"The Things We Do For Love"
...
What is a love story without a happy ending?
It's just all the trials and tribulations in between that make it seem like it's all too much effort with nothing but pain and misery punctuated by a few moments of utter delight.
I'm sure a story where everything works like clockwork might have been easier, but the thought of having some meaty characters standing between them and ultimate happiness was more interesting.
The idea of Emile, or the Turk, being an affable person, was modelled on Sidney Greenstreet, a rather interesting actor in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, and I'd just seen his performance in The Maltese Falcon.
When I first started the story, I wanted Michelle to have a secret, but at the time, it wasn't for her to be a prostitute, simply a fashion model who fell in with the wrong crowd and got into trouble with drugs and the high life.
But that wasn't interesting enough. By that time, I was dabbling in the thriller genre, and realised I couldn't write a Mills and Boon-type book, so it veered into thriller territory.
Who doesn't like a guy who wants to rescue a fallen angel?
Why not make the fallen angel an avenging angel? Her friends help her escape, and then she decided to help her friends escape to the freedom she fleetingly had, and now, determined, would have again.
But, the idea of freedom and the actual getting of it are two entirely different concepts. 400 pages worth of angst, setbacks, love found, and love lost, the love found again. Henry might be a little too naïve, but he had to be to provide the extreme contrast in backgrounds and notions of what life is like.
...
Words written 3,914, for a total of 111,685
No comments:
Post a Comment