedly says that she's been seeing people, when she says that, the rival emerges and it flips him out. And that forces the action of him who's excited to be in there. At the beginning, there's nothing worse than going into a meeting thinking it's going one way. And oh my gosh, has this happened to me before? You think it's going one way and when it turns, it's like somebody stuck a hand into your gut and just started ripping things out.

And when you see, when you see.

I love that picture.

Yeah. When you see that reaction of Dustin Hoffman. Every person who's ever been in that moment when they discover that the, you know, they lose the person that they care about and it's just. It rips your heart out. Anyway, so that's the rival. So the job is not a rival. The job is a societal force.

Okay, so that's the first convention you have to have a rival. A third party that comes in between. And in romantic comedies, these are always the great, you know, nerdy guy who's, you know, he's the right choice for the wild lady, you know, the really straight laced guy who's gonna make her, you know, comfortable. And then there's the wild man that she can't help but love or, you know, vice versa. It's the man who's the nerd who falls in love with the crazy woman. But the other woman is, you know, the right call. There's a great movie with Charles Grodin and it called the Heartbreak Kid, which is one of the funniest movies ever. And it's the story of this guy who goes on this honeymoon with his wife. He marries the woman that he's supposed to marry. And then he's this nice Jewish guy in New York City. He goes to Miami beach for his honeymoon. And who does he meet there in the. On his honeymoon but Cybill Shepherd. You know, when Cybill shepherd was 20x years old and he falls for the blonde shiksa, you know, and it's just hilarious movie. Anyway, I highly recommend it. It's a great example of romantic comedy and Charles Grodin is just genius in it. Okay, so after the rival, then we also have to have a couple of other role players. You have your helpers, the people who are in favor of the relationship and your harmers, the people who want to destroy the relationship. You know, In Pride and Prejudice, the helpers are people like Jane, who is Elizabeth's, you know, best friend and an older sister. And then the harmers are people like Ms. Bingley, who is a rival for the affection of Darcy. And also the other people in sort of their social circle who think this country girl, whose family are a bunch of, you know, crazy people, should never, ever be in our society. So those are two other roles you need. You need to have helpers who are for the relationship and harmers who will do anything to stop it. So those are the two, you know, camps this all goes to Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeare, the Capulets and the Montagues. You have these two families who are big rivals, and then you have people who are helpers and harmers within the story. Another convention is to raise the stakes of the. Of the love story. There needs to be some sort of external need introduced. And what I mean by that, in Pride and Prejudice, it's a very, very important external need, and it's introduced very early on. The Bennet family has five daughters. There's Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet. Mr. Bennet is a gentleman. He lives in the country. And he married a woman because he found her beautiful. And she turned out to be a little bit silly after he was married. But he's made a commitment to her. He doesn't have much respect for her, but he's a gentleman and his estate will go to a cousin and not to any of his daughters. So his daughters must marry well or they're gonna. After Mr. Bennet dies, they're all going to be thrown out of their house. So the external need for all these Bennet sisters is they better get married and they better get married well or they're going to end up homeless or at the mercy of this strange cousin who lives elsewhere who gets the whole loot of the entire Estate once Mr. Bennet dies. So over. Over all of the proceedings in the story is this external need from the sisters needing to get married. And the mother is crazy about them getting married. That's all she focuses on. And she's just crazy, you know, running around trying to get them all hooked up, and she makes a fool of herself. And all the things that she does to get her daughters married, you know, have the opposite effect. So she thinks she's helping, but she's really harming. So she thinks she's a helper, but the reader knows she's a harmer. So again, the external need in a love story. There was also a recent movie with Sandra Bullock in it, and I think it was called the Proposal, and it was a romantic comedy. And it turned on the idea that she had to get married or she would be kicked out of the country. She was Canadian or something, and she had to marry an American citizen. So she makes her assistant marry her and things ensue from there.

It's a pretty non innovative.

Hook, but it works because you have Sandra Bullock and she's fantastic.

So the external need is that.

I mean, does that usually come pretty early on as far as.

Is that all?

Often the inciting incident of the book of, like the, you know, this is what kicks things off, is if somebody doesn't, you know, hook up soon, something bad's gonna happen.

