Now up at Shadow of the Unicorn: my "mechanical" and insufficiently emotional sex scene, for comparison to the one I wrote with more emotional investment.
This one, I'm nervous about posting because I know it's not up to snuff. It could be improved, of course, by adding emotional context for at least one of the characters. But I haven't touched it much since I wrote it, and it's at about the same revision level as the other scene. Sometimes the writing comes out well, sometimes it needs a lot of improvement.
I saw a blog post over at The Bookshelf Muse about Donald Maas lecturing on just this topic. He also suggests an interesting writing exercise to help you think outside the dialogue when it comes to conveying your characters' emotions.
The free-written snippet Angela included in her post includes a lot of plot-related telling but only little bit of emotion -- IMO, the usefulness of tapping into your own experience of emotions is in finding descriptions of the physical impact of emotions and creating your own descriptions of those. Your jittering stomach. How you can't stop clicking that pen.
What sorts of descriptions have you gotten out of your personal experiences with strong emotions?
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