Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...that you have the setting, you must construct a plot around the basic love-story theme of boy meeting girl- which is merely the skeleton. Segal cleverly dresses up his skeleton with class conflict- he chooses a poor Cliffie as the girl his richboy hero meets- and a sad ending. The sad ending is a good device: it prevents reviewers from degrading fiction by calling it "light" or "trivial...
...WITH the plot out of the way, you must concern yourself with its handling. First-person is an excellent narrative mode: it allows you to commit incredible errors of style and pass them off as a characterization of your narrator. Segal takes full advantage of this technique (although his lapses are more the voice of a wisecracking writer than that of a Harvard preppie jock), which also permits brevity by enabling you to describe characters rather than illustrate them. The reader might not accept the words of an author who says. "Jenny was brilliant," but if Oliver Barrett IV himself...
Character, of course, is an integral part of the love novel. Plot and character must work together. It is advisable to add several secondary characters to amplify the basic falling-in-love sequence...
Segal's Love Story provides a good example of another use to which the secondary character can be put. Jenny's father, while having little to do with the plot per se. shows that Jenny is indeed from a poor Italian family, for now she is at Radcliffe this is hard to see in the girl herself. Oliver, of course, who has found this out, gives the reader reminders; Jenny's father is a subder means to the same...
...final element to consider in the handling of the plot is time. The passage of time can cause events as well as follow from them; that is, if you announce a movement forward in time, you can also have the characters accomplish an action without necessitating lengthy explanations. In this manner Segal has Jenny and Oliver fall in love without dragging the reader through a lengthy exposition of their developing relationship. You, like Segal, must invite the reader to participate: let him imagine how it could be that the protagonists could fall in love, rather than knocking him over...