ONE MORE TIME — WITH FEELING
STATUS: Brazilian. I’m getting rid of what doesn’t need to be there.
Rob and I are in a cleaning/selling/reorganizing frenzy. When you live in 850 square feet like we do, you gotta be lean. We’ve been paying almost $200/month for a climate-controlled storage unit these past couple years, and we’re SO over it. I mean, that’s a car payment, a raise, an extravagant dinner at the Chop House every month. Why waste it on stuff? Let’s be honest: We all need less stuff.
But here’s the twist. The one area where I need more is with my latest book. More scenes, more depth, more emotion. More, more, more. And you know what? That’s hard to do. I haven’t mastered the art by any means, but I’m going to offer up one tip for anyone who is also struggling with more: Make connections.
Simply put, that means tie your characters together in unexpected ways. Why make them separate people operating in separate spheres if you can link them somehow?
Let’s say you’re writing about two friends who are thick as thieves until … I don’t know … the traveling circus comes to town and one of them wants to join up. Fine if they experience that separately, each with their own reactions to the dancing bears and high-wire performers, but what if the one friend was totally crushing on the friend who wanted to become the lion tamer? See, extra dimension right there.
As I make more connections in my current book, I’m also busy with some fabulous bathroom reading. No, not the new Harry Potter book. Crappie magazine. Get it? Crappie? I’m serious about this, actually. We not only put Crappie in the bathroom as a cheeky joke for anyone who might use our toilet, but I also happen to have a character who’s really into fishing. So I gotta read up.
It’s craptastic.
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