Wright’s Writing Corner: Romantic Tension Two: Catching the Lightning—Part One
This article is on the pains and cares writers without a natural knack for the craft must suffer to learn it, with particulars on capturing the levinbolt sensation of romance.
Slowly, painstakingly, I have taught myself one area of storytelling after another. Description was so hard for me. I spent years trying to learn to write even simple descriptions. I would copy by hand passages in books by authors I liked. I would sit and describe the same thing over and over. Sometimes, I wonder if none of the descriptions I write for the rest of my life will be quite as nice as the ones in Prospero Lost…because I polished them over and over and over again. I’ll never have that kind of time again for that.
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One of my favorite things about reading romances—either the genre called romance or the romantic plot in any other kind of story—is the moments that zing. By zing, I mean the moments when that jolt me like I have received a shock, or in a really good book, a lightning bolt. The moments that leap off the page.
First kiss is often a zing moment. But more recently, I began to study these moments more careful, to realize that there were quite a number of potential zing moments and that many authors do not make as good use of them as they could.
Read the whole thing here:
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
