The problem with writing a love story

Here's a kind of monologue about writing and love, I like the idea behind it and some of the imagery but I'm not happy enough to consider it finished. All advice is massively appreciated!

The problem with writing a love story is that everyone starts to look for the truth in it. Start it with ‘Once upon a time’, or ‘In a galaxy far, far away’; people will still wonder: ‘how much of this is real?’ There’s no escaping the fact that when you write something, you’re writing about the world you live in, the people you know and more than anything else; yourself. Disguise it however you want, your life will still bleed into the story until the point where your veins may as well run through the book.

                Someone will pick up your tragedy and read: ‘boy meets girl, one of them lives happily ever after’, and then they’ll say to themselves: ‘poor guy’, ‘how sad’ or any of those other casual, grossly understated clichés people save for condolences. Trust me, your characters may be two dimensional, the plot might be absurd but at some point you’ll betray yourself and the lines between the story and reality will smudge. Most people might take it for what you want it to look like, but someone’s going to see straight through the paper into you like the one-way mirror of an interrogation room.

                Plus, if you want to write about love it helps to have been in it, or freefalling madly into it or recovering violently from it like a crack-head being force-fed methadone. Everything your write is based on what you know or what you’ve been through, so whether you mean to or not you’re pouring those experiences straight into the paper. It could be like one bad penny in a batch of thousands and that truthful little bit of copper goes largely unnoticed, but it’s still out there.

                Think about a time when writing has spoken to you as surely as if you’re name was in the list of dedications at the front. You see yourself in things the characters do, in the dilemmas they face or you see a bit of your home, something uncanny from your past, something secret that only you, the book and the writer know. It’s like seeing yourself in a crowd, dressed like you, walking and talking like you. What if she sees herself in your story?

                That’s the scary part.

                Writing is lying, so much of it is hiding things, embellishing them, polishing reality with clever metaphors and pretty language. So much of it is representing something through something else, always writing in a roundabout way. But what if that one bad penny finds its way to the girl the story’s about? What if she sees herself so entirely in your fiction that denying it would only affirm your guilt? That’s the really scary part.

                It’s scary enough to stop your pen before you finish the opening sentence a thousand times over. It makes you wonder if the writing is worth the vulnerability, if it’s worth taking a quill to your life and scratching it across a page, stretching yourself out across a hundred thousand lines just in case someone sees something in it that speaks to them and tells them something secret.

                The problem with writing a love story is that it’s so entirely tied up with falling in love. I’m not sure if either of them are worth the mistakes you’re guaranteed to make, I guess I won’t be sure until I pick up a pen and start. I won’t find out until its too late to take my words from the pages, too late to pull them from your mind and back into mine.

                I suppose I’ll find out soon enough.

                Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl...  

Author's Note

I'm really stuck on where to go with this one, negative and positives needed.