Weak Emotion
Hi everyone,
I didn’t get to write much today but that’s usual for a Sunday. I didn’t find any micro-tension pages (not because my writing was awesome, but because I didn’t read enough pages.) I deleted 15 words and spent some time working on word choice for my verbs—rush instead of run, smear instead of put.
But looking back on my week, what I’ve noticed is that my micro-tension additions are increasing the emotion in my manuscript. A wonderful side-effect.
In the last few days, eleven of my micro-tension editions focused on emotion. Five of which were about fear.
The current version of those five pages had no micro-tension even though my main character was afraid. You’d think that my POV character being afraid would automatically give rise to micro-tension, right? But nope. It didn’t. Reading it, I felt nothing. No suspense, no tension.
This shows me that either, I’m not great at conveying fear in a nuanced way, or that the scenes where my POV character experience fear overwhelm my brain and I’ve nothing left for presenting tension when describing the emotions (which happen to be fear).
Either way, it’s a message to me. Check any scene where my POV character (and future characters in future novels) experiences fear and determine if I’ve done any of the following:
1. Relied on a body sensation to convey it.
I’m learning that most times thoughts convey emotion better than physical body sensations. There are probably times when physical sensations are the best option—and there are still some in my current WIP. But more times than not, they aren’t the best way to convey the feeling. It was just the easiest way to get it across it when I was fast drafting.
2. My character just out-right says she’s afraid.
I’m not saying this is always wrong but it wasn’t right for any of my five examples.
3. Plucked a low hanging, obvious and perhaps cliched description of fear from my word tree that I’ve read a thousand times over the years and is thus right at the forefront of my brain.
Doing this, I think, is pretty much always a bad idea, except if you’re writing a parody. So, maybe it works for humor. Sometimes. Perhaps.
My take away from this is to create a list of emotions (sad, happy, fear, excited, nervous etc) and do a draft searching for them. Am I guilty of these three crimes above? If so, it’s time to change them.
That’s all for now.
Chat to you tomorrow.
Happy writing,
Joanne.
Micro-tension draft: 57 pages
