Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with a new story published each day during the week of Valentine’s Day. For this year’s installment, Vogue partnered with the publisher 831 Stories on a collection of essays and excerpts celebrating the art of romantic fiction. So break out the chilled red wine and silky pajamas, and read on.
Like most people with big dreams, I knew what I wanted to do early. As soon as people started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had a clear answer: writer. Obviously.
Everyone around me agreed I had the chops: I was an early reader and a quick one. In elementary school, I developed a reputation for being an exceptional speller. Teachers heaped praise on my prose. Yes, the people around me agreed. Of course you’ll be a writer.
I appreciated their confidence, but I was harboring a terrible secret: I didn’t know how to finish a story.
I started them all the time. In the second grade, I tried to turn a short fiction-writing assignment into a full-length mystery novel about a group of tween equestrians who uncover a horse-thief ring in their town. But I couldn’t figure out how to drop clues into the narrative, probably because I also had no idea who was actually stealing the horses, let alone how. In the final draft, the girls found their missing horses had not, in fact, been taken but had simply…escaped from their pasture.
I remember this incident because it was the first time I felt a particular clench of terror in my stomach—the recognition that my appetite had outpaced my skill, that the talent that allowed me to put attractive sentences on the page had almost nothing to do with the instinct and imagination required to craft a compelling narrative. I liked my sentences fine, but it was stories that I wanted, desperately, to tell.
Something changed when, toward the end of elementary school, I discovered a whole new genre of story: fan fiction. It was 1998 or so, and I had fallen hard for Hanson, a band of boys just slightly older than me with approachably relatable interests. (Their debut music video featured them rollerblading in an empty parking lot.)
As I clicked my way through hand-coded Geocities web pages, I accidentally wandered into paradise. The girls making these sites weren’t just scanning and transcribing interviews from magazines and collecting music-video Easter eggs; they were also writing stories. Stories about what it might be like to meet, flirt with, and even kiss these golden, beautiful boys.
I didn’t know it then, but immersing myself in this kind of fan fiction—the kind focused on romance—was also teaching me the standard beats of Western story structure. Almost everything I read started with normal girls in normal situations: rollerblading down their own suburban blocks or calling in to radio stations to win concert tickets. They were inhabitants of what Joseph Campbell, in his theorization of the hero’s journey, termed “the ordinary world.” Their call to adventure (or inciting incident, as it is sometimes known) was obvious: They would meet a Hanson brother. And then everything would change.
In conversations about narrative, much is made of the importance of characters’ goals and desires. And the girls in these stories wanted simple things, but they wanted them badly, in a way that produced stakes only achievable in teenage melodrama. Breakups always took place in the rain, the sky weeping for our heroines’ lonely, broken hearts. Sometimes makeup kisses were placed under the same stormy skies, the rain now a symbol of renewal…and also because we had heard that it was sexy when clothes got wet.