If there's anywhere that writing truly is a numbers game, it in the characters you create.
It's a common misconception to believe that most romantic stories are about two people. In point of fact, most of them are about at least three people, and oftentimes more. Writing those characters off as "fluff" and "comic relief" is all well and good, but subtract them, and you'll soon notice just how vital some of them can be.
The idea of a "spare" or a "wedge," the front fork of your literary tricycle, is ancient, tested and largely understated. A couple searching for love in an environment that seems hell-bent on tearing them apart is compelling, certainly, but unless you're up for a lot of internal monologue that ends with a rush of "meh," you need a secondary agent.
Enter the spare.
Most stories, even love stories, tend to focus on one particular character at a time. Even if you wrap several such stories together, the reader's attention is better kept if it clings to someone with whom they can form a deeper, more lasting relationship (and not get motion sick when trying to shift perspectives without a clutch).
When you tear lovers apart or create obstacles to keep them from being a sensible, realistic, and ultimately boring match, you introduce a unique problem: how is the side of the pair you're focused on going to live out his or her angst without pages upon pages of what amounts to well-phrased LiveJournal monologue?
The answer, as you've doubtless seen countless times, is the spare.
A friend, a similarly-cursed companion, even an unimpressive enemy all make spectacular spares. The spare travels with the lead on their quest to find their beloved again. They can be fonts of insight, comic relief or purely a shoulder to cry on.
The more base examples serve as foils against whom the hero looks all the more bold and bright by comparison. They stumble, they stutter, or are shown as less moral, less stalwart, less resolute or less open-minded. It helps establish that the hero is an uncommon individual, set apart not by their circumstances but by some unique, intangible essence growing within them.
Others are the guides and guardians, taking the hero through their trials until they are worthy of the object of their affections. You can even combine the two, revealing the guardian's light-hearted side or giving the clumsy sidekick a sudden moment of clarity. These sorts of spares are either killed before the end credits or else happen upon a soulmate of their own somewhere off to the side of the epilogue, one with whom they can begin a sensible, realistic and ultimately boring relationship for all time.
From a technical perspective, the spare turns weighty monologue into witty dialogue; both a quicker and more emotional venue for outing the hero's feelings and devotion throughout the adventure. It also gives the audience and the author a mouthpiece in an otherwise heavily-biased circumstance.
Consider Romeo & Juliet, one of the classics, and notably lacking a true spare. Both sides of this torn and tangled affair are so busy being swept up in the melodrama of being teenagers forbidden to date that there's very little grounding the story in reality, giving it a very fairy-tale feel (which, being as it's Shakespeare, may well have been the point).
The spare adds a new dimension. If Mercutio had remained decidedly un-run-through till the end of the work, not only would Romeo have had someone to help rein in his astronomical hopes and dreams, but the open gang war happening all around them might have garnered more than passing mention as "gee, our parents sure are cooky."
As it stands, he did his best.
There's a flighty quality to personal romance that can leave some readers in the dust if they haven't wholly bought into the character's own affections yet. Just because your character is head over heels doesn't mean the reader is. Yet. Selling someone on the love-conquers-all motif helps if you keep it grounded in the beginning, which is precisely where having a spare becomes so valuable.
The spare is the friend telling you you're crazy, and then helping you plan the stunt anyway. He's there to slap you on the back of the head when your heart gets carried away and leaves your head behind. The spare doesn't stop you being hopeful and romantic. To the contrary, he lets you make a fool of yourself, and then is there to call you as much.
The idea of the spare is an insertion of the audience itself into the work. When you leave someone alone to hide in the bushes and stare at a girl in a nightgown gazing up at the stars, a modern audience is more concerned with "Is he a stalker?" than "What light through yonder window breaks?"
Having a friend there (or one to confront him later in retrospect) to chide him for being creepy lets the audience feel validated (and rules out for them the chance that you yourself see no issue with watching a girl on her balcony at night while hiding in the hedgerow). Likewise, as the story progresses, the friend can start to slowly see what makes the two leads such a great match, hopefully in time with your audience's own come-round progress.
It allows you to seed a hopeless romantic without letting the entire story be seen through their star-dusted lens. The spare keeps at least one element of the work firmly grounded in reality, leaving you room to at once hold both an optimistic (romantic) and skeptical (realistic) perspective on the exact same scene, which changes the voice from lovesick idealist to weathered, practiced dreamer, something this post-fairy-tale generation has come to crave.
In the game of subversion, it's your way of still telling a modern fairy tale of true love while at once denouncing fairy tales as hopelessly unrealistic and silly, which lets you catch both sides of the reader's brain no matter where they rest on the optimism spectrum.
But the grounding element isn't just to the benefit of your audience: often it's the only thing keeping your hero alive. In extreme cases, your idealist would walk into spinning blades to get to their love. Such devotion (read: "obsession") often makes them oblivious to everything else in the world, danger being chief among the things they overlook.
You can keep your hero supernaturally dedicated to their quest, their journey, their one true love, whatever the object be, while at once letting the spare be the one to help them through the very real-world obstacles that lie between, often gaining audience sympathy when his or her efforts go completely unnoticed.
When your lovers are kept apart not by environmental factors but by their own personal inability to drop the pretense and start humping like bunnies, the spare becomes a catalyst; a somewhat self-interested interloper dedicated to the two lovers becoming a couple for whatever reason (often just so the tension in the room will go down).
Even the matchmaking spare works to shatter the mega-romatic air that we often wrap our own relationships in by becoming the jarring element that pushes one half of the pair or the other over the edge; in effect, the spare distracts them from their own issues long enough for base instinct to take over.
The chief weapons of the matchingmaking spare are blunt admission and canny misdirection. These are the sort to set up a clandestine meeting between the loves, writing each a letter posing as the other until they find themselves alone and confused somewhere romantic and/or a small, confined space in which they can be easily trapped by the now-snickering spare.
When the only barrier between two people is their own awkwardness, the spare is often the one to grab the hero by the ankles and forcefully huck him or her through said barrier and into the unsuspecting lap of their intended. ...At times, literally.
The spare is prime for comedic timing and fourth-wall-stretching commentary to keep your romance from feeling too cheesy, or to help delay the moment of gushy goodness for as long as possible, to make it all the more rewarding when even the loudmouthed cynic in the room is forced to admit it's a little cute.
The spare gives your audience someone to connect with other than the main characters, so that even those long past sparking their first love or not caught up in finding their own can still delight in the third-person onlooker's perspective with a real and waiting shell standing there, smirking on the sidelines.
Which means, done right, the spare can turn out to be most beloved character of all.
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