Tag Archives: romance

Everything I Needed to Know About Romance I Learned from Bollywood

Posted on May 11, 2012 | 2 Comments

I read my first Romance novel early on in high school, probably about 23 years ago.  It was love at first sight.  What more could you want in life than a world where the hero and heroine always come together to vanquish whatever obstacles stand in their way and where you know they will love each other with passionate abandon for the rest of their lives?

I watched my first Bollywood movie about 3 years ago.  And yes, it was love at first sight.  Once again I’d stumbled across a world where the hero and heroine always came together to vanquish their obstacles and where you know they will love each other passionately for the rest of their lives … or maybe in their future lives.

The essence of Bollywood is Romance.  Pyaar.  Ishq.  Mohabbat.  Love.  So much more than American cinema, Hindi films wrap their plots around love.  More often than not a good Bollywood film will center around a love story.  Whether it’s two lovers who are kept apart by culture and tradition, like Veer-Zaara or Dil Se, or whether it’s family keeping them apart, like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge or Devdas, or whether it’s something much, much sillier, like Dostana or Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, love is always at the center of the plot.

And boy can Bollywood plot a film!  I’m still trying to figure out parts of Om Shanti Om.  In a nutshell, the story begins in the 1970s when a perpetual extra, Om, falls in love with the leading lady, Shanti, and attempts to convince her she should be with him.  Only Shanti is secretly married to the dastardly director.  And when said villain burns down the set with Shanti in it, Om rushes to try to save her … and they both die.  And that’s only the first half of the movie.  In Act Two Om has been reincarnated and in the present he is a huge film star.  When he starts remembering his past life he sets out on a mission to find the dastardly director villain, who is still alive, and get him to confess his guilt.

But I digress.

The first Bollywood film I ever saw was Salaam-e-Ishq.  It’s title translated is A Salute to Love.  It’s a remake of the film Love Actually, which was and is one of my favorite films ever.  As I sat watching the three hour extravaganza it hit me that here was a culture that knows how to lose itself to love.

In musical theater they say that when words can no longer express your feelings, break into song.  In Bollywood not only do they break into song, they throw in a splashy dance number to go along with it.  Folks, this is love!

Love is just as likely to be loud and joyful as it is to be dark and sultry.  It is colorful and energetic.  It has five costume changes within a three minute span.  When you’re in love you want everyone to know it.  You want the passersby on the street to jump into the thick of things with you.  You want grand and majestic scenes as your backdrop.  Bollywood doesn’t hold back at all when it comes to love.

Except that it also holds back far, far more than western cinema.  Up until a few years ago you would never so much as see a Bollywood couple kiss let alone take their clothes off and do the horizontal hokey-pokey.  And yet some of the most romantic and passionate scenes I’ve ever seen have been in B-town films.

Bollywood romance is all about subtlety.

It is about the look of longing, the heaving sigh.  Passion is something expressed in the eyes, not in skin and sweat.  My favorite Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan, never ever kisses on screen.  Why?  Because in real life he is married and he maintains (and I believe him) that the only woman he has ever kissed is his wife.  (Although there was that one art-house film Maya Memsaab that was truly awful and he might have kissed the actress in that one?)  And yet when you see him making love to his on-screen heroine there is something so sultry in his look and movements that I need a cold shower afterwards.

That, my friends, is true Romance.  Forget all of this voyeurism that has become the norm in the west.  When everything is visible on the table what’s the point of dreaming?  That’s why I love Romance novels but can’t stand porn.  Some people argue that Romance novels are porn for girls, but unlike graphic images that spell everything out for you, Romance novels let your imagination run free.  The only thing you are actually seeing is words on a page.  The rest is up to you.

Same with Bollywood.  The only thing you are really seeing is color and movement, a look and a flash in someone’s eyes.  The rest is up to you.  And folks like A.R. Rahman, who writes amazing soundtrack music.

But don’t take my word for it.  Here are some samples to get you started on your romantic Bollywood journey.

