Authors: Ronald B Tobias
But understand that there's a big difference between creating sentiment and creating sentimentality. Both have their place. Romance novels depend on sentimentality; a love story that tries to be unique depends on sentiment.
What is the difference?
The difference has to do with honest emotion vs. prepackaged emotion. A sincere work —a work of sentiment —generates its own power; a sentimental work borrows feelings from stock. Rather than create characters or events that generate unique feelings, the sentimentalist merely relies on stock characters and events that already have their emotions built in.
Edgar Guest is a good example. At one time, Guest was one of America's most popular poets (proving that there's a big market for sentimentality). His poem "Sue's Got a Baby" isn't exactly a monument to American literature, but it's a first-rate example of sentimentality. The topic of love, in this case, is about motherhood.
Sue's got a baby now, an' she Is like her mother used to be; Her face seems prettier, an' her ways More settled like. In these few days She's changed completely, an' her smile Has taken on the mother-style. Her voice is sweeter, an' her words Are clear as is the song of birds. She still is Sue, but not the same— She's different since the baby came.
Sentimentality is subject-ive, meaning you write about the
subject
of love rather than create a story in which the unique relationship between writer and subject evokes genuine sentiment. Take a look at Guest's poem and you'll see what I mean.
"Sue's got a baby now..." All right, we have a tiny bit of context. We don't know anything about Sue (who she is, where she lives, how she feels about the whole thing) but we know she's just given birth (we assume) to a baby.
Because we know so little about Sue and her circumstances, we must reach our own conclusions about how she feels.
So we draw on our own feelings. Motherhood is a good thing, therefore Sue must be happy, right?
"... an' she / Is like her mother used to be;" What exactly does that mean? There's no way to tell, because the author is so vague that we can only guess. Again, based our own experience and
the subject of motherhood,
we assume that her mother was as happy about having Sue as Sue is about having her own baby. Right?
"Her face seems prettier, an' her ways / More settled-like." Her face seems prettier than
what
? And I still have no idea what "more settled-like" is supposed to mean. Did Sue used to run around with bikers?
What sentimentality does is rely on the reader's experience rather than the fictional experience created by the writer.
You
fill in the blanks.
You
remember what it's like. The reader, not the writer, does the work. If you go through the poem line by line, you'll see that Guest never says anything specific about being a mother. He just piles cliche upon cliche and lets you bask in your memories of what it's like. There is no real character and no real situation in the poem.
Sentiment comes out of context. With sentiment, you have the portrayal of real people and real situations. That makes sentiment object-ive, because it relates to objects (people, places and things) rather than generalized emotions. If you're going to write about love, think about whether you want to be sentimental (which has its place in certain types of writing, such as melodramas and romances) or if you want to go for the real thing and create a world that has its own feelings and doesn't rely on the reader's.
Stephen Spender wrote a short poem called "To My Daughter," in which he writes about a walk he takes with his little girl. It's a simple poem (five lines), but it packs a lot of feeling. His little girl is grasping his finger with her hand, and the speaker knows that even though they are walking together at this moment, he will someday lose his daughter. So he holds the moment dearly. The personna of the poem realizes that he will always remember how his daughter's hand clasps his finger. Her tiny hand is like a "ring" around his finger. The ring becomes a metaphor for the emotional bond between father and daughter.
Can you tell the difference between the two poems? Spender works with two people we can see
and feel.
We see the two of them walk down the road, and we understand the feeling the man has for his daughter, both having her and yet losing her. The ring (the object) is a metaphor, rather like a wedding ring between father and daughter. Spender's poem goes much deeper in five lines than Guest's does in all ten. Guest relies on the feelings I already have toward motherhood and taps into that reservoir. Spender creates a moment and feeling in time.
We never feel so alive as when we are emotionally aroused. It's not easy to accomplish that in writing, but when we take a short-cut by faking those emotions—by building them up into more than what they are—we're guilty of sentimentality. Sentimentality is the result of exaggerating any emotion beyond what the context of the moment can express.
I don't want to sound overly critical of sentimentality, because it definitely has its place. Most of us like a good sentimental book
or
movie now and then. The point is to know the difference between sentiment and sentimental, and to know when to use one and not the other. If you're trying to write standard formula romance, sentimentality (to some degree, anyway) is expected of you. If you're trying to be sincere and authentic as a writer, you need to develop feelings that are in line with the action, and avoid exaggerating them. In other words, don't just talk about love, show it!
I LOVE YOU SO MUCH I HATE YOUR GUTS
Since most of us spend much of our lives searching for and fantasizing about love, we forget love has two sides: the up side (falling in love) and the down side (falling out of love).
For every thousand stories about falling in love, there may be one story about falling out of the love. For obvious reasons, it's not a real popular theme in love stories. Yet it's produced some incredibly dramatic works. I suppose the optimist thinks about the possibilities that lie ahead, whereas the pessimist broods on the realities that lie behind. That's not to say that princes and princesses can't live happily forever after. They do—sometimes.
Falling out of love is about people, too. It's about the end rather than the beginning of a relationship. The success of your story depends on an understanding of who your characters are and what has happened to them. By the end of your story, the situation is driven to crisis, which results in some kind of resolution: resignation to perpetual warfare, divorce and death being the most common resolutions.
