If you've been following this blog for a while, you've probably read my lamentations about the many problems that Bright Fire, one of my novels, has. Some of these problems are obvious, and some of them are things where I know something isn't quite right but I'm not sure how so or what to do about it.
Recently, upon comparing Bright Fire to my 2 other partial novels (working titles are The Wolf and the Sheath, and Brinyor), I realized that one if the many issues is the imbalance of power between Bright Fire and her love interest. This isn't to say that it's a bad relationship - it's just not very realistic right now.
Reading back on Wolf and Sheath and Brinyor, I realized that both of the main characters in those stories have a better balance of power with their love interests. (Side note - none of these stories actually qualify as Romances, despite the presence of a couple and other romantic elements. But the difference between romantic elements and Romance as a genre is a topic for a different post.)
Without giving a lot away (because I do intend to publish both), in Wolf and Sheath, while Reyala technically is of a higher station and has more political power than her love interest, he has his own special station and knowledge within another group, and they live in a place where her position doesn't remove her from "normal" people as much as it might in another time or place. In Brinyor, Rigan and her love interest both have high positions within their respective communities, are very close in age, and have recently suffered similar losses. One major problem with the relationship in Bright Fire is a big age gap, and the fact that he starts out as something of a mentor figure to Bright Fire. I'm not saying it can't be done - it's a quasi-historical fantasy, a setting where a big age gap isn't as much of a problem as in a modern piece, for example - but it's also something that I may not be a good enough writer to make it work yet.
And honestly, this revelation doesn't bother me as much as it might have a few years ago. I recently read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. It is a fantastic book that won the Hugo, Newbery, and Carnegie awards, among others. In the afterword, Gaiman admits that he had the idea when he was 25, but that when he sat down to write it for the first time, he realized that he was not yet a good enough writer to do the story justice. Eventually, he did sit down and complete it. This gives me hope. This book that I have been so hung up on for the past several years, now I can take a breath and say, "Ok. This is a good story. This has the potential to be a great story. I just need to give myself a little more time to figure it out."
But back to the couples... After I realized that Bright Fire's relationship is potentially tricky, I sat down and looked at some of the other major ideas I have. (By "major" I mean that I have the majority of the plot worked out in my head.) There is always a balance. The couples may not both be immediately obvious as equals, but there's always something - fame vs. maturity, political power vs. perceived power, political power vs. street smarts, etc. - that keeps the couple in balance.
Maybe this is something that I understand the importance of now that I am in a stable relationship and have been for over 6 years, and why I'm only just now recognizing the imbalance in Bright Fire. (Though it's also interesting to note that I wrote the bulk of W&S when I was not in a relationship of any sort, and 2 years before I met the man I am now married to.) I think this is something that is just important in fiction as in real life - the couple have to work together. They have to have strengths to lend each other. You can't have one leaning entirely on the other, just as you can't have them both be exactly the same. The couple in Wolf and Sheath came to me very easily - oddly enough since that is the first novel I started writing. The couple in Brinyor are also good and strong - once they finally get over themselves long enough to realize there's something between the two of them. : )
So it's a little odd to me that Bright Fire, the novel I started between W&S and Brinyor has, of all my stories, the most imbalanced couple*. But that might also have a lot to do with where I was mentally the year that I started it.
*Well, except for the one where someone gets killed, but that's also another subject for another blog...