EXERCISE: Those Breaks!

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Fri, 29 Sep 2000 23:54:25 -0400

All right, in honor of taking a break from writing (with a piece that I enjoyed from start to finish!), here we go...

Let's consider the place of breaks in your story.  For example, have you noticed that often when the pitch of the story is very high, the hero will turn a corner and...

Slow down.  Wander around, enjoying the view of the art in the gallery (or something else similarly interesting, and not quite on the same intense level that has been going on).

And by the very act of relaxing, slowing it down, taking a few pages at a slower pace, the tension moUNTS!

This can be overdone, of course.  Readers will happily take a breath, a break, but they expect that we'll get back to the chase pretty soon, and you can't delay it forever.

So don't forget to show the villian (nemesis, opposition, challenger, conflicting antagonist of some sort) coming around that corner fairly soon, and the hero resuming the race!

Can you think of examples where this technique was used in a story (book, etc.) that you liked?  How did the author make it work?

Have you used this technique?  Wind the tension tight, then crank it up another level by having the characters disengage from their face-to-face confrontation?  Or similar?

Could you take a story you are working on, and add in a break?  What kind of break would your character take?  What would that scene look like, and what would be the focus of the inaction there?

Write?