TECH: Find The Passion (an article summary)

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 18 Feb 2008

[Just an article in the flood of papers - but I thought I'd pass along the central notion to y'all. Hope you enjoy it.]

Find The Passion by James Scott Bell in Writer's Digest, November 2004, pages 24 to 27 talks about how to put emotional power into your writing. He suggests five steps:

1. Feeling authentic emotions
2. Playing with the possibilities those emotions create
3. Planning
4. Writing
5. Editing

So we start by finding the emotion. Pick the tone that you want, the emotional feeling, and then into your own emotional memories. Actors put themselves in the characters place and then imagine what they would be feeling. Remember when you felt the emotion. Remember what you saw, heard, smelled, touched, tasted -- what you felt! Other people use music to remind them of feelings. Get in touch with that emotion.

Next, we improvise. "In the theater of the mind, we learn to let scenes and characters play around; we keep things hopping in new and interesting ways just by giving our imaginations free reign." (p. 26) Take a character, and imagine them in a scene in your mind. What does the character do? How do they move, what are they wearing, how do they act and react? Where are they going and why? Now put in some opposition, another character, or a problem of some sort? Watch the scene unfold and feel the emotions, the struggle, the fight. Find the passion. Bell talks about the imaginary movie that we run in our own head.

Oh, and keep track of images or scenes that your imagination tosses up at odd times. I woke to the phrase "getting up on the wrong side of the Bard" today. I have no real idea what that phrase had to do with anything, but I wrote it in my journal and expect that sometime it may expand. Especially if you get images, take the time to write them down.

Third, we're going to plan the scenes. Analyze the results of the brainstorms and improvisation, and put it in working order. Remind yourself of the emotional tone that you want to achieve. Think about whether the scene you're working on will be mostly action or mostly reflection. Should the stakes be high or low? Are the characters working at the top of their game or are they recovering from a major scene? And make sure that the end of the scene makes the reader desperate to turn the page and keep reading. One hint: you don't have to resolve everything. Leave the reader wondering!

Fourth, write the first draft. Write your heart out. Many writers recommend writing the first draft passionately and quickly. Put the inner critic away and just let the words flow.

Fifth, finish the job. Clean up the draft. Cut out the big, stupid mistakes. You may be cutting entire sections, but that's okay. Then clean up the details. Refine the cliches, tighten up the wording, make those diamonds that you wrote sparkle.

"Great fiction is formed by heat. Feel your characters and plots intensely, write in the heat of passion, then cut judiciously." (p. 27)

When we write, we learn about ourselves.

EXERCISE: One line?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting 20 Feb 2008

Single Sentence Start?

    "Why didn't you buy it?" he said, and pulled the line.

What line? What happens when someone pulls the line? And who is he talking to, what didn't they buy, let the little gray cells agitate and spin dry, hear them fry in the crackling grease of your terrible hot pan?

I wonder just what kind of line he pulled, don't you?

When we write, we learn about ourselves.