Well, it can. It can take as large a role in the storytelling as you'd like. It can be the major external force that gets the entire story going as the inciting incident. Like if you don't get married by X. There's also another great romantic comedy called A New Leaf, which starred Elaine May and I Forget the man, but it was the story of this sort of loser, ish rich guy who's running out of money and he has to marry this. This woman in order to maintain his lifestyle. And she's sort of like a nebbishy loser, but he marries her anyway. And then, of course, you know, once they get married, they fall in love and he discovers how wonderful she is. So you can use the external need as a means to get the characters together. But in Pride and Prejudice, what's wonderful about it is that the only person who really, I mean, everybody in the story understands the external need that these sisters must get married. But Elizabeth, who plays the major protagonist in Pride and Prejudice, she tries to put it out of her mind. And she doesn't want to give in to the external need. And so what she does is overcompensate by insisting on finding a partner that has crazy, you know, crazy amount of qualities that she would find, you know, attractive. That's her prejudice. She's prejudiced against anybody who has any flaws. And she's very quick to point out the flaws in people so that she's almost sort of, you know, preconceivably causing her own destruction through her prejudice. You know, so Darcy is prideful and she is the prejudice. So that's why we have Pride and Prejudice. They both come together and they fall in love, which is genius. But the external need can be as monumental or as secondary as you wish. Usually in a romantic comedy, they try and, you know, ratchet up the external need to give a level of stakes. You know, if they don't get together, the worst is going to happen. It's a way of using the convention to propel the stakes of your storytelling, to make people more invested in the story. So I always recommend.

Think about an external need that could be really compelling and innovative that can keep people interested in the storytelling. Which brings up two other things. One is something I've already mentioned, which is forces that are in the control of the characters, which are, you know, pushing the two people apart. And in the case of Kramer versus Kramer, it's societal pressure to become a big shot advertising executive that's bearing down on Dustin Hoffman. Now that's a force that's in his control. Nobody says that he can't take a lesser job or do something that is not as high powered, still be a man. He's in control of that force and he's feeding that force. But there's also forces that are out of their control that come between. And just to use Kramer versus Kramer again, there's a moment in the story when the little boy falls off a jungle gym and he gets a very deep cut on his eyelid. And it's just this horrific moment where Dustin Hoffman has to run across the park, get him into an emergency room. The boy's screaming and it's terrible. And they sew up, you know, his eye, and he's gonna be okay. But later on, that moment is brought up in a court of law saying that he's a negligent parent because the boy fell. Now that's a force that's out of Dustin Hoffman's control. The fact that the boy fell off a jungle gym is an accident. There's nothing that he could have done to stop that. So that is another example of a force out of control that conspires to push the two lovers apart. And so Meryl Streep and her attorney use that information to push their family apart so that she can get full custody of the son. And Dustin Hoffman will lose his custody.

So those are two forces that push the characters apart. One is forced out of their control, and one is forced in their control. Okay, now the next convention. Are secrets. There have to be secrets held, you know, throughout the story. And it's a great way of thinking about how am I going to get some really cool secrets in this story. Now, there's. There's four different kinds of secrets. There's the secrets that society keeps from the lovers. Meaning I'm trying to think of a good example of when society has a secret that the lovers don't know about.

Like. Like something where once you're married, this awful thing happens or.

I'm trying to.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of one too.

Well, there have been some love stories that feature, you know, this is a kind of a movie of the week idea, but there have been some stories where people have fallen in love who discover later on that they share some genetic material together, meaning that they are related. And so a societal secret that they don't know is that they cannot come together because society will shun them for being first cousins and marrying. That's usually a movie of the week convention. Where will they or won't they? You know, and so that's one example, if you think of it sort of. There's societal legal pressures that, for example, in the really dark ages of the United States, there are miscegenation laws that kept black people and white people from marrying one another or even, you know, getting together. And they would literally be thrown in jail if they were ever caught, you know, courting one another. So the miscegenation laws would be a societal secret that keeps the two lovers from. Well, it actually wouldn't be a secret. That would be more of a force out of their control. You know, I'll have to come back to that one, but that's an important one to remember. Now, another thing would. A couple keeps a secret from. From society. That's an example where after Darcy and Elizabeth, you know, come together and they. They share a lot of intimacy together and they understand each other. They don't tell anybody about that. They. She doesn't share this information with Jane because she doesn't want Jane to know about other things. So there's these secrets that go on top and on top of one another. Elizabeth doesn't know that Darcy proved his love by bailing out her family. She has to learn that through her, her sister and her aunt. So Darcy keeps a secret from Elizabeth. That's another one where they keep secrets from one another. Darcy doesn't want Elizabeth to know that he did this act of love because he doesn't want her to falsely fall in love with him just because he did a good action for her. He doesn't want her to feel indebted to him. So he keeps the fact that he. He saved her family's honor secret from her. But once she discovers it from third parties and she understands that he wanted that to be a secret from her, she falls in love with him all the more so that's another example where the lovers keep a secret from one another. Another one is a secret that they keep from themselves. And this is usually the, the flaw that's holding them back from being able to form an intimate relationship with committed relationship with somebody else. In Darcy's case, this is his pride. His pride is keeping him from being able to recognize beauty and love in another person. So Darcy's big thing is he's from a really hoity toity family. And his friend rents this house in the country. He goes to the country with his friend to hang out and this woman and her family come over for a party and the family acts like a bunch of idiots. You know, they're running around and they're saying things that are ridiculous. And he just thinks that there's no way that he should have to withstand these terrible people. And his pride in his status and his stature in life is keeping him from seeing the beauty of Elizabeth. Now, Elizabeth problem, the secret that she's keeping and hiding from herself is that she's prejudiced. She finds the rich people to be so ridiculous that she will do anything not to see their merits. So she, she refuses to see the good parts of Darcy because he's so prideful. And anybody who is from a higher station in life, she looks down upon and she refuses to see the inanity of her own family. And until she can recognize that her family's pretty foolish and they're country bumpkins, she is not going to be able to understand Darcy's world. So these are the two things, these secrets that the lovers are keeping from themselves that they must arc in the story and overcome before they are capable of a commitment. So this is why secrets are so important in a love story. Because lies and recognizing the truth is a really major part of forming a committed relationship. Now, there are only two more. One is it just makes absolute sense. Are rituals and what rituals are these sort of things that, you know, we share with the people that we love. So I can say something to my wife from 30 years ago about some restaurant that we were in and she will immediately, you know, know what I'm talking about. These are rituals and traditions that we both share. It's sort of like people who throw salt over their shoulder after they drop something at a dinner table. But there's shared intimacies that only the two lovers are aware of. So for Darcy and Elizabeth, the things that they do is they're very, very good at poking fun at one another. So they speak to one another in a way that other people would find offensive, but they enjoy it. It's sort of their repartee where she's constantly needling him and he needles back. And they're very smart people, so they really enjoy the repartee that each one of them gives to one another. But they wouldn't do that ritual kind of talking to other people. So it's only when they're talking together and they share these sort of things together. And the last convention is that there has to be a moral weight to the story.

