"The Etiquette Of Love Has Changed So Much" |'One Day' Author David Nicholls

I’m in a thirty-year-old relationship and the father of two teenagers. Actually, I’m glad to be out of the ‘love circuit’. When I look around, I see that romance and the etiquette of love have changed so much. Earlier, finding love was a matter of chance. A lot depended on your luck. You’d go to a party hoping you’d find someone to talk to, someone you’d like to spend time with. You dreamt of getting to know a person and falling in love. There was no clear intention. Today, the approach is very direct. And there seems to be a great deal of rejection and humiliation involved, all out in the open.

The digital world is addictive. I’m not saying it doesn’t have its uses. When I find myself alone, I do spend time on Instagram scrolling through posts about books and writers. There라이브 바카라 a lot of book talk going on there which interests me. But I’m also aware that I need to step back at a certain point. The virtual world is no substitute for the real world, real life. What the virtual world offers is a meal without nutrition. You can binge on it, but it doesn’t satisfy you in a meaningful way.

What is romance without an element of mystery? Today, it라이브 바카라 possible for us to keep track of each other every single minute. We know where exactly the other person is, what they are eating, what they are doing…Don’t know what a person looks like? Pick up your phone, key in their name, their face pops up instantly. There is a problem in maintaining mystery. It라이브 바카라 hard to conjure a sense of yearning in our hyperconnected time.

I think I’m very lucky it라이브 바카라 still striking a chord. When I wrote the novel, I thought it would appeal to my generation. But I’m delighted that many young people walk up to me saying they read the book or enjoyed watching the series. When people tell me, “I’ve read your book”, I know which one they’re talking about! One Day was my third novel and it changed my life.

During the covid pandemic and the lockdown, all of us had to grapple with enforced solitude. People found different strategies to deal with it. In the time of the climate emergency, environmental anxieties weigh on our minds. Many factors are involved in the decision to become a parent, many anxieties come into play. There are those who make a conscious decision to not have kids. Others feel a sense of urgency to start a family as they get older. I have friends who are happily single and who cherish their solitude. But there is a lot of outside pressure on many people to not stay single. I try to explore some of these aspects about life in our time in You Are Here.

I’d been going on long solo walks for some years and it had become part of my writing routine. I would go for walks when I was stuck in my writing. When someone suggested that I write a novel about the walks, it struck me that so far when I thought of romantic comedies, I had always thought of the city as the setting. For this novel, I decided to put two people in a landscape and to make each stage of their walks a stage of the relationship.

I confess it라이브 바카라 a hard thing to do. What you have in a romance are tiny moments. The challenge is to make them exciting and entertaining for readers. You have to add tension and doses of humour to keep it interesting. I try to make it real and grounded. Romance is not all about sweeping a person off their feet. There is difficulty and boredom, different shades of emotions. You deal with good and bad phases. Lovers struggle with acceptance and forgiveness at times, which is a shared human experience. Also, there is value in keeping the characters apart. Keep them apart as long as you can. Add some missed opportunities and an element of uncertainty. That creates narrative tension and promises to hold the reader라이브 바카라 interest. I work out all the details of the characters’ lives at the start—their emotional landscapes, events that shape their personalities off the page, the clothes they wear, the music they like, who they are friends with. It helps to know them inside out.

When I am adapting a classic, I am aware that the moments in it may play differently now. An adaptation is a hybrid, a mutant. I decide carefully which elements to retain and which ones to discard. Script writing involves a lot of meetings and consultations with other people. Fiction writing is a gentler process. You get on with it in solitude, but it is very self-revealing whether you want it to be or not.