Since I wrote of war yesterday, I should write of love today, since those are the two places in which we’re told that all is fair, right?

So to balance out what Tim O’Brien had to say about the war story, here’s what Jane Smiley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, has to say of love stories:

A love story, at least a convincing one, requires three elements: the love, the beloved, and the adventures they have together. If the lover isn’t ardent, then the story isn’t a love story. If the beloved isn’t appealing, then the lover just seems idiosyncratic or even crazy; and if they have no adventures, then their love is too easy, and they have no way of learning anything important about themselves and one another.

These two quotes would appear to be mutually exclusive, in that one couldn’t write a story in which characters learn important things about themselves while at the same time avoiding making any moral statement (now there’s a challenge for you!), but still, they’re both worth keeping in the backs of our minds as we write.