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Alright, romance.
Uhhhvuvuvuv . . .
Romance is what . . .
What different readers want regarding this going to differ wildly depending on the genre and subgenere you're writing.
I think the best thing I learned for making a romance realistic was what I learned about making characters realistic
I keep coming back to that concept, but when a character is there just for a romance to occur, the romance felt, um . . .
unengaging, because it's a character falling in love with a cardboard cutout
and so (bell rings)
Boy, what can I say about romance?
Oh, yeah?
Student: Here's a question
Brandon: Oh okay. I hope you're going to take over and teach us.
[Students laugh]
Student: I know nothing about it, but . . .
Brandon: I've got Dave's lesson on it and I'll teach that one after this. He does a good job with it.
Student: What's the difference between a childish romance, versus let's say an adult romance, do you really need to make that much of a difference when you're writing?
Brandon: Oh that's actually a good question because it's something I've thought about quite a bit.
Certainly there's going to be a big difference between a middle grade romance and a teen YA romance.
Middle grade is the kids are usually just beyond "Girls are yucky" or "boys are yucky".
And they giggle but they don't profess true love.
And I think that one's actually easier for you to distinguish than the teen romance which is . . .
Here's the thing. How realistic do you want your romance to be? That's question number one.
Okay? How realistic do you want your romance to be?
That's a little like how realistic do you want your fight sequences to be. It's kind of a loaded question.
My fight sequences are wildly unrealistic because they're taking place in a fantsy world and we're doing fantastical things with them.
Even if you pull out the fantasy, I tend to arrange the situations in such a way that they would be somewhat unrealistic.
I do more Hollywood style fighting than I do tough-and-gritty fighting.
And I probably should have talked about this in the fight sequences thing.
Tough and gritty fighting, the real nature of fighting is: you take a wound and you don't fight anymore. That's the end.
Two people, one person can almost never beat two people.
If there's two of them and one of you, you lose. That's how fighting is in the real world if they're all trained.
The only way to get around that is the sort of intimidation factor, which is the berzerker factor. If you go watch people fight online, you can see little videos
There's this one that I saw of this guy who just goes crazy, rips of his shirt and takes down four guys, but what he does doing it is
he shoves this one, he knocks this one away, he goes crazy on this one, and the other stands back going HOLY COW HE'S GONE CRAZY
[Students laugh]
That's the way you beat a group in real life. In real life, if two people come at you with swords and shields and you have a sword and shield
and nobody around you, you're dead. We don't like to talk about this, but it's true. I mean yes, you could probably beat those two guys once in a while, but
those sorts of situations . . . two on one is not very fair. We've got some martial artists in here, right?
What am I saying wrong about this? It's really hard to fight two-on-one, isn't it?
Student: Well notice that even in Hollywood movies, I mean, the hero's surrounded by a group of guys, they all come at him one at a time. [Students laugh]
The others stand around and wait.
Brandon: Here's another fact of real fighting for you, getting the guy on the ground is the best way to win in an unarmed fight.
You don't want to kick him and punch him except for once, get him on the ground and put him in a headlock.
That's how you win. Preferably while pounding him in the face while you've got him in a headlock. [Students laugh]
Don't laugh, that's what you do. You really want to beat somebody, you kick them really hard, or you rush at them really hard and knock them off balance and down
You get them on the ground, you put them in a hold, and you beat them senseless.
That's how you win.
You can't do that in a group, because notice when you're doing that, what happens with their friend?
Students: They're jumping on you.
Brandon: They're jumping on your back and you lose.
Real battles with a sword and shield did not take place with the, "test" and the "circling" and the things and the exchange,
They went like this:
[Students laugh]
Brandon: No, really! You put your shield up and you hit over the other guy's shield or to the side of it until one of you dies.
Or gets hit, and that means you die. And it's over like that.
That's a battle.
A one-on-one. Now, in real warfare, they're putting you in ranks and formations
So that sort of thing doesn't happen. You're here, stabbing, with a line of a bunch of guys stabbing at a bunch of guys coming at you stabbing.
And you're hoping to break their formation so you can do the stuff I just talked about to them.
And that's real war, so it depends on how realistic you want to make it.
Student: Are you talking more about fantasy warfare?
Brandon: I'm talking about medieval warfare. Modern warfare is a completely different beast.
Question, comment?
Student: I was also going to say if you've ever watched Olympic fencing, it's over in like one second.
Brandon: Yeah.
Student: Whoever goes first, really.
Brandon: Yup. That's realism. So going back to the romance, how realistic do you want your romance?
Do you want to allow it to be Hollywoodified a little bit?
And there's really nothing wrong with that, it's a trope we all buy into, just like we buy into the fact that we can have extended duels commonly
And that once person can take on three--granted it helps with suspension of disbelief when you give them magical powers and you make the fight sequences
feel realistic as they would be if these magical powers happened, you know, are cleverly designed to make the battles work more like they would in a Hollywood show
Student: I think that's something he was talking about video games earlier, we came up with this idea of hitpoints
as long as you don't go to zero you're fine
Brandon: Right, right!
