I love love. Silly love. Playful love. My heart-is-full-and-ready-to-burst-with-joy love. I also prefer to laugh than cry, which is why I’ve written mostly romantic comedies. And not only do I love to write them, I also love to read and watch them on the big screen. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan, and 50 First Dates are just to name few of my favourites. Stories like those pull on your joyous heartstrings and leave you blissfully floating through the uplifting side of love. They inspire hope … and sometimes anger toward your husband who didn’t bring you home a bunch of flowers or leave you the sweetest note listing all things he adores about you. Poor husbands. (Btw, if you haven’t seen those three movies or read the books, I suggest you drop everything and do that now. You’re welcome. Thank me later).
In real life, though, love isn’t always rainbows and unicorns or finding Mr Perfect in the middle of a park on a summer’s day after you’ve tripped and smooshed your half-eaten ice cream into his shirt. Love isn’t always a romantic comedy with a happily ever after. It’s inconsistent, ever changing, and it transforms—a bit like Optimus Prime. When all is said and done, love is unpredictable.
So why do most people read romantic fiction? My guess would be to escape real life but to also relate, to identify with the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, and to see both the light and the dark. You can’t have one without the other, and that’s the reason I wanted to make the switch and write a love story that encompassed all there is to love. I wanted to write about the fear, the excitement, hurt, joy, and pain. I wanted to draw every emotion from my reader so they could feel the happiness of love and life but also the heartbreak that accompanies it.
Unspoken Words, my new release, is one of those stories: a real-life love story of hope, joy, laughter, loss, and pain. Think stories like Forrest Gump, A Star is Born, and Beaches. They take you on an emotional roller coaster and leave you feeling full, or empty, or perhaps both. They rip your heart out, stomp on it, break it into tiny pieces, and then stitch it all back together again.
Love stories are unapologetically honest, and they don’t conform to any set of rules. They are raw, poetic, and beautiful. And as a writer of all things love and romance, having the freedom to explore all of that without restriction was what I treasured most about switching genres.