This first song is from the film Veer-Zaara.  The hero, Veer, is Indian and the heroine, Zaara, is Pakistani.  In the song Zaara is about to be married off to someone else.  Veer has actually been captured and imprisoned as a spy, but as the lyrics imply, “Main Yahaan Hoon” or “I’m right here”, he’s with her even when he isn’t.  Pretty sexy stuff from Shah Rukh and my favorite Bollywood actress, Priety Zinta!

And this one is one of my favorite Hindi film songs from one of my all-time favorite movies in any language, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, which means Never Say Goodbye.  The director, Karan Johar, who I love, has said it’s a film about two love stories that were never meant to be and one that was.  The hero and heroine in this song are each married to someone else but falling in love with each other.  The film is amazing.  You can feel the passion and the disaster both in this clip.

And okay, this song is mostly just pure Bollywood entertainment, but Salaam-e-Ishq is what made me fall in love with B-town and this song is a major part of that.

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Great Romances – Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger

Posted on May 10, 2012 | 4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago one of my Facebook friends posted an article about the ten most disappointing or least inspiring sci-fi couples ever.  One of the couples on that list was Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley.  I wish I could find that article again (believe me, I’ve tried) but the gist of their argument was that there was no spark between the two.

Of course, the article even said that the problem was the lack of chemistry between the actors who portrayed the characters in the movie version and that if you read the book the Harry/Ginny romance is a lot more interesting.  I wholeheartedly agree with this.  In fact, I was going to write about that Harry/Ginny romance, but then I realized I would be missing the point if I did.  Because the truly great romance of the Harry Potter books is Ron and Hermione.

What makes Ron and Hermione such a great couple is the fact that they have known each other since they were kids.  They met on the Hogwart’s Express only moments after Harry and Ron met.  And of course neither was particularly impressed from the get-go.  But against the odds they became friends.

Another thing that makes Ron and Hermione such an awesome couple is that they kick butt together.  This is not a relationship where one is the hero and the other is the sidekick.  They are both sidekicks, which gives them a degree of equality that, frankly, you just don’t see in a lot of romances, even in our modern world.  They each brought something unique to the table in their efforts to help Harry defeat Voldemort.  Throughout the series they took turns being more or less prominent in Harry’s world, but as far as I can tell one never overpowered the other.  It is a partnership of equals.

And yet those equal things are not the same things.  Ron isn’t as smart as Hermione, but I personally think Hermione doesn’t have the heart that Ron has.  And to me it’s sort of brilliant that in this pairing it is the boy who is the heart and the girl who is the head.  How’s that for turning stereotypes on their heads?

They’re also brilliant as a couple because there is and has always been so much fire between them.  They bickered from the get-go.  And as everyone knows, bickering is a sign of something much deeper waiting to burst out.  Of course these two kids, with their confusing hormones popping and their unfamiliar new adult feelings wrapping them up in knots, would take out that energy on each other.  Rowling presented the budding romance like someone who understands adolescence all too well.

I also happen to think that Ron and Hermione are a perfect example of opposites attracting.  They have different approaches to life and problems.  And yet they end up in the same place eventually because in their deepest cores they are far more alike than unalike.  They are yin and yang.

For a second I thought they were going to go there!

I will concede that the relationship is much more vivid and alive in the books than it was in the movies.  Frankly, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson had some seriously good chemistry and if you’re just watching the films of course you’re going to want Harry and Hermione to get together.  But that has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with the actors portraying them.  And as we all know, the movie is never as good as the book.  In the book it’s Ron and Hermione all the way.

So way what you will about Harry and Ginny, who I also happen to think are brilliant together, when it comes down to it, Ron and Hermione are the great lovers of the Harry Potter series.

P.S. Why are there so many bizarre HP pairings (and resultant porn) all over the internet???

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Writing Templates

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 2 Comments

For as long as I can remember I’ve always modeled the characters in my stories after particular actors or actresses that struck my fancy.  Sometimes an entire story would suggest itself to me when I watched a given performance of my favorite actors.  Not exactly a retelling of the thing I saw them in, but a variation.

