1. Puppy Love

Allie is a lowe class man while Sarah is from the upper-class. Allie falls in love with Sarah when he was a child. Can they ever find true love?

I was born into a family that always had a roof over their head and food to eat. I never needed anything and never considered that we were lower class. However, I did live in a time where society was divided into classes. Very few could boast that they were part of the upper class, while the majority lived in the lower class.

I was born in Ireland in a small rural town in the middle of the 19th century. I was the oldest of 9 children and my parents called me Allie. This is something other boys always teased me about as it sounded like a girl's name. My mom was always busy keeping our cottage clean, cooking and taking care of her big family.

Dad was a gardener and worked at the Sandalwood Mansion. He was a hard worker and proud of his job. I looked up to him and he seemed as if he was the wisest man in the world. I also admit that I kept clear of him when he drank beer. He could drink beer by the gallon. I always wondered how his stomach could accommodate so much. Despite my father's drinking habits, he worked very hard and believed that hard work brought you closer to God.

My father did not understand the Sandalwoods. They were the upper-class family in our town and landlords. My father never did understand how a man and woman and one daughter my age could live in such a big manor house and never work. He told me they had nothing to do all day and this must have made their lives dull.

Dad told me my destiny was decided. I would follow in his footsteps and be a gardener. This was a job I could be proud of. I would get blisters on my hand and be tired at the end of the day, but it would be a productive job and it had no shame.

So when I was 13, Dad told me that I would be working at the gardens of the manor with him. I would learn the difference between weeds and plants and learn how to landscape.

So I was now a gardener apprentice at the manor. The Sandalwoods had a huge garden and they expected it to look perfect at all times, so we worked very hard. The work was so hard, that I often just went to sleep when I came home. My mother would get upset at my dad and tell him not to work me so hard. Dad would just say I was a man and could do a man's job.

I remember the first time I saw Mr. Sandalwood. He was wearing a tweed suit and had a hunting gun with him. My father introduced myself and slapped my head because I did not take off my cap to show respect. He was a nice man and spoke with a funny accent. He welcomed me to the manor and hoped that my work would be as good as my dad's. Then he talked with dad about some work he wanted to be done.

Dad told me afterward that Mr. Sandalwood was a good man, even for a higher class man. However, he could be very demanding.

I remember the first time that I have seen his daughter. Her name was Sarah. I saw her in the garden sitting and playing with some kittens. I just stood there and stared at her with my mouth wide open. She was the same size as me and had long hair that had a huge and prominent ponytail. She had a small face and wore glasses. She wore the nicest dress that I have ever seen in my life. It was like everything went slow motion and I was sure that she looked like an angel. I could have stood there all day just looking at her. However, dad gave me a slap on the back of my head and told me to get back to work.

My life changed when I first saw Sarah! I knew that I was in love! Every time I saw her in the garden or seen her through the windows in the manor, my heart would skip a beat and I would just stare at her. I wanted so much to speak with her and even be by her side all the time. I wanted her to be my first kiss. I knew I had this sickness called love.

I knew another girl that worked as a kitchen maid at the manor. She was my age and fun to speak with. She has seen how I looked at Sarah and would laugh and tell me that I was doomed. There could never be love between a boy like me and a girl in the upper-class. Heidi could have been right, it would have been better if I loved Heidi and not Sarah, but my heart decided it was Sarah that I loved!

Sarah spoke with me one day. That was when I was singing in the church choir and done a solo. Sarah came up to me after and told me that I had a great voice and she enjoyed my solo. I stammered back to her, unable to put a sentence together. The girl I loved and admired finally spoke to me. She giggled when I could not answer and she must have thought it was funny that I was so shy.

She never praised me again for my voice, as it broke and now I had a deeper voice.

The years went by, and I was becoming a good gardener. When I was 19, I had more responsibility, because my dad left us to be together with a new woman. This broke my mother's heart that had given her best years to my father. It also meant that the oldest of her children had to support the family.

So I continued working as a gardener. I was good at it but did not want to spend the rest of my life in a garden earning a small bit of money each week. I wanted to own something. Sarahs lovely dresses and her style inspired me of dreaming about clothing the whole country. Even if someone was in the lower class, there must have been an opportunity to dress well. However I was poor, so this was just a dream. It was impossible to move up in the social ladder.

I still was in love with Sarah and would watch her every day as she took a walk through the garden. Sarah grew up to be a lovely woman that always had the nicest dresses on. Her hair was still a ponytail, and it seemed like it was perfect all the time. She would sit under a tree and read a book. Reading and learning seemed to be her favorite past time.

One day she stopped and talked to me as she was taking a walk. I was so shy around her that I never knew what to say. She would tell me about what she just read and I would listen to every word. It made Sarah happy that I quickly learned what she was explaining.

