Let’s start with the definition of to romanticize, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: “to make romantic : treat as idealized or heroic.”

I would argue that authors of fictional novels and stories are almost obligated to be natural-born romantics. What is a novel if not an idealized telling of scenarios coming from real life. Your typical romance plot will have at least a few tropes such as “enemies to lovers”, or “the knight in shining armor”. These are tropes for a reason, in that they are reoccurring themes that create the ideal outcome and overall fantasy that the reader is drawn to because they cannot find it in the real world.

Even books dealing with dark themes like post-apocalyptic dystopias present them in a romanticized manner. Having a modded dune buggy a la Mad Max is probably not the most likely outcome in the case of a post-nuclear war world, but it fits in perfectly to a fantasy world with characters whose exaggerated personalities make them living caricatures.

Even suffering is romantic in many novels. How can you capture the human condition and evoke an emotional response in the reader if you do not romanticize even the darkest parts of your character’s journey.

Given this, the writer needs to be able to see the world through rose-tinted glasses in order to craft these fantastical stories which allow the reader to escape the mundane and explore the limits of their imaginations.

What do you think? Is the writer always a romantic at heart?