In both my completed manuscript and WIP, my characters start to fall in love for the first time. They’re both YA, what do you expect? Your teen years are for experiencing new things, and falling in love is a big one. But if you write YA, you could encounter one of two problems. These problems are likely only problems to you. Like I said last week, we writers are our own harshest critics.

The first common problem I have heard, mostly from teen writers, is that they have never been in love so they are speculating on how it might feel based on observations and reading. But then, I’ve never traveled in time or done magic, and I have my characters do those things. Once again, this is probably only a problem to you. People write on topics they’ve never experienced every day. I remember being shocked that the author of Memoirs of a Geisha was in fact a young American man. I wasn’t shocked that Orson Scott Card hadn’t attended Battle School or fought aliens. While falling in love is lovely, pun intended, I don’t think it is a prerequisite for writing about it. Plus, you could fall in love while writing it or after it is finished, and go back and edit it with personal feelings. Describe your own first kiss, and really know how it feels.

The second problem with writing falling in love scenes, is if it happened a while ago. I fell in love with my husband almost 10 years ago. Some authors fell in love, then fell out of it and are now disillusioned. Does that mean they can’t write a sweet love story? Absolutely not! I look back now and laugh at myself for the unnecessary fear I had when I started writing. Yes, it had been a long time since I felt those first stirrings of love, that precious first kiss, but the job of a fiction writer is to create.

An unexpected benefit of writing about first love, is reminding me of all the reasons I fell in love with my husband of eight years. Beyond his black hair and green eyes, his strength and calm that only add to his wit and sense of humor. Our wedding anniversary is in two weeks, and I find myself wanting to be as romantic and sentimental as the fictional characters I love so much. For the eight days leading up to our anniversary, I am going to send him a song that reminds me of our relationship, with our wedding dance song and the full playlist on the last day.

We tend to over think things that we feel we ought to have experienced, and think nothing of making things up. Pulling on my own life experiences, mixed with a unique world and endless research, is how I write. Do you add your own personality and feelings into your own stories? Have you ever felt the irrational fear of writing about something you have yet to experience?