Bernard Batubara: On Stories, Love, and Heartbreaks

My first novel draft was a love story. I wrote it when I was in junior high school. It was about the life of rebellious high school student and a love story that blossoms with a classmate. A cliché, I know. Like a template. But it was only this kind of stories that crossed my mind the first time I tried to write a novel. The draft was completed in 2 years. I sent it to a big publishing company in Jakarta, and got a rejection letter 6 months after. At first, love-themed stories (and heartbreak; these two are actually a unit; it is impossible for each one to be written on their own) became the fuel for my writing. Simply because I felt that these stories were the ones closest to me. It was a theme I thought I understood the most. Actually, I wanted to write fantasy like Harry Potter novels, but all the monsters I could imagined already made their appearances there. I felt less imaginative to write fantasy and I didn’t read enough to write a history novel. So, I wrote romance.