Breathing Room

I've noticed an annoying thing about my writing in the last few weeks. I guess that how we write--especially in our rough drafts--is related to who we are, and this is sometimes more evident than we wish. I'll tell you what I'm talking about, but first we're going to talk about movie rules.

We all know one of those people who have movie rules. Sometimes they're unspoken, and sometimes they're the focus of passionate arguments about what that person will NOT go to see with you. The rule may be religious (at least one person I know says they won't go to see Rated-R movies on that basis). It may be based on rabid dislike (I don't care how good Inception is, I can not sit in a theater staring at Leonardo di Caprio and be expected to enjoy it or to take him at all seriously. I just keep thinking about how much he looks like a human weasel.). It may be based on lack of desensitization (I didn't watch a lot of TV as a kid, and still don't, and I'm not desensitized to high levels of graphic violence, so I don't enjoy it in movies).

Yes, I am one of Those People With Movie Rules. Most of the above don't even have a chance to seep into my writing. I don't have a problem with graphic violence when it's on the page, just when it's up on a 22-foot-tall sheet of vinyl in front of my face. I guess I could write Leonardo into something, but about the only way it'd fit is if I was writing a Redwall novel rip-off, and I love Brian Jacques' books too much for that.

But the one movie rule that has proved the most insidious is this: I can't stand too much suspense.

I guess that has to do with a mixture of my desensitization problem and my empathy problem. I can't watch movies where people are being humiliated or tortured; they get me honestly upset, and I don't enjoy the sensation. I guess if I found it easier to distance myself, this wouldn't be a problem.

So how does it seep into my writing? I give my characters too much breathing room.

This was brought up by my first reader when I handed him a new story last week, and he noted that I backed off of the rising tension right before the climax. Then I looked at my older story--the one I just got a rejection for--and I do the same damn thing! It's like characters I empathize with being put in tense situations makes me uncomfortable, so I give them a breather. Crazy talk. Who would have thought such a thing could come out, unconsciously, in my writing?

And, of course, it's very harmful to any story to take a big breather unless you're building a stairway of tension--a little tension, then a short break. More tension, short break. Lots of tension, calm-before-storm. Incredible tension, climax! I wasn't doing that, though. I was interrupting the smooth rise of tension in the story just when it should have been at its most intense. To quote the awesome Blake Snyder in his fantastic script-writing book Save the Cat, I was breaking the tension just when "the bad guys close in".

Well, the good news is that now I'm going to get a lot more conscious of this in re-writes and revisions. Maybe someone else will read this and get more conscious about rising tension in their stories. And maybe my own stories will start to drive a little more and meander a little less.

At least, my beta readers sure hope so...