Student: But you said like one hit and they're basically done, so how much damage can we do to our characters believably before they should lose?
Brandon: What type of story are you telling?
Bruce Willis in Die Hard. [Students laugh] That guy should have been dead long ago, but the story works because he is just so tough.
He's not.
Realistically, you take a wound in your arm and you're out of fighting for what, six months?
You don't fight again for six months.
You take a wound in the side, you don't fight again for six months.
Or maybe longer. You're down, that's it.
You take a wound in the leg and you can't march. You are not on the battlefield. That's what happened in these . . . you had lots of people cycling off
the battlefield and on the battlefield, as well as another thing we missed in talking about warfare
There were long, extended campaigns and a lot of warfare is about not actually fighting.
A lot of warfare is about intimidating the other people, getting into position to fight, and then having the quick clash, and seizing a little bit of ground
Or losing a bit of ground, or attacking a supply line, very rarely do they actually have the BIG battles--they did still happen--
That were just like everyone runs at each other and at the end of the day we count who is alive the most.
Most armies will break after ten percent casualties.
You see ten percent of your friends fall in this rank, and holding that rank gets really hard because it's breaking apart.
And when the rank breaks, you know that you're dead.
And so, you break first and run, and that's what armies were about was making sure you didn't break first and run.
And both sides would be taking a bunch of losses, and both sides, no one was winning, both sides were losing, one just broke first.
That's very frequently what would happen. So if you want to write sequences like this, don't listen to me because I've learned to fake it
I fake it well enough and then I give it to experts who tell me what I'm doing right and wrong.
Go research it for yourself, because it'll be things I've said today that are true in some cases but not true in a lot of other cases.
And you'll just have to know it.
Let's do talk about, really, the romance though.
How realistic do you want your romance to be? A lot of people who are reading for a romantic subplot are not looking for a realistic romance.
That's perfectly fine. I don't know your scale of how unrealistic the romance is going to be is going to vary depending
on what type of story you want to write. I try to keep a little more on the realistic side, but I'm sure there are people who do it much more realistic than me who say
"This is complete fantasy, Brandon."
But let's look at Twilight as an example.
[Students laugh]
Twilight is an example of a very realistic teenage romance. This is how teenagers really do approach romance.
Everything is the MOST PASSIONATE that has ever existed in the history of mankind. They are very . . .
She wrote Bella like a real teenager. And then, the tone of the story was that this actually true love.
And that's where it becomes a fantasy. [Students snicker]
I'm not saying this to snicker! This is what is intentionally done in this type of story, and it's perfectly alright.
It's the type of story that's being told.
They're making the . . .
Like I'm taking the idealized sense of combat and making it the reality in my book, they're taking the idealized love at first sight
eternal soul mates, made for each other, that see each other, are passionately, ravenously in love with each other
like teenagers, and making that a real basis for a solid relationship.
And that is one of the big tropes of the romance genre is doing that.
So that's question number one.
It goes back to your question of what distinguishes a teen romance? Well teenagers tend to think they're . . . it's Romeo and Juliet.
Where if Romeo and Juliet had lived, they would have broken up in three or four weeks.
That's what the show doesn't talk about. Am I right, parents of teenagers?
That's how it goes. I guess there aren't a lot of parents of teenagers in here.
What's that? (Anybody?) Yeah well we got one.
That's how it goes, and that's what Romeo and Juliet skipped.
And so, what's a real romance like? Well you've probably been through some of them. Real romances involve a lot of trying to guess what the other person
is thinking and being wrong. They involve a lot of doing dumb things for what you think are good reasons but really aren't.
They involve a lot of fumbling, and all of this sort of stuff.
You can make a really deep and powerful romance that way, but it takes a lot of work.
And so sometimes the quick and easy romance is a better fit for a story.
One of the things that Dave Wolverton talked about with romance is a concept he called braided roses.
This is one of the most fulfilling archetypes for a reader is to have two characters--this works not just for romance--two characters who are forced to be together
In a way that together they look beautiful like a pair of roses, but they each have such personality quirks and such that they rub each other the wrong way.
And they jab the thorns into each other.
So they're like a pair of braided roses.
The reader can get a sense over time that they're beautiful together, and the characters can get a sense eventually that they're beautiful together
But in the beginning, it's just about those thorns. You've read stories like this I assume.
This is a very well-used archetype but it's something to pay attention to, the two people who don't get along very well at the start but are forced to travel
with each other and come to a mutual respect and even love for one another.
It works just as well with buddy cop type stuff as it does with romance.
So, that is one approach to writing a romance. That's not how most romances really are.
That's a fanciful version too, it's a nice one, I like that one.
I use that one, but it's a fanciful one.
Real romances, really, are more like "Huh, I could probably go out with her."
"Yeah, this is alright." "Hmm, maybe she's not interested. Maybe I'm not interested."
"Huh, okay we'll go out again." "Yeah I'm interested, I'm really interested."
"Ooh, but am I going on too strong?" "Is she coming on too strong?" I mean, that's how it is.
We joke about women overthinking things, but men do too.
And remember just to make your characters characters, rather than fulfilling gender tropes--
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