Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Roller Coaster Ride

The Rollercoaster Ride

I am halfway through the reviews, of lesson 1, the EWW and what I tend to see, as the most common deficiency, is a lack of balance between character and story line development. Both these are obviously important but most writers seem to focus, at least to begin with on story line.

When I read a vignette I am attuned to three things. To me a story is like riding a rollercoaster. There is the ups and downs of the structure and how it meanders about, there is the car that negotiates the rails from start to finish and finally there is the resonance, the exhilaration of the ride.

What I normally see most at first is the structure of the rollercoaster. This is the story line beginning to rise up, the world of the story and an initial sense of foreshadowing as to where the story is heading. I will not denigrate the importance of story line or say an author is wrong to focus on it to begin with. What I will say is that concurrently the writer has to think about the course that will be negotiated and the vehicle that will carry the passengers. The passenger is of course the reader and the vehicle is primarily the central character but also the supporting characters. Concurrent with a beginning effort to weave the threads of the story line, a writer has to reveal some depth to the characters. On a roller coaster ride, like reading a novel (hopefully) these three things are happening together and the writer needs to write about them concurrently…. Not sequentially, but concurrently.

Now I am not going to discuss resonance here. I believe that what made Shakespeare great was the resonance of his writing more than anything else, however that aspect of writing appears almost forgotten. Now-a-days this aspect has been relegated to the world of the poet but it wasn’t always this way. I suggest that aspiring writers take some poetry courses whether they feel they need them or not. When a reader comments that Stephen King writes “beautifully” it is not exclusively his story lines, interesting as they are, nor his characters that really get your attention but also the way his words resonate. Resonance is a bit much for a beginning novelist to think about and is perhaps a graduate level course on writing. For now I hammer hard in the EWW course, Character Development . The cart that carries the reader along….that offers that vicarious opportunity for the reader to climb into the CC’s head and enter into an adventure that transcends our everyday lives.