Tonight I have about a thousand words written so far and it is interesting because I am doing so many different things, but i am working on the chapter 'The Days of Doldrums" and I am trying to craft a portion of the story that deals with two young people dating, but I want to avoid the stupidity of love cliches. That is a much more difficult task than one might imagine because, as I said some time ago, there is no such thing as a love story that has not been told. There is no unique angle on love and there is nothing that I can write that has not been written. I could say her heart was hardened and when she least expected it... blah, blah, blah, but that has been written; a million times.
So what I am going with is accepting that having been hurt has happened before; and people who have been hurt have baggage... but I am crafting it in a way that sort of admits that it is stupid to pretend this character is the first to go through this, and yet she willingly accepts where she is without feeling too worried about being cliche... and then use her own feelings as the uniqueness to the story... so here is an example of what I came up with:
Livvy had long ago recognized the hardened case around that chest. With its metaphorical big red ‘S’ on the outside, not the speediest of trains or highest velocity bullet could breach the case, she had accepted this malady not consciously or with some sort of epiphanical moment of brilliant insight, it was really something she subconsciously accepted as fate with a life devoid of melodrama to the point of a sort of melancholic happiness. Some will say that there is no such thing, but to Livvy this was living a life happy with each passing moment for its own inimitable value and somehow longing for a happiness she never really wanted. That is pretty passé as it is a common feeling amongst those who have been jaded by lost loves and dilapidated hearts. Livvy, though, was not really the lovelorn type outwardly abjuring love while secretly, desperately, yearning for some ‘man of her dreams’ to sweep her off of her feet and she was not one thinking that by no longer looking, the right man will come around. She had created a mental checklist of asshole versus not-an-asshole qualities and there was no explanatory derivative of each that she could quantify. There was simply a feeling. She knew that being not-an-asshole only meant that there was a tolerable possibility of simple exchanges without her antipathy becoming so bitter as to leave her the woman with seventeen cats, a ton of yarn and magazines stacked to the roof like the calculus professor, Kathy Truveiro, she had once met through her own mother, who had become so bitter with everyone surrounding love; she had tried all forms of love; she had tried being a lesbian when it was once considered chic to be a lesbian and she had failed at love. She pressed too hard and left herself alone with just those cats. She was found one day buried under a mountain of magazines which had collapsed on her as she sat knitting in her chair. She had lived, but the authorities had discovered the squalor to which she had become accustomed and decided she was no longer fit to care for herself and took her cats away, eviscerating her soul and creating a sort of free imprisonment that saw her quickly descend into a form of despairing fear of life and death. Livvy would not want to be like that, so she really told herself in her diary that there is nothing she is not open to, but there would be no force in her actions; no meaningful search for love; just an enjoyment of each moment with an asshole meter she hoped had enough accuracy to at least keep the posers at bay while she enjoyed living in an intellectual port city where there really were men and women who simply accepted the moments for what they were.
Yes, this is written in the manner it is for a reason and there are some unique phrase turns - and that is how I try to make this character unique in her approach to a cliched version of love. She has baggage. As do most people; it is how she accepts her baggage, how she totes it around and how she lets that baggage affect her choices that I hope becomes unique.
Love is cliche. How each character experiences love can be unique to that character.
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