Writing Love in Brief: 200 Two-Sentence Romance Stories

Written By D. T. Adams

Creating some of the shortest love stories around.

How long can a story be? Some can be hundreds of thousands of words. Others can be as short as two sentences! In early 2022, I was looking at random stuff online when I came across two-sentence horror stories. I decided to try writing some and quite enjoyed this different approach to writing stories. Eventually, I set myself a goal: I would write 200 and self-publish them as an e-book, Terror in Brief.

Having enjoyed writing very short stories, I thought about releasing some more, this time focusing on another genre. Even though I’m not a romance fan, I settled on this genre for my second collection of two-sentence stories. I figured I could rise to the challenge and produce 200 two-sentence stories all about love, relationships, dating, being single and everything in between. That’s how Love in Brief came about.

Naturally, some of the stories are inspired by various things that have happened in real life. Most of them, however, are made up. With romance not being my forte (I still don’t know what is!) I didn’t know if I’d be able to write 200 two-sentence romance stories (I wanted it to be 200 to match Terror in Brief). But once I got started, I didn’t find it too hard to crank the stories out, so to speak.

This is because, like horror, romance is such a vast, open genre. It’s a treasure trove of possible stories. After writing a dozen or so, I was starting to come up with ideas more frequently and quickly realised that reaching the goal of 200 was feasible. It still took me a good few weeks to get it all done, but I got there in the end.

I liked writing about all different stages of relationships, from people meeting to people leaving each other and everything in between. What I also enjoyed was coming up with scenarios in which relationships started and ended, and incidents that would have profound effects (positive or negative) on relationships.

Online dating is something that I wanted to incorporate into a lot of the stories. It’s very much the de-facto way of meeting people these days, though while it has plenty of advantages, it’s not without its disadvantages. I think most of my online dating stories veer towards the negative (perhaps a subconscious reflection of my own experiences with it!).

Some of the two-sentence horror stories in various Terror in Brief e-books have been expanded into full-length short stories. I probably could take some Love in Brief stories and expand them, but that’s not a priority for me right now. I’m not ruling it out altogether, though it’s not very likely.

Love in Brief

Love in Brief

Love in Brief contains 200 extremely short romance stories that are just two sentences in length. They’re arranged into the following categories:

  • ‘Single and Dating’

  • ‘Relationships Thriving’

  • ‘Relationships Failing’

Why Call It Love in Brief?

The first instalment in my ‘Two-Sentence Stories’ series is Terror in Brief. For the second, romance-genre instalment, I decided to keep the same title format. Deciding on a title was simply a matter of replacing ‘Terror’ with a suitable word to sum up romance. ‘Love’ was the perfect word for this. There was simply no competition.

Even though not all of the stories are about people being in love as such, I felt the word ‘love’ was still apt. After all, love is the backbone of relationships and relationships are the key factor that the stories have in common.

Why Split the Stories Into Three Sections?

When writing Terror in Brief, the plan was to present all 200 two-sentence horror stories in a random order. There wouldn’t be any logic or sense to the order. Shortly before reaching the target of 200 stories, I decided it would be better to split the collection into a few sections. I think it worked for Terror in Brief, so I did the same for Love in Brief.

The three section titles are quite vague: ‘Single and Dating’, ‘Relationships Thriving’ and ‘Relationships Failing’. I settled on these three because they cover just about every aspect of love/romance. I didn’t want to give them titles that were too specific since each section would have upwards of 50 stories in it and the stories are quite varied.

After settling on the three titles, I looked through the stories and assigned a section to each one. This was pretty easy since just about every two-sentence romance story in the collection naturally belongs to a particular section.

Did I arrange each section’s stories in a certain order? No, I didn’t bother. All the stories are standalone and I figured arranging them into three broad categories was enough.

Will There Be Another Instalment?

I’ve got no plans to write any more two-sentence romance stories. The romance genre isn’t my favourite, so it’s not one I’m going to dip into it much in the coming years. That being said, I’ve since released several more Terror in Brief e-books and plan to write at least one other type of Two Sentence Stories e-book.

Read Love in Brief If You Haven’t Already

Download Love in Brief and read some very short romance stories. You might enjoy them; you may even find some of them funny or even inspiring.

Here are the links:

Love in Brief - Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Kobo

If you enjoy what you read, please leave a rating and review. All feedback is greatly appreciated.

D. T. Adams
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