Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with a new story published each day during the week of Valentine’s Day. For this year’s installment, Vogue partnered with the publisher 831 Stories on a collection of essays and excerpts celebrating the art of romantic fiction. So break out the chilled red wine and silky pajamas, and read on.
Like most people with big dreams, I knew what I wanted to do early. As soon as people started asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I had a clear answer: writer. Obviously.
Everyone around me agreed I had the chops: I was an early reader and a quick one. In elementary school, I developed a reputation for being an exceptional speller. Teachers heaped praise on my prose. Yes, the people around me agreed. Of course you’ll be a writer.
I appreciated their confidence, but I was harboring a terrible secret: I didn’t know how to finish a story.
I started them all the time. In the second grade, I tried to turn a short fiction-writing assignment into a full-length mystery novel about a group of tween equestrians who uncover a horse-thief ring in their town. But I couldn’t figure out how to drop clues into the narrative, probably because I also had no idea who was actually stealing the horses, let alone how. In the final draft, the girls found their missing horses had not, in fact, been taken but had simply…escaped from their pasture.
I remember this incident because it was the first time I felt a particular clench of terror in my stomach—the recognition that my appetite had outpaced my skill, that the talent that allowed me to put attractive sentences on the page had almost nothing to do with the instinct and imagination required to craft a compelling narrative. I liked my sentences fine, but it was stories that I wanted, desperately, to tell.
Something changed when, toward the end of elementary school, I discovered a whole new genre of story: fan fiction. It was 1998 or so, and I had fallen hard for Hanson, a band of boys just slightly older than me with approachably relatable interests. (Their debut music video featured them rollerblading in an empty parking lot.)
As I clicked my way through hand-coded Geocities web pages, I accidentally wandered into paradise. The girls making these sites weren’t just scanning and transcribing interviews from magazines and collecting music-video Easter eggs; they were also writing stories. Stories about what it might be like to meet, flirt with, and even kiss these golden, beautiful boys.
I didn’t know it then, but immersing myself in this kind of fan fiction—the kind focused on romance—was also teaching me the standard beats of Western story structure. Almost everything I read started with normal girls in normal situations: rollerblading down their own suburban blocks or calling in to radio stations to win concert tickets. They were inhabitants of what Joseph Campbell, in his theorization of the hero’s journey, termed “the ordinary world.” Their call to adventure (or inciting incident, as it is sometimes known) was obvious: They would meet a Hanson brother. And then everything would change.
In conversations about narrative, much is made of the importance of characters’ goals and desires. And the girls in these stories wanted simple things, but they wanted them badly, in a way that produced stakes only achievable in teenage melodrama. Breakups always took place in the rain, the sky weeping for our heroines’ lonely, broken hearts. Sometimes makeup kisses were placed under the same stormy skies, the rain now a symbol of renewal…and also because we had heard that it was sexy when clothes got wet.
With the concept of desire now firmly in place, I started many, many more stories: five hundred, a thousand, sometimes several thousand words imagining scenarios and developing character. Describing the world as it was and then shoving it toward the one I wanted to inhabit instead.
But I still couldn’t finish the damn things. Wanting was a concept I grasped intuitively, but the rest of the hero’s journey—the part where you struggle and resist and change, where you go through an ordeal and come back transformed—that was still a bit beyond my 12-year-old ken. I mean, I knew the characters should get together, break up, and then end up together. But I was much more interested in setting up challenges for them to overcome than figuring out how and why, exactly, they did the overcoming.
By the time I got to college, I figured I wasn’t cut out for fiction. Very occasionally I composed three-scene short stories, using the brevity of the form as an excuse for vagueness. I got A’s on all of my essays and occasionally published articles in the student newspaper, but I felt certain that if I were going to figure out how to write stories, I would have done it already.
But then fan fiction came back into my life in my mid-20s. The journey there was circuitous, basically random. It involved spending a lot of time on Tumblr when I was supposed to be working and also starting to watch MTV’s Teen Wolf. Really, the details don’t matter as much as the fact that, once again, I was consumed by a fervor for making two characters kiss each other.
The fandom was relatively young then, and when I sought out fic, I couldn’t find what I wanted. But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if there had been a million stories—I had such a specific vision in my head for how these people interacted, how they felt about their world and each other. Eventually, there was nothing to do but to start typing it all out into a Word doc.
My first story was short: the requisite three scenes. But instead of the static brooding and aimless wandering I usually described, these scenes had direction to them. Dialogue, desire, humor. Life.
It was the first thing I’d finished in years. More than that, it was the first thing that felt finished in…ever? It wasn’t just that I’d gotten the characters to kiss at the end; I felt that I understood why they had to kiss each other. And I had gotten them to understand that too.
I built my way up from there: The next thing was in two parts and took place over several years. After that I threw myself into a series, where with each story I expanded my ability to world-build, handle character, braid in a side plot. But a love story was always at the center of every work.
Since then, I’ve published three novels and two novellas, with a third scheduled to be released this summer. There are plenty of ideas in those books, about girlhood and desire and celebrity and the internet. But every single one of them came to me first as a relationship: something unresolved but urgent happening between two people. It turned out that those feelings—that love, in all of its many and varied forms—had been the story I was trying to tell all along.