In time, Sarah found me every day and we would talk and talk. She was so intelligent but at the same time very stubborn. She would listen to my ideas, but if they were not the same as hers, she would roll her eyes and tease that it was my lower-class mind.

I was so much in love with her, and this was a hard secret to know. Only Heidi and my mother knew. They both told me that I was foolish to fall in love with a woman in the upper class. My mother said she could understand I had a childhood crush on Sarah. She called it puppy love, however, such love would only be doomed. They both explained to me that Sarah would end up marrying an aristocrat, and not a poor gardener.

Mr. Sandalwood could also see something was going on. One day he told me that he noticed how I looked at his daughter. He warned me that falling in love with her can only end up in disaster. Mr. Sandalwood asked me what could I even offer her. I did not earn enough. He told me that Sarah was raised in luxury with the best and she was respected by the people in the upper class. Mr. Sandalwood finished by telling me that I did not have the right status to be in love with his daughter.

Sarah knew that I had a crush on her. She would giggle when I flirted with her and call me foolish. This was probably true. I could have been content with being her friend. Even friendship was uncommon between people of two social classes. I should have listened to my mother and remember the social class that I belonged in.

I knew that Sarah was born with privileges and she was spoiled. She could never live the life of a commoner, that had no money and simple cottages. It made me think that love had so many limitations. It was not enough to love from the heart. One needed to have the right social status, the right religion, and the right family.

I understood that my love for Sarah was doomed. She was not in love with me. Even if she was in love with me, I could not offer her the life she was used to. My love for Sarah would force her to live a harder life, without a nice house, pretty clothes and good food.

I came to the conclusion that the best way I could love Sarah was not to love her. This was no easy thing to do. I tried to convince myself not to be in love with Sarah, but she would always have a special place in my heart. I would always love her!

You remember that I told you about the woman in the kitchen. Her name was Heidi. I knew that she had feelings for me. My plan was simple. I would court Heidi and see where it led. It seemed like the perfect plan. She had the same social status as me and maybe I could learn how to love her. Maybe she would help me forget Sarah.

Heidi was a totally different woman than Sarah. She joked and laughed a lot and liked to have a good time. She was fun to be with and yet she was so unpredictable. Like one day we were walking through town, and suddenly she went into the pub. We had a few drinks and I do not think I ever laughed so much. Heidi told me that life was to short to be serious and it was only human to want to be able to smile and laugh!

I continued courting Heidi. She confessed to me that she was deep in love with me and we should get married. This was very strange for her to say. She told me once that marriage ties people down so they stop having fun in their life. So the fact that she wanted to get married was big change to our relationship and made it suddenly sound so serious.

I was not ready for a commitment. I was not in love with Heidi. She was a woman I could have fun with. My heart was still broken because it loved a person that it could not have.... Sarah.

Still, I continued with Heidi. I was now 21 years old and have to admit that I lost my virginity one night when Heidi and I had too many drinks. I did not see this lovemaking as something romantic or something to do with love. Heidi considered it as a proposal of marriage. I considered it as a fun experience.

I smiled when Heidi mentioned marriage and told her we could talk about it another time. This delay did not stop Heidi from finding me in the garden and jumping on me planting a huge kiss on my mouth. At times we would simply roll around the grass kissing each other and forgetting everything all around us.

It was at one of these times when we noticed Sarah standing looking down at us rolling around the ground. She had this look of shock on her face and looking at me she said the whole situation was disgraceful. I started stammering again explaining to Sarah that it was not what she thought. I admitted that it was not done out of love. Heidi was in tears as she heard me say that I did not love her.

Heidi was fired from the kitchen. She wrote me a short letter telling me that I had no heart and that I used her. She wrote that she wanted someone she loved to have her virginity and the love she had for me was a big mistake in her life. Heidi left town to go to Dublin. I heard people saying that she was trying to be an actress and famous. Deep down I prayed that she would succeed.

When Sarah fired Heidi, it did give me some hope. I figured that Sarah did it out of jealousy. It never occurred to me that Sarah would be doing it for moral reasons. This gave me hope that Sarah loved me too. Our love was true love that would prevail and win despite social restrictions. The whole idea that Heidi was fired because Sarah loved me gave me new hope.

This was until one day when I saw Sarah walk with another man in the garden. Sarah as smiling and laughing as they walked. The man was definitely a gentleman and this made me assume that he wanted to court Sarah. I was never so jealous that I was at that moment. I wanted to jump on the man and beat him up. I wanted him to leave Sarah alone.

