The Rom-Commers

Throughout the novel, Emma and Charlie struggle to revise the rom-com screenplay while they simultaneously grapple with their feelings about love and the romance building between them. In this way, the screenplay serves as a symbol for Charlie and Emma’s relationship and how their feelings about love and themselves must evolve for them to have their happily ever after. The screenplay starts as a farce of a rom-com, using all the clichés of the genre but none of the heart. Emma describes how Charlie didn’t include any romance in the original draft, and the things he did include were not at all romantic. She suggests that they research romance to put some real feeling into the script, so they mimic many of Charlie’s original scenes by going line dancing and falling on one another to see whether these things are romantic. Though Emma tries to show Charlie how his first draft is not romantic, all these things only seem to bring them closer together.

As they revise the screenplay, Charlie and Emma start to get in sync with one another, and Emma says, “Maybe writing was our shared love language. [...] We liked the process” (137).