Love Story Theme


The love story theme happened accidentally. Or so it seemed - but ultimately I came to believe my grandmother was prompting my writing from beyond the grave!

Why my belief? Because I had no sooner created the characters than they became independent of me - doing their own thing, ignoring the plans I had for them! It was my heroine especially who behaved so willfully - a heroine fashioned to a degree on my grandmother's character.

I'd best explain that grandma had been an actress who gave up the West End stage to marry a foreigner and live with him and his outlandish family in a castle in Czechoslovakia.

I had never understood why she did this, since she had lived for the theater, or why she often expressed her wish for me to write her life-story. It was long after she died that I realized hers had been a most unusual life. But I was no biographer.


My mind was too fertile to stick to facts, even had I known them. Knowing no more than the basics, beyond which she had never elucidated, I suddenly and inexplicably had the strong urge to set to work on a romantic novel that took the thread of grandma's life and then went where this led.

Well, incredible events emerged - and I was sometimes staggered by their emergence! It was soon as if I were simply a witness to all that was happening to the characters. Did I say 'happening to them'? By their wayward actions, they were making them happen!

I seemed to have no control over their behavior - some of which I found truly shocking!

So who was in control? Whose fingers were directing mine over my keyboard to produce these dramatic and sometimes tragic developments?

Obviously I can't say for sure, but when words appeared on my computer screen that I did not even understand until after consulting a dictionary I began to have my suspicions. Grandma was a strong-willed woman, you see, and I doubt that even death would stand in her way if she'd made up her mind that her wish was finally to be fulfilled through me!

What was I to make of the love story theme that had seemed to evolve all by itself? If my grandmother was really behind my writing, was she telling me that the events I had documented were based in reality? How thrilling, if so, since I had always had the impression that she had somehow missed out on true love.

You see, I had never even seen my maternal grandparents together in the same country! I had visited grandma often in London and grandpa less often in Vienna. But I had danced with him, on a boat on the Danube under the stars, and seen the expression in his eyes when he spoke of her. That he loved her still was all too evident... but how did she feel?

Maybe I now know. Maybe she had told me as words poured ostensibly from me onto paper. Or maybe mine is just another of those sad love story books that are out there to entertain!