...so there I was, working on the Dance with the Devil workshop. Happily trucking along, doing the blurb thing--and it hit me. It's all about emotional structure. The one thing I've been putting off for...has it been two years? Wow. I'm a procrastinator.
Back in 2008, I did a little work on it--not much, since I visualized it as some sort of double arc running just beneath the character arc. Like Dunne said, the under structure. I did a workshop on it for Nano. Only five people came. None of them romance writers. Two of them wrote children's picture books, and I wondered what they were doing in a geeky craft workshop. I don't think I connected, but it was good practice for my later videos. Doing the live-in-person stuff is hard.
Looking back on it, I shouldn't have started with such an obscure subject, but at the time, it was my blue soapbox--the one I jumped on even when people didn't want to listen.
Nowadays I sort of visualize emotional structure as spackle, or a layering rewrite. It fits all the crevices and bald spots, and expands--not an under-structure, but more integral. Thinking...
2 comments:
Integral is the word. I think of it not as a layer, but as a way of making room for the reader. It's something I can fix in re-writes, but everything goes better if I keep the emotional arcs in mind from beginning to end.
it does. :) Very true
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