Quilting: The Ultimate Template

For some reason a little voice at the back of my head has always considered this cheating.  Are you really creating an original character if you’re modeling them off of somebody else?

Imagine my surprise the other week when I finished reading Eloisa James’ novella Winning the Wallflower and there in her notes after the story she mentioned that some of her characters in this latest series were based off of House and Forest Gump!  Wait a minute, maybe I’m not the only person who does this.

In fact, I already knew that I wasn’t.  Last year while attending a writing workshop taught by Jenni Holbrook she mentioned that she uses what she called “templates” to create her characters.

I love this idea of templates.  Templates exist everywhere, from Word documents to architecture to fashion design.  All sorts of industries start with one thing and make it into something else.  I’ve always worried that there is a sort of plagiarism in the way I have become enamored of a character and then taken them out of their original setting and made them into something else.

Take, for example, the character Danny in my Grace’s Moon sci-fi series.  I’m not gonna lie.  That character started out as Ben Linus from Lost.  Yes, creepy Ben Linus.  But I love Ben.  I loved Ben from the moment he first appeared on the screen.  Probably because Michael Emerson is an amazing actor and as someone with a master’s degree in theater I know acting and I appreciate it when I see someone who does it well.

But those of you who watched Lost know that Ben was a nasty little man, manipulating things behind the scenes, ruthless in his pursuit of what he wanted, dedicated to The Island, and at the same time tragic in everything that life had thrown his way.  There is no way that character is ever going to be considered a hero.  But as I said, I love him and I wanted him to get his moment in the sun.

I wanted it so badly that I created Danny.

Now Danny is not Ben.  There are some fundamental differences in everything they stand for and the way they act on it.  But the essence of what spawned Danny began in Ben Linus.  That’s what a template means to me.  I saw something I liked in a package I found attractive and morphed it into a whole new character.

I did the same thing with Crispin from my novel The Loyal Heart.  Crispin started off as Richard Armitage.  I saw a couple of episodes of the BBC Robin Hood TV series he was in and spun it out in my imagination in an entirely different way.  Throw in about four other versions of the Robin Hood legend and the actual history of the time period and voila!  An entire Medieval trilogy.  But it all started because I think Richard Armitage is the sexiest man on the planet.

I think people do this with more than just characters.  We’ve all heard that old saying that there are no original stories.  So in essence every story out there is based off of a template.  In Romance these days there seems to be a trend of basing stories off of fairy tales.  And why not?  There is very little difference between a fairy tale and a romance novel.  Girl meets boy, obstacle gets in the way, girl marries boy.  It’s a template.

I do like to use celebrities and other well-known people (and a few people I know in real life) as my character templates though.  It’s fun to throw together really odd pairings.  I think I mentioned before in a post about Character Pics that the aforementioned Michael Emerson has been the template for more heroes in my novels than any other man (with Richard Armitage a close second – now how’s that for two entirely different men!).  Well, in my very soon to be published novel Our Little Secrets Michael Emerson is indeed the template for the character Michael.  And as you can see, I am not at all subtle about it.  And guess who the template for my heroine is?  Zooey Deschanel.  Now seriously.  Who in their right mind would ever think of putting those two together in a romantic situation?  That would be me.

So who else here uses templates for their characters?  And who do you use?  I’m dying to know which celebs out there are getting the most action in the imaginations of the writers of the world.

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Great Romances – Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy

Posted on April 26, 2012 | 4 Comments

When it comes to epic romances, no couple does it better than Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.  Their love story has inspired generations, and you could argue that it marks the beginning of the tradition of the Romance Novel.  Not just the Romance Novel, but several generations of films as well.  Whichever your favorite casting, there is no doubt that these two personify all that is romantic.

