From the Adventures in Indie Publishing

Love is Complicated

If you decide to write about love, you're at the slight disadvantage of being in a line that's five-thousand years long. Thousands of writers have written about love, and now you want to do it too?

The competition is enough to make anyone pale. What can you hope to say that hasn't already been said?

You can take that attitude, but it could be applied to any subject you might write about, not just love. It's also true that love can be difficult to write without relying on the same old tired clichés. What you write isn't as important as how you write it. Arguably, it's all been said before. But the number of ways it can be said are inexhaustible. We're as intrigued about the mysteries of love as much today as the Babylonians were five thousand years ago.

Sentiment vs. Sentimentality

There's a big difference, though, between creating sentiment as opposed to sentimentality. Both have their place, but a love story that tries to be unique should depend on sentiment.

"But Mike, what's the difference?"

Sentiment is honest emotion. Sentimentality is pre-packaged emotion. A sentimental work borrows feelings from stock. Rather than create characters or events that generate unique feelings, the sentimentalist merely relies on stock characters and events that already come with their emotions included. But a sincere work—a work of sentiment—generates its own power.

How to Avoid Sentimentality

Sentimentality is subjective. The sentimentalist writes about the subject of love, rather than creating a story in which the unique relationship between writer and subject evokes genuine sentiment.

What sentimentality does is rely on the reader's experience rather than the fictional experience created by the writer. The reader fills in the blanks. The reader remembers what it's like. The reader, not the writer, does the work.

We never feel so alive as when we're emotionally aroused. It's not easy to accomplish that in writing, but when we take a short-cut by faking these emotions—by building them into more than what they are—we're guilty of sentimentality. Sentimentality is the result of exaggerating any emotion beyond what the context of the moment can express.

Sentiment, on the other hand, comes from context. With sentiment, you have the portrayal of real people and real situations. Sentiment becomes objective. It relates to objects (people, places, and things) in the story rather than generalized emotions.

But that's not the whole story...

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