Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Let up on the Reins

Let up on the Reins

Yesterday I had some good thoughts for a blog but I let them slip away. I should carry a note book and write them down when they come to mind.
Oh! I remember, one of my students mentioned in the lounge that she is worried about not being able to come up with the required number of “Crisis.” This got me to thinking and actually dreaming last night.

In my mind when a person faces a life changing event and decides to launch their life on a new path what they are doing is breaking with the flow of their life. Nature has decided how the current is going to carry them along and has everything planned out by default. It is a type of predestination where nature has everything written and if you do nothing to intervene this is the way your life is going to play out. Thus when a person faces a life changing event and they decide to get off their duff and resist the flow, there is turbulence in the force. The irrestable course of nature is no longer postured and in equilibrium, and for the the future to now unfold, there are some realignments that will have to happen to get everything back on track. Another word for these realignments is “Crisis.” They are inevitable when a person decides to get serious about restructuring their lives and that is when the hiccups and bumps really begin to happen. Actually they are quite easy for a writer to anticipate. In such a case we don’t have to go about looking for a crisis, the crisis comes looking for us.

So for a writer to say "I am writing a novel and there is this life changing even but I am having trouble deciding what the crisis will entail..." is not being very imaginative about the way reality works. For example assume a character to escape an abusive relationship decides to flee to a shelter and file for a divorce. Is it that hard to see what sorts of crisis will spring up as a consequence.?

I think that the problem with many writers is that they try and tell the story to their characters instead of the other way around. We get this idea in our heads and come hell or high water we are going to spoon feed the lines into our characters instead of turning on our listening skills and paying attention to our inner voice. Make up your mind as a writer... accept the fact that you are not going to be able to regulate and control your story and characters and let the story flow into the realms of the unanticipated and illuminate your awareness with a host of events and circumstances you could never think up for yourself in a million years.