The brilliance of Elizabeth and Darcy is that they were never meant to be.  The Bennets were decent enough folk, but they were nowhere near the level of the Pemberly set.  Jane Austen does a great job of portraying this whereas sometimes the film versions clean things up.  The fact is that Elizabeth was the daughter of a middling man and a meddling woman.  She herself was intelligent, but not exactly a classic Regency heiress.

Darcy, on the other hand, was a man of wealth, if not title.  He had a vast estate and at least one relative that could claim the moniker “Lady”.  He was clearly a catch, although Austen never goes into the details of how his family made its money or how far back it goes.  It was enough to have Lady Catherine De Bourgh maneuvering him into marrying her daughter and to have Caroline Bingley falling all over herself to nab him.

Elizabeth and Darcy were an even more unlikely pairing because of their approach to society.  Elizabeth was open and witty, almost sharp.  She had no problem socializing at balls and private gatherings.  She was bold enough to go out walking on her own for amusement.  Darcy, on the other hand, was painfully shy.  He disliked being in company and hid his discomfort by being a bit rude and aloof.

Yep, on paper there was no way these two should ever get together.

But as we all know, they did.  Why???

Well, because as we all know, a single man in possession of a great fortune must be in want of a wife.  That and because they were the perfect compliments to each other.  Elizabeth brought Darcy out of his shell and spurred him to action while Darcy tempered some of Elizabeth’s fire by making her see the truth beyond the way she imagined it must be.

But it wasn’t easy getting there.

First, there was that whole bad first impression thing.  Let’s face it, our dear Lizzy jumped to conclusions without getting her facts straight at that first ball.  She got the idea in her head that Darcy was proud and she wouldn’t let it go for the longest time.  Darcy, for his part, really didn’t know how to deal with women.  He didn’t know that he came off as a jerk or how to fix it.

Then there was that little problem of Wickham.  There’s nothing like a handsome, smooth-talking rogue walking into the picture to feed a girl’s prejudices and turn her head.  Bless her heart, but Lizzy judged the books by their covers and held fast to her ill opinion of Darcy and her good opinion of Wickham.

Fortunately, it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.  I was always impressed by the letter Darcy wrote to Elizabeth after she tore him a new one and refused his proposal.  Not only did he present the facts to make Lizzy see how mistaken she’d been, he did it in the most user-friendly way possible for her.  If he had tried to visit her again and say all that in person she would have scratched his eyes out.  Because Elizabeth Bennet is nothing if not impulsive.

But what makes this such a fantastic love story is the way Darcy came to the rescue, not just of Elizabeth but of her entire family.  And he did it after he’d been smacked down hard by the object of his affection.  Darcy knew he’d been wrong and he tried to make it right.  He owned up to Bingley and encouraged him to go after Jane and he forced Wickham to make an honest woman out of Lydia.  What makes Mr. Darcy the ultimate romantic hero is the simple fact that he is a great guy.

So in the end Lizzy wised up to the prize she’d had sitting in front of her the whole time and Darcy broke his usual introverted habits to risk proposing again.  And they lived happily ever after, or so we presume.

Now, I’ve never read any of the pseudo fan fiction continuations of the Elizabeth/Darcy relationship that are out there.  Maybe I’m too much of a purist.  I would rather imagine the continuing story of this epic romantic couple being so tranquil and satisfying that it doesn’t make for a good story.  But if you think any of the multitude of stories written about their later life are any good, let me know.

As for the film versions….  Well, can anything really come close to the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle version?  That mini-series is one of the best things that has ever been put on film.  Not just for the leading couple.  All of the supporting cast is brilliant, from Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Collins to Lady Catherin and Mr, Bingley and Jane.  The casting is so perfect and they all shine.

But I also happen to really like the Kiera Knightly/Matthew Macfadyen version too.  I think that one captures the true status of the Bennet family and the society of Meryton a lot better than the clean and proper 1995 BBC version.  Plus Matthew Macfadyen is wonderful eye candy.  Not that Colin Firth isn’t, mind you.

