Writing With Emotion, Tension, and Conflict: Techniques for Crafting an Expressive and Compelling Novel by Cheryl St.John

Author:Cheryl St.John [St.John, Cheryl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Writer's Digest Books
Published: 2013-10-31T05:00:00+00:00

Today this is referred to as “purple prose.” The character’s surroundings get in the way of moving the story forward at a satisfying pace. Description must be chosen selectively. Be precise and use vivid words, but don’t overdescribe. We want to paint word pictures, but we don’t want them to get in the way. The reader wants to know what is happening next and how the character is going to handle it. Once we’ve set up our character’s goals and given her conflict, the reader buys in for the duration and expects us to fulfill the promises we set up. He has expectations about what kind of story this is going to be and wants to move on with it. He doesn’t want to get bogged down in heavy-handed descriptions.

In this next example, you will see how a modicum of description sets the scene and gives the most importance to the character’s conflict and emotions.

We want to use our character’s internal conflict to its best advantage. Whatever vulnerability we create—abandonment, mistrust, emotional deprivation, dependence, or social exclusion—we must use it in scene to challenge the reader to keep reading and, most importantly, to keep caring. If your character is a social outcast, then create a scene to make him feel all the worse about himself. Use a setting in which his losses are pointed out to him. In Her Colorado Man, my hero grew up in an orphanage, was apprenticed to a doctor, and later ran off to sail aboard a whaling ship. He panned the gold fields in the Yukon and later delivered mail by dogsled across Alaska. The point is that he’s a lonely man.

He reads letters from a small boy sent to his post-office box in Alaska and crosses the country to find the child. The heroine and her son are part of a huge, close-knit German family, and she has an important position in the family business. Everything about the setting, the location, the stability, the routine, and the familiarity is glaringly outside of his experience.

The following scene takes place on the night the hero arrives in the heroine’s family home—the first time he meets her and her family. I set the scene by having him arrive during the beloved grandfather's birthday celebration, with the entire family in attendance. The abundance of people, all family, are part of the setting. At this point, nothing about the house is important to him because he’s focused on the child—the whole reason he came.

Mariah’s sister, Annika, perched in the spot Mariah had vacated. “We’ve all been eager to meet Mariah’s husband. John James has been talking about your arrival for weeks.”

Wes smiled politely. “Pleasure to meet you, too, ma’am.”

“Did you find any gold?”

“A little there and there. I settled on a job that was as good as gold, and a sure thing.”

“As long as you survived the bears,” Dutch added from across the room.

“There was that,” Wes answered, and several of them laughed.

“Don’t crowd the man,” Louis said good-naturedly.

Eventually,

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