“I love you.”

Three simple words.  We say them all the time.  To our family, to our friends, to those we grow attached to, who share our lives.  For some of us, it’s easy to say, so much so that it comes effortlessly.  And yet, through all that exercise, in the literary sense those three words can come across as almost trite.  Yet they lie at the heart of every great romance.

The funny thing about “I love you” is that, when reading a romantic subplot in a novel, often readers both anxiously await it, yet don’t actually want to see it happen.  After all, first and foremost the romantic subplot is supposed to be intriguing.   There has to be conflict, uncertainty.  There must be pitfalls, there must be difficulties, there needs to be forgiveness.  And, first and foremost, the reader wants to see something they haven’t seen before.  They want to be surprised.

It may be said that one of the greatest challenges in writing is the idea, however true, that it’s all been said before.  Writers struggle endlessly to come up with something fresh, something that, at least, they haven’t read before.  It is an all-consuming task, and one that comes with a great deal of self-doubt attached.

Of all the famous “I love you’s” in fiction, there is perhaps one that towers over all the rest: the iconic scene in The Empire Strikes Back.  In George Lucas’s sequel to his hit film Star Wars, the film begins its climax with a scene that was written very differently.  The script, in fact, featured an exchange between Han and Leia that was somewhat more verbose, in which Han essentially alludes to his return in the subsequent Return of the Jedi.  However, it was Han Solo actor Harrison Ford (who infamously said of Lucas’s script, “You can write this shit George, but you sure can’t read it.”) who made the last-minute changes that led to the fantastic exchange seen on film:

LEIA: I love you.

HAN: I know.

It’s so simple.  It fits the characters so perfectly.  And it was so original that it resounds even today.

That’s a hard act to follow.

A brief perusal of my recent posts makes it clear that reworking the romantic subplot has been, without a doubt, the most daunting task in my editing of Wide Horizon.  I needed to do it justice.  I needed to take my time, allow things to unfold slowly, more organically.  All of that, every word, led to the all-important passage I wrote tonight.  It was a grueling, pivotal moment, lots of raw emotion, and as originally written it ended with the two characters exchanging that three-word phrase.

After everything I’d written over the past week, that no longer seemed sufficient.  I wanted it to end with something new.  I wanted my character to say “I love you” without saying it.  I wanted it to be something understood, something implied, that simply need not be said.  The result was these two lines:

“Daena…I…”

“I know.  Me too.”

And I couldn’t be happier with it.