We were watching a Hallmark romance movie and my wife said, “I
don’t know who she’ll pick.”
I said, “probably the guy with no visible source of income,
but let’s see.”
I was tickled by her remark. My gal reads a ton of romance novels,
but she’s not a writer. I knew the who, what, where, when, why, how and throw
in some tropes, 10 minutes into the 2 hour (well, maybe 1.5 hours after
commercials) movie. The credit for my wife's confusion of who gets the gal, goes to
the writer of the screenplay. It used to be and still is in some plots that the guy who will not get the gal, has a really fatal flaw.
Basically, one guy’s a doctor. The other, a struggling and not
google-able writer of unspecified fiction (romance*). Both have caring hearts,
love her, good senses of humor. Both are handsome. One seems well off; the
other not at all. *The heroine doesn’t
read romance, thinks it’s fluff. He writes under and travels with his pen name
and persona, a woman, Veronica something (can you ID the tropes here?). His
fiction earns awards and nationwide bestseller status (like the ladies of
RWASD) and when the heroine finally gets her hands on an example, thanks to her
girlfriend— “just read this, maybe you’ll change your mind about some romance”—she
loves the tender story.
Tickled? Yes, because I think the longer you can hold the suspense
of who-gets-who, the happier and more entertained the reader will be. That’s if
you play with a two-guy theme. BTW, Hallmark is doing more and more
experimental movies and is trying to hide the obvious happily-ever-after in
layers upon layers of conflict and misdirection. But, they can’t fool us,
right?
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