Better Than the Movies
Better Than the Movies
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Lynn Painter on Better Than the Movies
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
The genre she’d been watching all alongBefore landing on YA, Painter had already written and failed to sell a ranch romance set in Texas (she is allergic to horses) and a love story set in Tuscany she had never visited. Reading back-to-back John Green novels was what finally redirected her, and her agent’s suggestion that she try a YA rom-com turned the work from a task into something else entirely.
Writing was suddenly fun and comfortable and downright electric, crackling like I was creating something that I was supposed to create.
The genre felt obvious in retrospect. Painter had been raised on rom-coms by her mother, and when her Air Force family was stationed in the Philippines, the single base theater repeated the same films for months, meaning she probably saw films like Smokey and the Bandit fifteen times. The appetite had been there from childhood.
My mother introduced me to G-rated classics like Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, she watched and re-watched Neil Simon’s Seems Like Old Times with me, and then she let me loose and I devoured them all on my own. From Pretty in Pink to 10 Things I Hate About You, Notting Hill to You’ve Got Mail, I consumed every little bit of laugh-out-loud happily-ever-after I could get my hands on.
The premise followed directly from thinking about what a lifetime of rom-com watching actually does to a person. Liz Buxbaum, the protagonist, grows up so saturated in the genre’s logic that she has internalized its rules as a blueprint for her own life.
It was totally inspired by the idea that our expectations of the world are, in some part, shaped and molded by the things we surround ourselves with. Liz grew up watching and re-watching the canon of funny happily-ever-afters, so she expects fate and love to happen in a very specific way.
myfangirlchronicles.wordpress.com, “{e-ARC Review + Interview} “Better Than the Movies” by Lynn Painter”That gap between expectation and experience is where the whole novel lives.
How she wrote it
Post-its, epigraphs, and an ending she didn’t planPainter describes herself as a naturally unorganized writer, but publishing deadlines forced a system. What she arrived at kept her spontaneous scene-by-scene instincts intact while giving the overall structure somewhere to live.
I began visualizing my story almost in movie form, using huge (8x8) Post-It notes to document each scene from the book. After I had it roughly drafted out, I slapped all of those big neon papers up onto the wall of my office and began pulling them down, one-by-one, as I worked on each scene.
The chapter epigraphs, one rom-com quote per chapter, required rewatching every film she drew from. Pulling a single line from Notting Hill meant sitting through the whole movie again. She gathered far more good lines than the book had chapters to hold, and had to cut accordingly.
Every scene with Wes and Liz banter was my favorite. They were just the MOST fun to write, my sarcastic little trash-talkers, and I feel like I could write an entire book of the two of them just conversing.
myfangirlchronicles.wordpress.com, “{e-ARC Review + Interview} “Better Than the Movies” by Lynn Painter”The character names began as accidents. Painter picked Wes and Liz at random, then scanned her bookshelves for surnames, landing on authors she enjoyed. The literary consequence went unnoticed until the manuscript was already drafted.
I later realized that if Liz and Wes were ever to marry, she would become Elizabeth Bennett. And what better name could there possibly be for a hopeless romantic?
writerinterviews.blogspot.com, “author interviews: Lynn Painter”The planned ending was a prom scene, the kind of set piece the rom-com genre had trained Painter to reach for. But the emotional logic of the story had been moving somewhere quieter, and by the time she got there she couldn’t ignore it.
Wes and Liz’s dynamic was looped together with their childhood memories of her late mother and her inability to move on with her life. So instead of them kissing at the prom at the end of the book, they ended up visiting her mother at the cemetery.
writerinterviews.blogspot.com, “author interviews: Lynn Painter”The manuscript that went to Simon and Schuster was, by Painter’s own account, flat. Her editor’s intervention was not cosmetic. It produced a round of rewrites that added a structural layer that had not existed in any previous draft.
My editor at S&S breathed life into this manuscript. She was able to see so many ways to make it richer and more complex, and her suggestions led to a multitude of rewrites that added a dimension that simply hadn’t existed before. She took my flat manuscript and showed me how to make it 3D.
The personal thread
The husband who became WesWes Bennett’s specific brand of affection, sarcasm worn as a love language, had a real-world source. Painter drew the dynamic from her own early experience of not being able to tell whether she was being liked or simply teased.
Painter described her husband as the template for Wes in temperament: a good person whose love language is sarcasm and teasing, who messed with her constantly when they first worked together, making her wonder if he liked her or just enjoyed tormenting her — exactly how Liz experiences Wes. [paraphrased from audio]
The grief at the center of the book also had a personal texture. Painter chose senior year as the setting precisely because its sequence of last-firsts, prom, graduation, the first day of school, makes the absence of someone who died feel newly sharp at each milestone.
Sometimes I think when you lose somebody, after a certain amount of time, there’s the assumption that you’re over it. I feel like a lot of times it’s never gone, especially when you’re young and all of these monumental moments, whether it be your wedding day or your prom, or the first day of school, there’s that absence where that person used to be or should have been if they didn’t make it that far.
That observation shaped not just the book’s emotional register but its calendar: every chapter is set against a deadline that Liz’s mother will not see her cross.
What she wants us to sit with
When real life outpaces the scriptPainter is deliberate about what she makes and makes no large claims for it. Escapism is the goal, and the rom-com structure earns its keep by guaranteeing the ending, which is what lets readers laugh freely at everything that goes wrong before it arrives.
The most surprising thing I learned — or was reminded of — is that no matter who you become as an adult, the person you were as a child is always still there.
Liz spends most of the novel insisting she has outgrown her childhood self, and then proves, in nearly every scene, that she hasn’t.
The title was never arbitrary. Painter constructed the whole arc of Liz’s story so that the title functions as a spoiler the reader only understands at the end, once real life has exceeded the script Liz had been following.
The title of my book — Better Than The Movies — is, in a sense, the final answer to the main character’s misguided quest. Liz Buxbaum is obsessed with rom-com movies and is convinced that her life should follow the plot of a romantic film. She is a lady-in-waiting for big Hollywood love, the kind of running-through-the-train-station drama she has always adored. But life isn’t a movie, and nothing goes as she’d have planned. But sometimes real life and its messiness ends up being — wait for it — better than the movies.
writerinterviews.blogspot.com, “author interviews: Lynn Painter”