It's been a long time since I was in a writing class, but my recollection of young, itinerant writers - this would include myself - is that they sometimes/often (really, really) want to share their doomed teen/young adult love story. I'm maybe stating the obvious here but the first prerequisite I think is: get over the person (which in my case took roughly 24 years before I was able to write about - in an actually inspired way). But I've kind of come to the conclusion (the kind of part is reflected in the title of this thread, which ends in a question mark) that there are maybe three types of romantic tragedy - all of which have to do with separation. The first type is probably the most familiar: separation by death. (I know you're thinking of a certain Shakespeare play, but to the extent that even actually qualifies as tragedy - the longstanding debate, and all - I think it's actually the third type, which I'll get to.) I guess this is obvious enough, but three of my more favorite examples are James Joyce's The Dead (which ends with Gabriel realizing his beloved wife is in love with a ghost, as well as a couple/few of the finest passages of prose in the English language), Ian McEwan's Atonement, and Chinatown (one of my more favorite movies, the crimes of its director aside). I want to talk for a second about the third example, Chinatown, because it also piggybacks on the whole discussion/debate about AI. Robert Towne's (RIP) script is still I think widely considered to be one of the best and most elegant Hollywood screenplays of all time (the movie was trounced by a certain mob picture at the Oscars in every category but original screenplay, because it wasn't that), but it was as fans probably know actually the first flick in a trilogy about LA (it was about water, of course, and the second one was about oil, and the third about freeways). And it had a different ending (which made those other two possible) - Evelyn escapes to Mexico with her sister/daughter Katherine (the real life Katherine Mulholland - who was not in fact the product of incest - lived down the block from me growing up). But Polanski made one very inspired change to the ending, turning it from comedy (in the sense of a Hollywood ending) to tragedy: Evelyn is shot dead by police - it's a tragedy of misunderstanding - and Katherine is given over to the clutches of her father/grandfather Noah Cross. And the reason I think Polanski's ending is so powerful is because he lived it. Famously, his young, pregnant wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family in...a tragedy of misunderstanding (Manson and his cultees thought Dennis Wilson, of Beach Boys fame - who had turned Manson down for a record deal or whatever - was still living at the house: he was the intended target). So color me skeptical that a machine - with no capacity for connection or grief, no life experience, no soul - could ever move us the way that movie does. But onto number 2...This is tragedy of separation not by death but culture: this is the more common one, and also the more elusive and hard to figure out, format/genre-wise. I'm sure there are examples - from real life, and fiction - that would probably give lie to what I'm about to say, but in general this type of romantic tragedy usually involves a man (or a boy, or the more masculine character in the relationship) from a more cosmopolitan background, and a woman (or girl, or the more feminine character in the relationship) from a more traditional one - this is the reason they ultimately can't be and stay together: they come from different worlds. (In my case it was another boy from a very Catholic family. Staying with me meant losing his family, his Church, his everything - it was doomed from the start.) It was in the spring of 2016 - during a tidal wave of inspiration in the midst of grieving my father's death - that the first stirrings of what will ultimately be my second feature, the Little Drummer Boy (which refers to a Christmas pageant I was in, age 7 - it's the Rosebud thing, a nod to my innocence then) came to me. I’ll describe more of that process downthread, but at a certain point early on it started presenting not as a drama (which is what the first type usually is) but as a thriller. And I was like: nuh no, I am giving my very personal story over to some genre thing. But of course stories want to be what they want to be, and after a few days or a week I just said to heck with it - I’ll just see where this wants to go. And before long I had the bare bones outline of not just this forbidden love story, but an overarching story about the murders of three teens and a satanic panic that sweeps my hometown of Thousand Oaks, CA in the summer of 1992. (The boyfriend and I are accused of being part of this satanic cult, and the murders are supposedly part of the initiation - this is not the actual case. The truth only comes out many years later.) I ultimately came to the conclusion that this is in fact how this type of story - this type of romantic tragedy - is done, and I can give you at least two examples: Witness, the mid 80s movie with Harrison Ford, and Snow Falling on Cedars (both the book and the movie, but the former was better - lots of pretty NW photography in the movie though). Both of these examples are aso moral and social dramas, as is mine. (In that sense this mode of storytelling has something in common with certain westerns, which in the case of Witness shouldn’t be surprising, as the three writers had worked on the later seasons of Gunsmoke together, and I believe had written it as an episode that never got made.) In the end, both John Book (Witness) and Ishmael Chambers (Snow…) have to return to their worlds, and their would be loves theirs. For Rachel, in Witness, it’s the world of the Amish, and for Hatsue, it’s the world of her very conservative, Japanese-American family and father. (There’s literally a line in Witness by Rachel’s father saying John Book would be returning to his world, where he belongs, near the end. My favorite line in that movie - and this was off script/not in the shooting script - is when Book says: if we had made love last night, I would have to stay, and you would have to go. I don’t know if this was Harrison Ford freelancing or what - textual integrity is roughly rule 2 or 3 in acting - but of course he was a big star even then, so...) So, all that… And #3 is just numbers 1 and 2 combined: separation by death and culture. What do you think? Am I right, half-right, or completely and totally mistaken? (I'm new here, so pleased to meet you in advance.)
Some of my stories include romance, but usually, it's either unrequired love, or the third person in a love triangle, the one who gets rejected. To me, the latter is a tragedy, but it doesn't fall into one of your three types. It's separation for internal factors, not external ones.
Yes, thank you - very interesting. I'll have to think about it some before I say really anything of substance, but thank you for inviting that. It's funny because the actual (other) person I mentioned in #2 (my ex I mean) developed a similar infatuation - lasting many years - with someone he went to college with, and ultimately moved to NYC after college (because that person was living there). And because life is pretty strange sometimes I actually met this other person in an extremely random way, and he was...attracted to me. (We did hook up once back in the 90s.) So, it was like: I was interested in this one person, who was interested in this other person, who was interested in me.
