Paging Mr. Rochester

I’m been thinking a lot about Mr. Rochester lately. Specifically, Mr. Rochester on his horse, slipping on the ice, and falling into the tender care of Jane Eyre. That has got to be one of the most romantic first meetings in literature and I’ve been thinking about it because I have two people in my new novel who are going to fall in love. (The nice thing about being an author is you can tell people what to do and most of the time they’ll listen.) How should they meet? How quickly should they know they are in love?  That’s led me to think about other great romantic meetings in literature. Mr. Darcy in full sneering mode comes to mind. Romeo and Juliet at the party. The poor anxious heroine of Rebecca running into Max DeWinter. My favorite romantic characters that I’ve written is Chuck Jones, who was the love interest in my first novel, The Fiction Class. He was actually the love interest in a novel I’d written before that, titled Courting Disaster, which was about a woman who gets engaged 17 times and then falls in love. It was a little dark, but my favorite part of that book was Chuck Jones, who was a smooth-talking and optimistic sort of person who I felt was perfect for the anxious and pessimistic heroine of that book. When Courting Disaster didn’t sell (though it did win awards!), I began work on The Fiction Class and had to populate the class with characters and I looked around and thought, why shouldn’t Chuck Jones sign up for a fiction class. Of course, he was impossible. Didn’t do his homework and whispered in class, and yet he was quite a bit of fun and Arabella fell in love with him, as did I. Unfortunately, it will not do for my new romantic hero to stumble across my protagonist on a horse, but I do think I have a fun way for them to meet. I’m thinking about it! 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *