The contra dance

Write-a-thon running total: 8,545 words out of 12,000. That’s 4,000 words in the last week, and I am feeling pleased.

And how I love the unexpected gifts that stories bring me. The out-of-nowhere metaphors that open up new ways of feeling the story, the moments that are beginning to snick together like gears, the sudden rush of a path forward that widens rather than narrows as I follow it. Happy times for this writer.

I cannot help but fall in love with my characters, and these early days are like the first wild phase of romance when the goal is simply to dig into another person, to learn their body and mind and history and heart. For me, writing starts with wandering around inside character. Which is fine — but it’s not a story. In stories, things happen, people collide, the world turns sometimes too fast.

So it’s always a relief to move from finding characters to finding scenes, and I’ve enjoyed this last week writing actual scenes in which actual things happen (grin). We need it all — plot and character, event and feeling, choice and consequence, the external story and the story inside the character. They are like a contra dance, weaving in and out. Do you know contra dance? It’s based on folk dancing, but it’s not a square dance — it’s done in lines, and by the end of the set, everyone in the lines has danced with everyone else. Now there’s a metaphor for story…
 
This one starts a lot on the band (which is fine, they are great) and then moves into video of the dancing:
 

 
And here’s a whole new movement in contra dance. I promise the sparkly bits stop quickly, and I could do without the MTV editing, but it’s a very cool combination of music and dancing:
 

 
Enjoy your day.