the raven king countdown → day five
OTP What is love x Baby don’t hurt me
I have very few important photos of Lover and I.
Wait, let me back up.
It’s a bit of a grim thing to realize that if, as a writer, you’re actually throwing yourself properly at a novel, it’s going to eventually be a sort of thesis statement. With every stroke of character development, you’re asking yourself, do I really think that if x happened to a person they might become y as a result? Do I really believe that trigger B might cause action F?
Do I think there’s a difference between friendship love and romantic love? And a possibly more relevant question for this series, do I care?
For the longest time, I had a post-it note stuck to my computer while I was writing the Raven Cycle. My handwriting exhorted me to remember that the worst thing that could happen to the characters was they could stop being friends. The importance and greatness and pain that is friend-love often gets the shaft in fiction, so I wanted a series where friendship was the most important stake.
But there are romance relationships in the series, too, increasingly important ones, and as I wrote this messy pile of passionate friendships, I realized I was going to have to produce a thesis statement in this novel. Did I think that romantic love and friend love were different? And if I did, how did I think they were different? I already knew that the answer wasn’t physical attraction. Physical crushes are not love, and asexual folks have romantic relationships.
What’s the difference, Stiefvater? I asked myself. Think carefully because this is going in writing.
So it turns out that I have very few photos of Lover and I. I have a billion photos of my close friends and I doing all kinds of ridiculous shit and having all sorts of endearing moments. And there are many photos of Lover that I have taken and photos of me that he has taken. But although we are often together, there are few photos of us together, and the ones that we do have are usually during pointless, touristy moments of our lives. The reason for that isn’t a lack of investment, but rather the opposite. In those most essential moments of usness, there is no one else close enough to take a photo of us, and in any case, the importance of the moment wouldn’t show up on camera anyway. How do you take a photo of a conversation in the middle of the night or capture how a ragged sigh fixed everything wrong with an evening? And even if we could get that on film, who would we show such a photo to anyway? We don’t need it for each other. We’ll remember it.
That’s not a full answer, because I don’t have words for why my relationship with Lover is different than my relationship to my friends. It’s intangible, suggested not in the stuff that’s said, but the stuff that doesn’t need to be said. Not in the photos we took, but the ones that we didn’t need to take.
It’s hard to shove a truth you don’t quite have words for into a book — books tend to be made of words — but I did my best. And hopefully as the group begins to pair off and fracture and repair in the final book, it’ll feel true to the reader, too, even if they don’t have words for it, either.
