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EMOTION EXPLOSION ©2000-2008, Vicki Hinze
WARNING: This is a no-edit zone...
Between a contentious election, the economic crisis and all of the additional challenges triggered by both, emotions are running high.
Doubt it?
Philadephia wins the World Series, and fans and supporters react by rocking cars, doing damage to a news van and setting fires in the street. This is not normal “we’re happy about this” behavior.
This morning, a San Francisco WGO radio talk show host called for the death of Joe the Plumber. A citizen whose only crime was to ask a question that some don’t like the way their candidate responded. This is not normal “we’re upset with our candidate’s answer” or “we wish you would never have asked” behavior.
A young woman “gets in the face” of a seventy-year-old woman because she didn’t like her political button. This behavior was urged by the candidate. “Get in their faces and....” This is not appropriate conduct, or being respectful for anyone’s freedom of choice. It was wrong for the confrontational woman. It was wrong for the candidate.
This morning, we’re waking up to news that one of the candidates’ plans, if implemented, will bankrupt the coal industry and for everyone energy costs will skyrocket. (The candidate’s words, not mine.) That’s got a lot of people erupting in an emotion explosion.
Everywhere we look, people are acting as if they’ve lost it, saying and doing things they would normally never do. It’s a time of hyper-stress. Hyper-emotion.
Characters endure times of hyper-stress and emotion, too. But I would be judicious in having a protagonist act in the unacceptable conduct ways that the individuals referenced above behaved. Why?
READ MORE
Tags: emotional reactions, heroic behavior, emotion explosion, Vicki Hinze, writers library, authors, novelists, emerald coast writers, creative writing
WARNING: This is a no-edit zone...
In the last week, every email that I’ve gotten from those who read this blog has related to crisis and stress. Understandable, considering.
Stress either builds slowly over time or comes on like a gangbuster and body slams you. Either way, we know that stress kills. Many try to ignore what has them stressed. They deny, rationalize, ignore, suppress, or otherwise attempt to hide from the stress factors that are burdening them.
It doesn’t work. And the impairments that come with it impact you emotionally, spiritually and physically. There is no calm, peace, serenity and the physical body rebels against all those things. You see headaches, body aches even nausea and colon challenges. The entire body can be impacted and tossed into turmoil.
What does work?
Dealing with the stress.
How do you do that?
Get physical.
Exercise releases endorphins that counter the chemical imbalance stress brings on.
Get rested.
Weariness and exhaustion destroys our ability to make calm, rational decisions or to set our course of actions.
Get smart.
Whether your worries are personal, your private business, your professional business, the nation’s business--get informed. It’s impossible to make wise choices when you don’t know the details. When you understand the challenge, then you can focus on the solution.
Making that shift--from the challenge to the solution is paramount in lowering your stress level. Why? Because command of the matter gives you confidence that the decisions you make will be good ones, seated in wisdom.
These are stressful times and they’re going to get worse before they get better. Every generation has its challenges, and this one is no exception. That isn’t always a bad thing. It’s not pleasant, but challenges have value. If we elect not to ignore but to deal with these challenges, we often discover what we stand for, what we will not stand for. We discover our strengths, our character.
We discover ourselves . . .
Blessings,
Vicki
Vicki Hinze
www.vickihinze.com
The stork has landed...
I'll be out a few days! :)
Blessings,
Vicki
WARNING: This is a no-edit zone...
Americans have a way about them.
They can be preoccupied, put things on ignore, or even be apathetic, but when disaster strikes, they pull together and strive to meet needs.
We saw it after 9/11. Countless acts of mercy and compassion. Caring and comforting, whispering shouts of hope.
Throughout our history, Americans rise to challenges, and not just our own.
READ MORE...
WARNING: This is a no-edit zone...
As human beings, we snip phrases like “S/he’s got the bug.”
We might mean a virus (very much on my mind as one’s laid me low for the past four days) or we might mean an intense interest in something like writing or photography or a desire for a new car.
Having the bug isn’t limited to any one thing, of course. I remember back in high school, one of our children getting the bug on oceanography. He was mesmerized by it and that interest impacted the direction of his life. (The lesson shared is that in some lifelong interests can and do develop early.)
Many of us get the bug to write. It manifests . . . READ MORE . . .
WARNING: This is a no-edit zone...
We dodged the bullet--or the eye of Gustav--but even in Florida, we’ve been under tornado warnings most of the morning today. They’ve been spinning off an outer feeder band, coming up from Destin, Fort Walton Beach, and Santa Rosa.
My mom’s family, in harm’s way in Gulfport, Pass Christian and Waveland as well as New Orleans are all evacuated and safe, last I heard, which has been long hours ago.
I’ve failed to reach extended family in Marrero on the New Orleans westbank, but so long as the Harvey Canal tunnel holds, they should be okay. My hope is that they too evacuated and just haven’t yet gotten through. As you can imagine, phone lines are really busy at times like this.
Since this storm had New Orleans in its cross-hairs for days, I did something I’ve not allowed myself to do since my mother’s death. READ MORE...
Is the Prologue or the Flashback an asset or a liability?
Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? But this is a case when what seems to be isn’t--not that a response is ultra complex, it just requires judgment calls, and we all know those can be tricky. But as authors, we make judgment calls all the time. So we’re experienced, and that helps but let’s face it, we all wish there were a few guidelines and tests we could apply to the work to assist us in making those judgment calls. So I’ve been pondering on this for a few days and thought I’d share my thoughts. As always, writers, take what works and rings true and helpful to you and ditch the rest...
THE PROBLEM.
