I love this quote.

 In fact, I think it sums up everything my writing is about: romance and heart break. I feel the quote has a resonance to my writing, like I have taken my own broken heart and turned it into art.

I carry the scars of love in my heart; my whole life, my broken pieces.

Very few people have not been touched by heartbreak, it is everywhere, in break-ups, rejection, death and wide-scale destruction, even. Heartbreak can directly affect one person or many.

“Many artists express art from pain and broken hearts and some sort of angst.”

Michelle Mont: Take Your Broken Heart . . . The Creative Cafe

Art in all its forms and expression has healing properties for the broken hearted, by allowing the artist to externalise the pain. By writing about my own feelings on heartbreak, I create an outlet for my own pain, through art. It provides some form of catharsis, to the internal turning of my mind – the self-doubt, anguish, regret, basically the lived human experience. Through the process of writing, I can release pent up emotions, that have caused me angst, sadness, and heartbreak.

Writing about these feelings, is as Matt Haig puts it perfectly:

“Externalizing some internal pain.”

Matt Haig: Happy Place podcast, Fearne Cotton

However, my stories don’t only seek to externalize this pain, they are also an attempt to understand love, to rationalize the irrational, in some way. To put words and meaning to a feeling, that is hard to share or conceptualise. Seeking to understand the complexity in love: how this one emotion shapes and defines my world. To examine feelings, emotions, and motivation with the reality of people’s lived experience, rather than a rose-tinted happy ending, that somehow rings with a falsity.

Each love story is unique, the people, the place, the time, the circumstances. I have never heard of a love, the same, as another. Dependant on the person’s personality and expectations too, as well as a person’s experience of love in any form, which can generate behaviours such as:  controlling, destructive, unrequited, bridge, equals, for instance.

I hope my writing is a source of empathetic understanding, a form of connection between like-minded broken souls. The aim of my books is always to reach ‘someone, let them know they are not alone, their feelings are normal, love is complicated, and we all feel lost and alone at times. I wish I had known this when I was younger.

Ultimately, through my writing, I am trying to understand love, if that is even possible, by focusing on the fractures and the heartbreak of my own love stories.