(This is also why I do not often show the fanfic I write to other people what I write feels authentic to me as the writer, but I cannot guarantee that it will feel the same way to others. That is, after all, the hard part of writing a love story: convincing the reader that what the characters are feeling is authentic.

More often than not they feel trite and hurried, relying entirely too much on cliches in place of showing genuine, actual feeling. To be sure, young adult books (YA being what currently appears to be the most popular genre) tell a great many love stories, but an enormous chunk of them don’t read as very convincing. Unfortunately, finding a good love story has not been easy as of late. Similarly, I am not entirely opposed to the love-at-first-sight cliche, but I do expect any writer making use of it to, at the very least, use it well. Happy endings are appreciated, of course, but they are not an absolute requirement if the story is such that a happy ending would not be believable, then I am likely to be dissatisfied with the story in question if it tries to give me a happy ending when a tragic one strikes me as more appropriate. That level can be quite flexible, since I do not always expect complete and total adherence to lifelike verisimilitude, but I do expect that a story can, at the very least, convince me of the authenticity of the feelings on display. In general, I am amenable to all sorts of tropes and clichés, but what I do require is a certain level of believability. Of course, I cannot say for sure that the stories I, myself, write are any good, but I can say with confidence what kinds of love stories I do and don’t like. It’s what drives me to read (and write) fanfic, and why I return, time and time again, to romance novels.

The tiger's daughter