The characters have to change for the better. So in many ways, these are love stories in the courtship drama and in the marriage drama are all about the two characters becoming morally better. They're education plots where their, their moral sensibility shifts from a negative place to a positive place. So for example, in, you know, Pride and Prejudice, we have Elizabeth moving from being prejudice against certain people to understanding certain people and withholding judgments. And Darcy moves from being very prideful to being very open minded and cordial and less so, you know, sure of himself and his station in life. So morally, there has to be moral arc from a negative place to a positive place. And even, you know, hilarious movies like There's Something About Mary. The lead character is obsessively attached to Mary and by the end of the movie, he has to have a moral, you know, rise for him to have an actual relationship with her. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's going on in love stories.

But when they're done well, they're so commercially appealing to us that we can't resist them. And combined with other genres, they can become just monster smashes. So anyway, that is my global overview of Love Story that really shows just how important this is for, you know, global storytelling. If you can master the love story, you are going to learn craft that can be applied to any other of the major genres themselves.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Story Grid podcast. Now, I mentioned at the beginning of this episode that there was something cool I wanted to announce. So Sean has been getting a ton of requests to do a live in person story grid with workshop. So he has decided that he's going to do one. We're planning this for February. It's going to be three days of Shawn walking you through specifically how to use storygrid to write and edit your own work. I'm excited to be a part of this. I'm excited to learn from him. And if this is something that you think you would like to be a part of too, we'd like to hear from you. So we've decided this isn't going to be something that you can just go to the website and buy. We want to make sure that the right people come. We want to make sure that we build something and invite the right people that will actually get the most out of it and really help them in their writing career. And so we've decided to put up a little application where you can tell us a little bit about you as a writer and then we'll follow up with you to talk about the best ways for you to be a part of the workshop. So if you are interested in being a part of a Story Grid workshop where Shawn is going to teach you live in person for three days, you can go and fill out the application. It is at storygrid.com workshop that will help us have a little bit more information about you so we can follow up and make sure that it's a good fit for you. Now, I will tell you that we're going to keep the attendance to only 35 people, so there's only going to be 35 slots for this thing. So if you're interested, I highly recommend you go as soon as possible to storygrid.comworkshop and make sure you let us know that you're interested in being part of it. So I'm really excited that Sean has decided to do this workshop. I can't wait to be a part of it myself and learn from him as well in person for three days instead of just an hour every week. So hopefully this is something you're excited about too. So make sure you go to storygrid.com workshop and fill out the application so we can follow up with you. And as always, for everything StoryGrid related, check out storygrid.com make sure you pick up a copy of the book. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss anything happening in the StoryGrid universe. If you'd like to check out the show notes for this episode or any past episodes, all of that can be found@storygrid.com podcast. If you would like to reach out to us, you can find us on Twitter StoryGrid. And lastly, if you would like to support the show, you can do that by telling another author about the show and by visiting us on itunes and leaving a rating and review. Thanks for subscribing and being a part of our work here at StoryGrid. We will see you next week.