Then there’s the first adaptation I saw, the Greer Garson/Lawrence Olivier 1940 version that we watched when I was in high school reading the book for the first time.  All I remember from that one is the style of acting.  Maybe it was good, who knows.  And let’s not forget the Bollywood version, Bride and Prejudice.  Believe it or not, this adaptation totally and completely works.  And it’s funny and has Bollywood dance numbers.  If you haven’t seen it you really are missing out.

So there you have it.  Elizabeth and Darcy.  One of the greatest romances in literature.

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Great Romances – Tristan and Isolde

Posted on April 12, 2012 | 1 Comment

Ah!  You’ve got to love a centuries old love story, celebrated throughout the ages, a legend remade as an opera and a film, and enduring love story … that isn’t really a love story.

The story of Tristan and Isolde was one of the epic stories of the Middle Ages.  It was retold time and again with countless variations and outcomes.  It endured for centuries.  But for whatever reason it isn’t really talked about much today.  Sure, there was a pretty cool film made about it a couple of years ago starring James Franco and Sophia Myles, but other than that you don’t hear much about it these days.

It’s a crying shame.  Because it’s a good story.  And depending on which variation you hear it actually isn’t much of a love story at all.  Which is why it’s so cool.

Here is my favorite version of the tale.

Tristan was a great Cornish knight.  He fought in the service of King Mark, his surrogate father.  In some versions Mark is his uncle.  Tristan goes to Ireland, fights an epic battle, and kills Morholt.  Morholt just happens to be Isolde’s fiancé.  As a prize Tristan snatches up Isolde, intent on bringing her back to King Mark as his bride.

Isolde hates Tristan.  I mean, she seriously, seriously hates him.  He killed her fiancé, after all.  Isolde is also a powerful healer, capable of making amazing potions.  On the boat ride back to Cornwall she concocts a deadly poison, intent on killing Tristan.  But her nurse swaps out the deadly poison with a powerful love potion.  Bot Tristan and Isolde drink the potion (Isolde was feeling a little suicidal after the death of her fiancé).  And BOOM!  They fall in love.

(In some versions Isolde makes the love potion so that she will fall in love with her intended, King Mark, but she and Tristan drink it instead.)

So these two people who just can’t stand one another are suddenly magically hot for each other.  Tristan delivers Isolde to King Mark.  Isolde and King Mark get married.  Isolde actually likes King Mark.  He’s a nice guy.  But because of the dratted love potion she continues to burn for Tristan, and Tristan for Isolde.

They can’t help themselves.  The love potion forces them to seek each other out as lovers.  It takes some serious conniving, but they meet in the forest and proceed to have wild monkey sex all day … until King Mark (or his henchmen in some versions) find them.

Well, Tristan and Isolde manage to use trickery to escape adultery charges, but King Mark is heartbroken.  Especially since the forced lovers keep meeting up and getting caught.  Finally, really pissed off, King Mark decides to hang Tristan and burn Isolde at the stake.  But Tristan miraculously escapes and saves Isolde.

At least that’s one version.

In another version Tristan is so ashamed after he is caught with Isolde that he leaves and goes to France … and marries someone else named Isolde who looks exactly like the first Isolde.  Many years later, when Tristan is mortally wounded in battle, he knows that the only one who can save him is the real Isolde, because she’s an amazing healer.  He sends for her, but his wife Isolde number two is jealous and makes him believe she isn’t coming.  He dies in despair, and when Isolde arrives and finds Tristan dead she dies of a broken heart.

Of course, another version of the story is that the love potion only lasts for three years.  Then it wears off.  Personally, I think this version has the best potential of them all.  Imagine hating someone so much that you would try to poison them to death, drinking a love potion instead that caused the two of you to have wild monkey sex, then having it suddenly wear off one day years later.  Personally, I think that version could be awesome.

So yeah, I think it’s time we bring this classic story in all of its various glories out in public again.  It’s as good as any modern melodrama.

Does anybody have any other versions of the story that they’ve heard?

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