Prose Like Buttercream

Last night I watched a romcom, a total chick flick, with a couple of great chicks. The movie made me smile, made me laugh, made me sigh (like any normal chick) over romance and weddings. But mostly, it made me think, "I could write that. I could write that even better."

Yes, alas, it made me want to try my pen at chick lit, one of the few genres I haven't touched in my hundreds of false-start story experiments. It made me want to write happy, quirky, semi-predictable love stories where everyone says only clever or awkward things, live in apartments entirely too large for their salaries, dress impeccably, and figured out relationships in the span of ninety minutes.

In other words, froth. Like buttercream squirted out into little rosettes.

Excepting what I wrote in elementary school, one stab at a humorous novella in middle school, and one farce I wrote for AP English, I've always felt the need for a deep overriding theme in my fiction. No comedy, no pure entertainment. We've gotta have pain and grit and Big Issues in fiction! Occasionally this has led my mother to ask me if I'm depressed.

But I think I could write a chick flick if I decided to. In fact, I think I will. It would be such a nice change of pace, and I think I might actually get it done before too much time had passed because I'd enjoy it, instead of feeling bogged down and moody every time I let myself slip into the story. I'll keep working on other projects, but I've never managed to have just one...or ten...projects going at once.

I'd like to shake things up a bit. While I work on a screenplay centered on a marriage that's reeling after an affair, I'll sidetrack into this story to whip up a dashingly suave modern-day Prince Charming, who, of course, will chase after the heroine (a young woman who has great hair and even better luck). I do realize I'll need to come up with some sort of problem to drop in the heroine's lap. But instead of having her dealing with, say, her beloved sister's tragic death, it'll be something along the lines of a funny little love triangle involving the childhood friend who has just popped back into her life, or her plight to find a decent sub-letter for the the summer. Something light.

Bring on the buttercream.