Bright & Dark

After a long weekend of working with story structure, I joined a group of six folks working one-on-one with Dean on advanced story structure.  I was really excited about having the opportunity to do this because as far as I was concerned I had major structure issues with my some of my short fiction and had spent lots of time writing the first 100 pages or so of novels only to realize they didn’t work and throw them away before beginning again.

I thought I had my problem narrowed down to emotion in structure.  Emotion is one of several author decision points in a story, and it must be balanced with other qualities in order for the story to work.  Writing a blazing hot action scene?  There’s not going to be a lot of emotion, and if it’s there it won’t be written in thick prose.  Otherwise it’d throw a splash of cold water on that blazing hot action and put out the fire.

The issue I thought I had with emotion is what I called “knowing the emotional thread of a story.”  A story’s emotional thread, the way the characters feel and their motivations, their emotional journey through whatever happens, and how they are changed in the end is what makes a story worthwhile.  It’s my holy grail.  If it’s not there in any particular book I’m reading, regardless of genre (and counting, of course, what’s appropriate for that genre), I don’t care.  I am officially Dark-Willow-bored-now and outta there.

I labored under the mistaken impression that I should know all that holy grail stuff before I ever start writing, or at least within the first 1,500 words.  (Cue sinister laugh.)  Because I never really have known it ahead of time (even if I thought I did) I would often write until 2/3 or 3/4 of the way through a story or to about page 100 of a novel and then the thread would reveal itself.  Problem was, I hadn’t laid the groundwork — all the little clues my subconcious would normally place in the front part of the work — to support it.

There is almost always no way to fix a situation like that.  Hence the stories that fell apart and Humpty-Dumptied themselves (they couldn’t be put back together again).  Or all those thrown-away novel pages and re-drafts.

I understand now that that emotional thread in stories always shows up on its own.  It can’t be manufactured.  It can’t be engineered toward.  When I try, it shifts on me like quicksand.

What does work, however, is writing the story one scene at a time or one 800-1,500 word segment at a time.  And in this segment, I concentrate on the emotion.  That way, instead of trying to eat the emotional elephant of the story or the book, I am laying that necessary groundwork for the emotion point of the story, whatever it turns out to be.

It took me all five days of one-on-one work to understand all this.  Literally, to the end of the working period — it all finally clicked into place at that last group lunch.  In those five days I plotted a short story, 800 to 1,500 words at a time, concentrating on the emotion.  And I started writing a new novel, jumping off a dark science fantasy YA short story I’d finished a few months before, that I’d never even contemplated writing.

(The writing was a trip if for no other reason than my roommate was busy writing a very funny romantic suspense in the back room, and whenever the kids in my book were at their most terrified, she would cackle because she’d just written something off-the-charts hilarious.)

I’m still working on the book fast and furious, with my focus on emotion, one scene at a time.  You know what?  I’ve never had so much fun writing anything in my life.