Writing and romance

[Pro-Life_Teen]

I’m rather scrupulous, so apologies if this sounds a bit picky or lacking common sense.

For you guys who write-- you know that when writing you have to be realistic. And to an extend there’s a level of empathy towards your characters, otherwise it wouldn’t sound realistic and you wouldn’t get paid.

Now, another thread was started in this forum-- a man asking if RPing romantically * was cheating. Many replied it was. I said it was not, but now I’m not that sure.

I write both novels and at times RP with my friends. As I said before, this is text based RPing, paragraph form with proper grammar and such. We’re all writers.
And with both there may be situations of romance between characters. It doesn’t get to the level of typing about sex *, but interaction between couples can be flirty as it is in real life.

The empathy for the characters is not at all near the level of realistic feelings.

So I’m wondering, is writing about couples a sin? Would that mean that all authors or writers who have ever written a witty couple flirting, are cheating?

The corollary to all this being, is watching anything with romance as a subgenre sinful- not even porn, but a romantic comedy.

Thank you for the replies, I realize this sounds a bit scrupulous at the very least. I feel a bit stupid writing it out as well.

Again, thanks!**

 

[Pro-Life_Teen]

Bump?

 

[Flopfoot]

Unfortunately, I don’t know the answer .But I can still help…

If you had posted this thread in the Mortal Theology subforum you would get more replies than you knew what to do with. So I’ll report the post to the mods asking them to move it there.

 

[BlaineTog]

No, I don’t think so. You are not performing the actions, nor are you thinking about performing the actions. You are, as it were, thinking about someone else thinking about performing the actions. You are creating a hypothetical situation.

I think art gets an unwarranted bad rap a lot of the time. Creativity is a God-given gift, and beauty is one way God shows us he loves us. As long as your art isn’t leading people into sin, it’s probably ok (and note, there’s a difference between “portraying” sin and “encouraging” it).

 

[rwoehmke]

If you want to be an author and a good one, your characters have to be “alive” and "real.’ I am not talking biography but fictional characters that come so alive that one could almost imagine them stepping off the page. That means that the situations they get into must also have a reality to them. There are plenty of situations in real life that don’t deal with illicit sex and even if your characters are involved in licit sex one does not have to include pornographic detail to make them real. Authors like the Bronte sisters, Graham Green, Thomas Hardy, Flannery O’Connel were very good at this. The work of many very recent authors tend to give an impression that one cannot write without including prurient detail.

My youngest son asked me when he was at university why he had to read all those dull old authors and I told him, because they wrote well and if you want to learn proper grammer, syntax, and how to write more than simple sentences you will find they are a treasure trove. “Oh”, he said, I never thought of that." Read a lot and enjoy writing. both are wonderful pastimes.