I can give you three stunning (and depressing) examples to read and study. The first is August Strindberg's
The Dance of Death,
which is about a love-hate relationship between husband and wife. Alice is a virtual prisoner of her tyrannical husband of twenty-five years, Edgar. As the play opens, Edgar is gravely ill, and yet he continues to try to dominate his wife. They battle it out to the death.
So do George and Martha in Edward Albee's
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(which has its roots in Strindberg's play). And finally, on a more psychological level, Georges Simenon's
The Cat
(also made into a film starring Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret).
In
The Cat,
Emile and Marguerite have reached the point of mutual hate at the beginning of the novel. They share nothing else — they don't eat, sleep or even talk together. With consummate skill, Simenon relates the circumstances that led first to their union and, gradually, to its bizarre devastation.
The emotional focus of these works isn't love so much as it's love/hate. This is the stormy side of love, but it's still every bit as much a part of reality as its sunny side.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE LOVE PLOT
In the other plots, I set out what were the commonly used plot phases. But in this plot, major sets of phases depend on the nature of the plot you intend to use. You must adapt accordingly.
The exception is the plot about two lovers who find each other in the beginning and then are separated by circumstances. In that case the three dramatic phases are:
1) Lovers found.
The two main characters are presented and their love relationship begins. The first phase deals primarily with establishing that relationship. By the end of the first phase they are deeply in love and are committed either by marriage, "troth," or some symbol of connection. Close to the end of the first phase, however, something happens to separate the lovers (as in the case of Eurydice's death). This may come from an antagonist who does something to deny the lovers each other. (She is kidnapped. His parents make him move to Cincinnati with them. Her ex-husband doesn't like the fact that she's taken up with another man.) Or the lovers may be separated as the result of circumstances, or Fate. (He must go off and fight in a war. She gets brain cancer. He has a skiing accident and is crippled.) However it happens, the first phase usually ends with the lovers' separation.
2)
Lovers split.
In the second dramatic phase, at least one of the separated lovers makes an attempt to find/rescue/reunite with the other lover. Usually the focus is on one of the lovers who must put forth all the effort while the other either waits patiently to be rescued or actively resists those efforts. For example, Jack has been crippled in a skiing accident. The doctors say he will never walk again. Jack is depressed; he tells Jacqueline he wants to get a divorce so she can find a "real man" (you know the speech). Jacqueline is too much in love with Jack to leave him or to let him drown in his own self-pity, so she fights the battle for him until he comes around and fights the battle for himself.
But the path to salvation is never clear. There are always setbacks. These setbacks are the guts of the second dramatic phase. One step forward, two steps back. The protagonist, the active lover, may have to fight a battle with the antagonist (if there is one), and for the short term, the protagonist only wins minor victories.
3)
Lovers reunited.
By the third dramatic phase, the active lover has found a way to overcome all the obstacles of the second dramatic phase. As is often the case with most plots, the obvious rarely succeeds. Opportunity presents itself to the diligent, and the active lover finally finds an opening that allows her either to overcome the antagonist or the preventative force (illness, injury, etc.). The final effect for all this is the reunion of the lovers and a resumption of the emotional intensity of the first phase.
The love, now tested, is greater, and the bonds have grown stronger.
CHECKLIST
As you write, keep in mind the following points:
1. The prospect of love should always be met with a major obstacle. Your characters may want it, but they can't have it for any variety of reasons. At least not right away.
2. The lovers are usually ill-suited in some way. They may come from different social classes (beauty queen/nerd; Montague and Capulet) or they may be physically unequal (one is blind or handicapped).
3. The first attempt to solve the obstacle is almost always thwarted. Success doesn't come easily. Love must be proven by dedication and stick-to-it-iveness.
4. As one observer once put it, love usually consists of one person offering the kiss and the other offering the cheek, meaning one lover is more aggressive in seeking love than the other. The aggressive partner is the seeker, who completes the majority of the action. The passive partner (who may want love just as much) still waits for the aggressive partner to overcome the obstacles. Either role can be played by either sex.
5. Love stories don't need to have happy endings. If you try to force a happy ending on a love story that clearly doesn't deserve one, your audience will refuse it. True, Hollywood prefers happy endings, but some of the world's best love stories
(Anna Kare-nina, Madame Bovary, Heloise and Abelard
) are very sad.
6. Concentrate on your main characters to make them appealing and convincing. Avoid the stereotypical lovers. Make your characters and their circumstances unique and interesting. Love is one of the hardest subjects to write about because it's been written about so often, but that doesn't mean it can't be done well. You will have to feel deeply for your characters, though. If you don't, neither will your readers.
7. Emotion is an important element in writing about love. Not only should you be convincing, but you should develop the full range of feelings: fear, loathing, attraction, disappointment, reunion, consummation, etc. Love has many feelings associated with it and you should be prepared to develop them according to the needs of your plot.
8. Understand the role of sentiment and sentimentality in your writing and decide which is better for your story. If you're writing a formula romance, you may want to use the tricks of sentimentality. If you're trying to write a one-of-a-kind love story, you will want to avoid sentimentality and rely on true sentiment in your character's feelings.
9. Take your lovers through the full ordeal of love. Make sure they are tested (individually and collectively) and that they finally deserve the love they seek. Love is earned; it is not a gift. Love untested is not true love.