Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Relationships

Relationships

Out in my workshop I have seven RC flying models. Some fly and some don’t but I work every day at repairing the unflightworthy.

Some of the models I bought new, some came to me severely damaged and another I am trying to build from scratch using materials I bought at the local lumberyard. This morning I was thinking about a priority of work and it struck me that these RC airplanes are a lot like relationships.

When a model is shiny and new everything is straight, the finish is shiny and the future looks bright. Then as time goes on there come the vicissitudes of flying and the inevitable hard landings. Suddenly the model doesn’t look quite so new and begins to gain weight from all the epoxy we use to keep it running.

That is how life is too when it comes to our relationships with others. We might have a dozen of these involving those we interact with on a daily basis and they have their ups and downs. Sometimes things go well and sometimes they don’t and we do what we can to keep them going.

As a writer the author needs to think about relationships between the characters and how they change as the story moves through its various cycles and between the geographies the writer creates. The reader loves to see change in these relationships as they develop and go from good to better or bad to worse. This is an aspect of writing a novel that I think is neglected. We see a lot of focus on story line, backstory, rising action and all that stuff in the standard model but what I can never get enough of is the change in relationships between the Central Character and the Supporting Characters (CC.) As things happen what is the CC thinking and what how are the SCs responding and how is all that resonating with the story line.

In the Exploratory Writing Workshop we talk a lot in the objectives and checklists about the components of good story telling and students are encouraged in the exploratory vignettes to demonstrate an understanding in their weekly assignments. For six weeks we practice using the components of good story telling practice to get a feel for how they work. In the seventh week it is time to write the story line outline and in the last week to take all the components and make sure they are included in the outline. At the end of the workshop a big chunk of the developmental work is done (less the research) and the student is ready to write the first draft.

There is so much to think about that a comprehensive outline is essential to allow the author to write in bite sized chunks confident that when the end of the outline is reached there will be an integrated novel waiting with all the good stuff that has historically worked. Still I need to work more on Geographies and Relationships in the structure of the course as these are often neglected..