Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Alternating POVs and Humor

One of the things I ask my students to do in the Exploratory Writing Workshop is to template a chapter from their favorite novel. I won't go over that now except it involves taking the chapter and using eight or ten components (exposition, dialog, interior dialog, repetition, symbolism and stuff like that.) going line by line and counting the sentences where these components evidence themselves. Since this is the first chapter of the student's favorite novel, it is a style of writing they like and they wind up with a number for each component which they can then divide by the total words and come up with a percentage. For example exposition was 30% of the first chapter, dialog was 28% and so on and so forth.

This is something useful to know and a student could use this to achieve the same sort of distribution in their own writing. (They never do)

Now in this class I was taking I was continually getting beat up by the instructor regarding my vignettes. She felt that what I wrote was seriously deficient in components such as sensory reference, emotionality, (is that a word?) and the impact of the back and forth between the male and female central characters and the impact it was having. So I decided to take templating to the next level. I went to Walmart and in the book section, started skimming the romance novels for one that had a really torrid love scene. Eventually I found one and bought the book. I then templated the love scene which went on for about four pages. I knew as soon as I read it that this was exactly what the doctor ordered.

So line by line I templated it. Only this time I used a different approach. Starting with the first line I asked myself, what component was used. What began to emerge was an outline of sorts. For each number on the outline I wrote (This paragraph contains...) Backstory, flashback, dialog, interior dialog, humor, exposition, emotion, metaphor, repetition, symbolism... So when I was done I had this outline (which I already provided a link to in a blog last week that nobody probably read) and I used it in writing my exam.

Now if you aren't aware, in an E-class there is more time to write than in a traditional classroom setting. In my view this is one of the benefits an E-course offers since in school I never was able to finish my exams and my grades suffered accordingly. In the Romantica class we had over two weeks to write and the submission isn't due until 26 March. Sorry for the digression.

I'll show her, I thought to myself. (She would have pointed out that labels are not necessary in interior dialog. I never realized that before but it makes sense.) Sorry for another digression. I'll show her and I wrote the climatic love scene that had been building in the six concurrent vignettes, (required earlier by the class) into the final exam which in the novel would come around chapter 25.

My initial intent was to write the final, as two chapters, one with the female POV and one with the male. To make sure I had plenty of material for both I took each outline bullet and wrote the two POVs for each character. When I finished I liked the way it read with the concurrent POVs alternating on the same time line. If you can alternate the POVs by chapter why not by paragraph? The answer usually given is that it will confuse the reader.

Well now! If dialog can alternate, often without labels then why can't interior dialog... that doesn't need labels? What the process delivered were some surprising results. What jumped out was the potential for humor. Humor to my thinking is the disconnect between expectation and reality and when those two meet in the brain there is a spark that ignites the humor module. For example if the male POV says something like "My love for you is like a rose." and then thinks ...or maybe a sprig of stink-weed the reader is struck by the dichotomy. "Ar! Ar! Ar!" they chortle. Anyway, this process makes the humor aspect jump right out at the author.