Tag: Emotions

Contrary to Popular Belief…

Ships sailing off the edge of the world -- a flat Earth.I have not fallen off the face of the earth. Real life has intruded and decided to complicate life further. Nothing bad, just I have more than one person should have to do at once. The number of demands on my time, my attention, and my car are quite high this week.

My in-laws are coming this weekend so trying to get the house in shape for that is a Herculean effort. Hey, why can’t they send me a demi-god to take care of all this? I’d be tempted to reroute a river to get rid of the clutter but unfortunately, our stable sits at the top of a hill and I don’t think it would work.

I don’t know why I feel so overwhelmed lately. The weather has changed from sunny and in the low eighties to cloudy/foggy in the mornings and settling in the upper sixties during the day. Usually I thrive in that temperature range.

I think the lack of colorful fall foliage has a lot to do with my fall downturns. I grew up in western Maryland near the Blue Ridge Mountains. Lots of color there. There was a huge red maple at the foot of our driveway. Giant leaves would turn a brilliant golden, shift to a fiery orange and finally turn a flame red. When the calendar claims it should be fall and everyone else is talking about the fall colors and the frost and everything else, for the last dozen years I’ve sat surrounded by people wearing shorts.

I haven’t had time to do more than my daily journals this week. I did pull out a set of index cards and printed off my spreadsheet layout of what are essentially digital index cards to work on adding emotional notes on the back of them. Unfortunately, the kids had other ideas and needed too much help with finishing their homework.

I need to come up with a set for the other two stories that I’ve been working on lately: the food critic and the spinster who’s going to the masquerade ball. I think not knowing the exactly sequence of events and then what emotional state the characters are supposed to be in at those various points along the plotline are making themselves into a convenient excuse not to work on them. If I exhaust every excuse I can come up with, I think I’ll have a better shot at working past all these self-erected obstacles.

Emotional Composition

Comedy and Tragedy MasksThe exercise today on Romance Divas in their author of the month workshop with USA Today Bestselling Author C. L. Wilson is to take a scene we’ve already written and revise it so that it has a completely different tone. I’ve been thinking about which scene to use and am coming up with a blank, but that’s what inspired the comedy/tragedy masks today. They also fit with the recent emotional ideas and themes I’ve been looking at recently.

You’ll be glad to know I’m finish reading Dunne’s Emotional Structure! However, I’m not quite done thinking about or talking about all the strings and connections that I’m going to need to figure out how to seamlessly manipulate in my writing to move forward with what should be character-driven romance stories.

I realized this morning I’m freaking myself out and making writing those three sentences harder than necessary. I need to cultivate better habits regarding how I come up with and save ideas. I have a bunch of loose notes that are mostly character sketches and my story ideas are even rougher even if they may include several thousand words worth of “notes”.

It’s scary to admit, but it’s true. Mistress of the Storm is nothing but notes really, the same with Beneath His Touch – both are pretty much just opening sketches. What became Revealed started with much fewer notes, but, again, an opening sketch. I liked how Dunne compared the process to an artist’s sketch. You start with gesturals and move to more detailed sketches to make sure you’ve balanced your composition. I’ve done a lot of opening gesturals, but unfortunately, I only focused on one corner and never really took a necessary step back to look at the big picture.

I need to buckle down and work on coming up with complete ideas that go from beginning to middle to ending. I plan to practice this by setting aside time to brainstorm ideas and polishing them to that three-sentence stage. Later, I can take those and work them up to three pages. I want to acquire the habit of thinking bigger than just character sketches or laying groundwork for the conflicts between the main characters.

Architecture of Emotion

I got some phenomenal feedback on Revealed from several Divas. Jodi suggested some great websites: Michael Hauge’s article Screenplay Structure and The Unknown Screenwriter’s article on Transformational Character Arcs. She also recommended the book Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot by Emmy award winning TV producer Peter Dunne, which has me itching to dig more into the architecture of emotion.

Jasmine also gave me excellent feedback much in the same vein – a need to see more justification behind the actions shown.

People (Hi, Bria and Jennifer!) have also said it needs to be longer. I’m good at making things over complicated. Considering the female lead was pulled from an abandoned novel idea, trying to fit her story in 1k words and even ending up with 2400 didn’t give it room to fully bloom. More experienced writers could probably pull it off, but not me.

This building characters from the ground up in a static medium is MUCH trickier than constructing them with more outright “told” and emergent behaviors that I’m so used to doing for online role playing games. So, it’s back to the drawing board (or at least will be after a weekend of camping with no ‘net) and burying my nose in theory again.