During March, I took an online course taught by Margie
Lawson. "Empowering Characters' Emotions" is designed to
help a writer add psychological power to her writing, improve the pacing, and
hook the reader viscerally. Here are the highlights:
- Basics
of writing the full range of body language: the physiology of emotion,
kinesics, facial expressions, proprioceptive stimuli (visceral), paralanguage
(dialogue cues), haptics (touch), proxemics (spatial relations), nonverbal
gender differences, communication accommodation, cross-cultural nonverbals,
levels of intimacy, love signals, and how to convey primary emotions. - Levels
of Powering Up Emotion: writing basic, complex, empowered, and super-empowered
levels of fresh emotion, escalating intensity, providing emotional
authenticity, and creating complex emotional states. - Foundations
of the EDITS System: recognizing and analyzing dialogue and different parts of
the narrative in your manuscript for patterns and voids, and improving your
work. - Introduction to psychologically-anchored editing:
backloading, emotional hits, cliché twists, backstory management, cadence,
white space, projecting emotion for a non-POV character.
That's a load of stuff for one month. Margie teaches chunks
of it in workshops during conferences. I received a sampling of her EDITS system when I took her
abbreviated workshop at the Moonlight & Magnolias conference last
year. What I learned and was able to apply to my own writing, just from that
three-hour workshop, so impressed me that I decided to take this month-long
online course.
I planned to participate
fully in each class exercise last month by applying lessons to the completed
first draft of book five, Regulated For Murder. Great idea, right?
However, when the first day of class rolled around, I didn't have a completed
first draft for Regulated for Murder.
Grasshopper has learned another lesson this year. Taking
classes online while writing a first draft conflicts with writing! Duh!
So I continued writing the first draft, lurked in class,
absorbed the lessons, and applied concepts straight into my writing.
Caution #1: I don't recommend that you take this course
unless you can apply it to a completed manuscript. If you're a writer who never
finishes first drafts because you keep obsessing over what you've written in
the early chapters, this course will encourage your obsessions, feed your
insecurities. So buck up, complete your manuscript, then sign up for
Margie's course.
Caution #2: I don't recommend that you take this course
until you're prepared to dig in and apply the ideas to your work. I wasn't the only published author taking the course. No matter what
stage your writing is in, "Empowering Characters' Emotions" contains
concepts to help you polish your communication.
The greatest insight I learned from Margie is that there's a
huge difference between body language that carries an emotion, and
visceral/involuntary reactions to that emotion. One isn't a substitute for the
other. I also realized that I need to "people-watch" more and note
for myself the types of quirky, subconscious actions that they perform. And I
learned how to focus on my most basic, sometimes boring, sentences and, when
appropriate, hike up the intensity on them. All this has somehow freed my
imagination, such that in my first draft, I incorporate more lovely rhetorical
devices like alliterations and anaphoras that normally wouldn't show up until a
third draft.
Three cheers for Margie Lawson!