Just like a piece of music won’t sound good if it’s played at all the same volume, writing needs to ebb and flow in its power and intensity as well. This isn’t always about the plot and intrigue, but sometimes it’s about your characters. Are they always running full tilt toward those windmills you have them chasing or do you give them a break and let them breathe a little?
They need to be larger than life, but if you also have them run full tilt all the time, they don’t get a chance to catch their breath nor will your reader. I mean, what will you do when you need that extra.. push over the cliff… if you’re already at 10, where can you go from there? Listen to Nigel — you need to leave a little room to get to 11!
At the same time, you’ll lose readers just as quickly if you start out with everything turned down mellow to only 3 or 4. There are times when basic actions are required, but other times understatement or blowing something completely over the top will work better.
That’s the current exercise in the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. The exercise was a familiar one since it was along the same lines as one introduced in Margie Lawson’s lecture on Deep Edits.The fun here is to take a random action in your manuscript and empower it so it’s stronger and makes a bigger impact or to take that action and trim it down until it’s so muted that it also created a strong impact on the reader.
Which one will work best? Trial and error baby. Sometimes you can get very silly with these and it shows. Don’t use that one. 😉 I loved the two classes I took from Margie and gained a lot of useful tools and ideas from them. I think it is possible to carry it too far, and that all things in moderation are necessary.
It was great to see Jodi‘s comment the other day about “sometimes–yeah, it does take a year or so for things you think you should know, and really do know, to soak in and become part of the way you look at things.” It’s always reassuring when she thinks I’m heading in the right direction, even if she’s not sure about my method of getting there. Is there anything better than when different approaches click together and you realize that you’re managing to run some of these processes in the background?