Tricky Relationships

Relationships are rarely straightforward in literature or in life. Love in stories comes in all forms: straight or queer, monogamous or non, platonic or passionate, serial or single, long haul or short time. Which kinds of relationships do you, as a writer, choose to explore in your stories? What effect on your story’s tension do these choices have?

What might increase that tension? In other words, have you thought about expanding your repertoire, or playing with a mismatch of relationship choices?

Maybe you’ve never even considered this. Maybe you’ve stuck with the kind of relationships you already know. I find many writers, including myself, run a groove, knowing and writing about only one kind. Or maybe two. What they’re comfortable with.

But exciting results comes when you dare to mix and match. Explore the variations of crushes your characters could have.

More variation in relationships creates the potential for more betrayal, more renewal and forgiveness, more jealousy and passion—some of the main emotional elements that drive a character’s journey or narrative arc.

Want to play with this, with me, this week? First, we’ll look at negative space and what that has to do with crushes.

Negative space

In art terms, negative space is what circles the object you’re drawing or painting. The background, the atmosphere, the air around it. It reveals the object more fully. My teachers advised focusing on it, whenever I was stuck in a problem with the object itself.

I found it could reveal hidden sides of the object, things I hadn’t noticed. What we might, in literature, call relationship secrets. Because the atmosphere of a person’s life is often made up of their relations with others, their environment, their world.

When I’m stuck in my writing life, trying to depict a challenging character, I might consider this kind of negative space in that person’s life. There are people this character feels, perhaps, a constant affinity for. Some, even passion for: their close friends, their partner or spouse, their kids or grandkids. Maybe this character is even obsessed with some of them, in a mild-mannered way—talking or texting with them multiple times each day, scrolling through photos on the phone library or social media whenever they can, posting about them. Then there are the troublesome obsessions, if you will: the people who must be checked in with just as often because they tend to disappear or get unlucky. Neither kind of relationship is easily ignored. It becomes the life “atmosphere,” the negative space around a person, and to know about it and use it consciously is a great technique for knowing a character better.

Often, this negative space fills their thoughts and feelings more than you’d expect.

Like in painting, these peripheral relationships may not be the focus, the thing you’re drawing. They fill the air around it.

Varying your types of relationships

I began this post by talking about the variations that exist within character relationships, and how we writers can fall into a rut about what we choose to include in our stories. We always write about lonely single people. Or distressed divorcees. Or friends for life. Who else exists within those negative spaces and how might we expand what we feel comfortable including?

I often spoke about this in writing classes: the tendency some of us have to shy from the more unusual crushes, to only write what puts our character in a positive light. But the strange brings more tension to story. Here’s an example.

Say something happens to your character that is very disturbing. There’s an incident at work that reveals a fact about a trusted colleague, and suddenly they are not so trustworthy. Maybe your character can’t stop thinking about this person’s hidden life, what else might be revealed. So they begin to obsess. This very peripheral person starts to occupy more and more of your character’s thoughts. It drives them to secretly search online, even cruise by their colleague’s house. They decide they have to answer questions about this person. This isn’t so different from the usual kind crush, where we are positively attracted—at least in story. Each obsession that sucks up your character’s life brings interest to the page.

Another example: a loss in their past, an abandonment, that creates a relationship they can’t let go of. I recently read Oh William! by one of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Strout. Strout makes huge use of obsession with loss, notably the mother who abandons their child in some way, a tragedy that colors both the main characters’ background.

A character may crush on a missing parent, hate the fact that they do, and relate to another through this profound loss. It can either destroy or save them. In Strout’s novel, one of the characters saves herself and the other is destroyed. What creates the difference?

So many different kinds of love exist, from friendship to committed love partners. Consider the choices you’ve made in your writing about crushes, both obvious and obsessive ones. What’s the primary vehicle for love in your character’s life?  What do they think about almost to the point of destroying their peace?

What circles in their periphery, their negative space?

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

List the kinds of crushes or relationships in your current work. What range have you chosen? What else could you add to a particular character’s life that might tug at them in a different way?

Are any of your characters obsessed with someone? What tension does that bring to the story?