Jerry Cleaver, author of Immediate Fiction, notes emphatically that emotion defines a character:
Who does she love & hate?
How does she love & hate?
It’s in this realm of emotion that I’m most withholding in my fiction. It has to be dragged out of me every time! This time, I’m going to try to overdo it, at least at the start.
This quote from Immediate Fiction is spot on:
If you go too far out with your story, you can always cut back. An old writing rule says: The best way to find out what’s enough is to do too much.
I need to keep this in mind this summer while writing the first draft. No brakes!
Stace, that's a great idea. I'm going to do it!
We need to paint that on a sign or a poster and put it up where we see it every time we look up from the page: NO BRAKES!!!
I'm so character driven, who and how they love and hate is one of the first things in most of my work, and one of the most obvious. I need to focus on outer action more than inner motivation. Bizarre, isn't it, how we all come from someplace different when the ink hits the page?