Today, I was drifting around my room trying to clean, and I started thinking about The Default Sweater. Draft two is coming along, slowly--I have my roommate yelling at me to finish, but right now I'm working through it backwards.
Yeah. Backwards.
I guess TDS sort of falls into a romance category. If it were a movie, it would probably be a rom-com, but I feel odd about that. I think if I approached the story with a romantic comedy attitude, I would come away feeling awkward and embarrassed and stumbling over my own feet. Though I've dated a couple guys, romance has always been a bit of a mystery to me, so the story would be silly, straight from my imagination. The thought of imaging Erin as some desperate woman on a manhunt makes me cringe.
In a way, this goes back to several posts ago, where I talked about female characters. I don't think I set out, exactly, to write a typical romance story. At the time I started TDS, I was a junior in high school. I didn't have a boyfriend. I was significantly younger than the protagonist. The only thing I really had to power the story was a familiarity with the vulnerable feeling of wanting to be loved, and wanting to learn about boys and romance and, yes, Erin's hangup, kissing. However, her preoccupation with getting her first kiss is not just to pass a milestone, and that's why she ultimately doesn't want it from just anybody.
(On a side note, I could write a whole blog post on the invention of the kiss. Kisses are so unappreciated and underestimated. What were they thinking when they tried it out for the first time? And what do you do with something that makes no sense and yet means so much?
This is why the conflict in TDS is perfect for me.)
That, therefore, is my Erin. I don't think it's a "rom-com" as much as a heart story, maybe even a bit of a fairy tale. Erin has a preoccupation with those, too! I love the idea of a contemporary, real-world story that can be written as a fairy tale, taking a measure of that sugary sweetness into a place that's so often unromantic. I love the idea that everything can mean something. There's a reason fairy tales endure, after all. We still understand them in the knock of our nitty-gritty reality, and there's that one grain of truth, and we read it, and think ahhh, there it is.
So maybe it's something in between--not a fairy tale, perhaps, but distinctly fairylike.
I never considered TDS to be a rom-com - while it has funny parts, I felt the story was as a whole more preoccupied with Erin's honest search for her first kiss and slice-of-life moments along the way. I'd probably feel nauseated on your behalf if I ever saw a film version of TDS that was full of nothing but slapstick moments.
ReplyDeleteI identify with TDS for many reasons, but the biggest is that I completely relate to Erin and I really am that age, haha! Now, if only I can find two guys like Dan and Asher ;)
How do you work through your revisions backwards? That sounds so interesting, but I couldn't figure out how to do that, haha.
Haha, it's a trip! When I first went back and reread, I took notes on each chapter and what needed to be revised. Now, rewriting, I just found myself so stuck on the first couple chapters that I jumped to the end and started speeding happily along. :) Obviously, it's only good for minor rewriting, but it's working well right now. There'll be some more hefty work, beginning to end, that I'll tackle this summer. *puts on hard hat*
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