The problem with prologues and flashbacks is that they’re passive (even when written actively). What’s occurring on the page has already happened. That diminishes urgency, suspense (doubt about the outcome) and that typically diminishes interest. Passive isn’t always a bad thing, and there are times when we want the psychic distance it creates and the distance between what’s occurring on the page and the reader. In other words, for valid reason we don’t want the reader up close and personal experiencing what’s happening and feeling the full emotional impact of what is happening.
The challenge is that often times we fall victim to this challenge not deliberately but unintentionally. So we diminish that which we don’t want diminished and create distance when we don’t want it or need it--when it doesn’t best serve the story.
The problem with passive specifically is it’s stagnant. So nothing is really happening right now, which means the forward momentum of the story is at a dead halt. That’s dangerous turf for the story which makes it dangerous turf for the writer. Why is it dangerous? Because if nothing is happening what is to inspire the reader or even to encourage the reader to keep reading?
Stagnant text/storytelling inspires and encourages or fosters opportunities for readers to put the book down. If a reader does so often, odds are against them picking the book up again--and even if they do, they’re not as likely to feel satisfied at the end of the book as if they’d read without that “put it down” urge.
Think of it this way... How many times have you been reading a book, knowing it’s late and you have to get up early and you really should go to bed now but you just want to read one more chapter, or scene, or page? Think about it. Hard. Then ask yourself: How many times when I had that feeling was I reading a prologue or a flashback?
My guess is not one. That you were neck-deep into active story. Neck deep into the fictional dream.
Both the prologue and flashback create a fictional dream (provided the author does his/her job). But the fictional dream either creates is a different and separate (if related) fictional dream from the one in the active story line.
The dangers in that? Think divide and conquer. Diffusion of focus, attention, interest, investment.
When you’re talking a financial portfolio, diversity is a good thing. When you’re talking about a reader’s emotional investment in a novel, it’s not a good thing. And if it’s really abused, it’s a kiss of death.
That isn’t to say that a prologue and/or a flashback is to be avoided. Some are story-essential. But it is wise to make sure any prologue you incorporate or any flashbacks you give story space have earned their place on the page.
Okay, but how do you do that?
First, kill them. Not in the novel, but in your mind. If you can tell the story well without the prologue or the flashback, then you don’t need them. You can avoid the complications that can arise, like the chalenges mentioned thus far, or the real potential of the reader getting more interested in the flashback story or prologue events and resenting being brought to the active story. That’s a major hurtle to overcome.
So kill the prologue/flashbacks. If the story works without them, great. If you can make it work well, then by all means do it.
If they won’t die--meaning, you can’t effectively tell the story you must tell without them--then let the prologue and/or flashbacks live. They’ve earned their space on the page.
By the way, this is also an excellent test for secondary characters--to kill them, if you can and if they refuse to die, then and only then to let them live.
But back to prologues and flashbacks.
Another challenge with both, but particularly with flashbacks, is transitions.
Often writers will write long passages, trying to bring the reader from then to now or to take the reader from now to then. This is problematic for a multitude of reasons, but I’m a simple person and think in simple terms, so I’ll share my version of why.
Think of a transition as a bridge that takes you from one bank to another. If it’s a long bridge, the span of it is weaker, right. You see bridges with all those support beams and tension bars. Well, a transition in a book is the same way. Sprawl it out and you better support it or you’re going to find your readers dumped in the river between the banks along the way.
The goal is to get the job done. Get the reader transitioned and get on with the story---the sooner, the better. So keep transitions short and vivid.
You might use an object or a phrase that cues the reader that they’re about to shift into or out of a flashback.
Example. A ticking clock or, one I used--I think it was in Maybe This Time--an amulet. When it glowed, the reader knew s/he was going to shift. Quick. Efficient. And right back to the story.
(This short-span and object/phrase method holds true and works well for point of view shifts, too.)
Here’s the thought process on these things as they pertained to my book, FESTIVAL.
Okay, the contemporary protagonists had to solve a mystery that occurred in 1100 in order to solve a critical-to-saving-their-lives mystery in contemporary time. The 1100 mystery was key and central to the current plot; it had to be shown. (Earned it’s space in the novel.) So getting to and from required transitions. I used a phrase in the then language. Don’t recall it now, but it was a couple words. That was the trigger--the phrase.
So when it was time, I planted the trigger (so the reader knew what it meant) then pulled it. That handled the transition. Coming out, I planted and pulled the trigger. Transition complete.
In Maybe This Time, I used multiple tools because that book was set in contemporary New Orleans, prehistoric times, Regency era England, and medieval Scotland. In between those settings, we flashed to the protagonists in a disincarnate state. So I ran multiple story lines that interrelated--so you had to go from A to B to C. If you skipped one, you lost vital events and information.
So relevance is a key to watch for in writing prologues and flashbacks. Is what occurs during them relevant to what’s happening now to the extent that you can’t leave it out and have what’s happening make sense?
The whole question of asset or liability can only be answered for a single story--yours. Because what is an asset for one story could drain the strength from the next. So the short answer for are prologues and flashbacks assets or liabilities is: It’s story dependent.
If you need the prologue, use it. If you need the flashback use it. But first try to kill them. If they won’t die, let them live. Then, knowing they’re essential, remember to cue the reader, keep your transitions clear, short and vivid--strong--and make sure they’re critical and related so that both the “then and now” fictional dreams support each other and work in harmony and aren’t disjointed which jars the reader and robs them of satisfaction with the whole of the book.
And do be aware that often when you’re trying to kill them, you will come up with a way to relate the needed portions in the active story, negating any need for the prologue or flashback. I love it when that happens.
So the bottom line is that the prologue and the flashback can be an asset or a liability. It really depends on the book--and the author’s skill in using them.
Blessings,
Vicki
VICKI HINZE
©2008, Vicki Hinze
