Writing Journal: Rolling in Rom-Com Cliches

Surprise, surprise – I’ve fallen behind, yet again, in my attempt to review all of the romantic comedies people recommended to me last year. I have a good excuse, though! I’m busy writing my own rom-coms and have less time to watch movies that people tell me to see.

The two original rom-coms are projects that I’ve mentioned before. One is a screenplay, a modernized high school adaptation of a Shakespeare play (think 10 Things I Hate About You for The Taming of the Shrew, except based on a different play). The other is a novel that’s part romantic comedy, part coming-of-age story, part satire, about characters who are grown-ups. Well, they’re twenty-somethings. I guess being 25ish means that you technically qualify as a grownup.

Anyway, while writing my romantic comedies, I try to avoid too many cliches and patterns that I see in movie after movie. In my stories, there will be no dramatic dash to the airport after an eleventh-hour realization of love. There will be no scenes of women bonding with each other or regaining their confidence by singing karaoke into hairbrushes. There will be no montages of busy career women shouting into cell phones to indicate how very busy and bitchy they are and how much nicer they will be when the more free-spirited man cures them. And no one will eat an entire pint of ice cream while crying and listening to Adele.

Still, some cliches are unavoidable. When I reread and edit my work, I notice a few patterns that I recycle in my dialogue and characters.

– The female lead characters all want to be writers. They say to write what you know. Well, I know that I’ve always wanted to write, so my female protagonists also want to write. The main character in the novel is a newspaper critic and a budding investigative journalist, and the female lead in the Shakespeare adaptation is a senior in high school who wants to major in English when she gets to college. Such cliches, I know, but these women are pretty clever and witty, so it makes sense to me that they would be writers! Still, I realize that not all clever and witty people are writers, and not all writers are clever and witty, so I’m going to make a change or two. Maybe the senior in high school will be really good in English class but want to major in nutrition or something.

– The male leads are athletes (but smart ones). I have no idea why this cliche is repeating itself in both stories – with three different characters, no less. Romance writers are often accused of living out their own fantasies in their writing, and this accusation is often true, but I was never attracted to the athletic types when I was in high school. Most of the boys I crushed on or eventually dated fell squarely into the “thin, sometimes skinny, hipterish nerd” category. It just so happens that the male characters are athletic for important plot reasons, but still. How did this happen three times in two stories?

– The female leads are overtly feminist. This isn’t a problem in the case of my twenty-something female journalist, but when I looked back at the dialogue for my high school senior, I thought, “There’s no way she would be saying some of these things at eighteen. No way.” So I toned down the more enlightened, wise, balanced feminist rhetoric, gave her a dose of knee-jerk man-hate, and had her call another female character a slut behind her back.

Anyone who follows this blog will look at that last sentence with a raised eyebrow and wonder what the heck has gotten into me. Let me explain. I want to incorporate feminist principles into my fiction writing, and I do, but I also don’t want to get preachy and become a feminist after-school special. I want to be true to life, and my high school version of feminism l was to be pro-choice and celebrate women in the workforce, but to also think I was better than other girls and think that all boys were jerks. If anything, my female lead is more enlightened than I was as a senior, as she really only hates one boy, not all boys.

– Bickering is a sign of true love. What can I say? I’m a sucker for those couples that argue with each other while secretly harboring deep attraction. Blame Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth and Pacey and Joey, okay?

(And yes, I’m aware that I just used characters from a piece of classic literature in the same sentence as characters from Dawson’s Creek, Katie Holmes’ newfound independence reignited my Pacey/Joey affection, okay, DON’T JUDGE ME.)

[Crap, why didn’t I just use Xander and Cordelia or Buffy and Spike when at least everyone already knows I’m a Buffy nerd?!] )

So. Uh. As I was saying, art imitates life, but sometimes art imitates art, and both of the main couples in my two rom-coms-in-progress banter with each other. A lot. The high school students bicker because they’re immature (and because there’s a painful history that they keep from their group of mutual friends). The rom-com about the adults is a little more lighthearted, though – those two bicker because of a silly misunderstanding where they each think the other is trying to kill them.

No, really. It’s a comedy!

– The female characters pretend not to care about romantic relationships, but they really do. This is is hard for me to get around. I hate, hate, hate narratives where women are presented as caring about romance above everything else in their lives, where romance is their lives. I didn’t want to write yet another story where men and love and sex and romance were at the center of everything.

Then I woke up and remembered that I was, in fact, writing romantic comedies.

That’s one thing I have to remember when writing these stories. It’s okay for the story to focus on love and sex and romance, because that’s what romantic comedies do by their very nature. The trick is to write complex characters who have other things in their lives besides romance, so the audience walks away thinking that the romantic comedy was just telling one chapter in a large story of the character’s life, not the entire book.

In conclusion?

It would appear that I’m already seeing a pattern in works of mine that aren’t even published yet, so maybe I’m not the type of person who should laugh at the YouTube video that makes fun of Aaron Sorkin.

But I’m going to do it anyway.