The next day, I went up to Sarah and told her that I was in love with her. I told her that I loved her since I was a boy. The whole fling with Heidi was an attempt to forget Sarah. I went on my knees and told her we were now adults. We could be happy together and defy social norms and expectations.

Sarah started blushing and giggling and then walking away. This was not good enough. I shouted and demanded her to answer if she had any feelings for me.

Sarah looked back at me and her smile was gone. She told me she had to find her father.

I was heartbroken. I thought it would be so romantic that Sarah would tell me how much she loved me. It seemed like the love between us was only one way! I did not go back to work and spent the next few weeks being drunk on my bed at home. My mother was worried and told me not to let this destroy me. I just continued feeling sorry for me.

After a while, mom had enough. She threw an envelope on the bed and told me to get out of her house and to leave town. She warned me that it was my responsibility to find where I belonged in this world

So I walked out of town and decided I was going to Dublin. I opened the envelope and never seen so much money. Mom wrote a note saying this was her life savings for when she got old. She wanted me to be happy and follow my dreams.

As I walked by the manor, I saw Sarah in the garden. She looked at me with a worried look on her face.

I whispered goodbye to the town I lived all my life in and I walked along the road to what the future held in store for me.

To be continued

Reviews

[JayG]

You are so going to hate me… Still, since this is listed as a novel, not a biography, and tagged as romance, there are some critical things you need to know.

What I have to say is unrelated to talent, though, how well you write, or the plot. But still, if you hope to please the reader …

At the moment you’re thinking in terms of plot-events and character history, and writing the outline of a fictional character’s history at a high overview level—a synopsis, not a story. In neither chapter posted is there a conversation or a live scene. But readers don’t come to a novel expecting to read the history of a fictional character. They want to be made to live an exciting part of it in real-time, as-the-protagonist.

Think about a horror story. If you read one, do you want to be told the protagonist feels terror, or have the events terrorize you, and make you afraid to turn out the lights, for the same reason the protagonist is in that state? Information or emotion?

Are you burning to know what my life as a child was like, and what my father did for a living? Of course not. So why assume the reader is aching to know the background you made-up for someone who isn’t real? Everyone has had childhood romantic experience. So why would they pay to read a summation of someone else’s?

The presentation method you’re currently using is that of a report—nonfiction. Fiction, however, has a set of skills and techniques unlike those we learn in school because the objective of our schooldays writing skills is to inform the reader, while fiction’s goal is to entertain them. And different objectives require different methodology. Where nonfiction is fact-based fiction is emotion-based. Where nonfiction is author-centric, fiction is character centric. And our schooling didn’t even mention that another approach existed.

In nonfiction we describe. In fiction we involve. One effect of the overview approach is that in what you’ve posted to date, no one addresses the protagonist by name. And we never learn how that character dresses. So while the protagonist appears to be male, that person could be female and gay, which would have a dramatic effect on the reader’s perception of that person. And while we get a dispassionate overview of what happens, we have little knowledge of the protagonist as a person. We don’t know their nationality, what year they live in, or anything meaningful. In short, you’ve provided the reader with no reason to care if the character lives or dies—just a, “This happened…then that happened…and after that…” summation.

But fiction can, and should be so much more. It can be intense, exciting, and filled with decisions and actions that the reader will participate in. If the protagonist trips and skins a knee, for example, we don’t make the reader know it happened, we make it so real for the reader that THEY will cry out in pain. And that empathetic connection with the protagonist—the feeling of living their life in real-time—is what the reader comes to us for.

But the skills necessary to provide that experience aren’t given to us, or even discussed during our school years, because it’s part of the specialized professional knowledge of the fiction writer, which, like every other profession, is learned IN ADDITION to the nonfiction report-writing skills we’re given to prepare us for the needs of our future employers.

And THAT’S what you need to look into. After all, if we’re not aware of the differences between a scene on the page and one on screen and stage, and why they are different; if we don’t know why a scene ends in disaster for the protagonist on the page—and must—how can we write one?

Your local library system’s fiction-writing section has lots of books on the subject and can be a huge resource. My personal suggestion is to pick up a copy of Debra Dixon’s, GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict as a first book. It’s a warm easy read, like talking with Deb about writing. You can download it from any online bookseller. You’ll be glad you did, because if you’re meant to write, you’ll find the learning fascinating. And if you don’t? Well, you’ll have learned something important. So in the end, it’s win/win.

Sorry my news wasn’t better. Still, since you can’t use the tool you don’t know exists, or fix the problem you don’t see as being one…

Hang in there, and keep on writing. If nothing else, it keeps us off the streets at night.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[Levi Levin]

Your writing is simple and easy to understand. It's the kind of writing that sells books. Down to earth and relates to humanity. Great job! Keep up the good work.