Forestalling the Conceptual Mind in Storytelling
The power of a story is in the intensity of its scenes. Each scene should be a complete experience unto itself, something readers can immerse themselves into. In a powerful scene, readers can surrender themselves to the story. They can let the situation take care of them. But this requires not a dry description of events, but an unexpected revelation of feelings and illuminations of ideas and understanding. To write an intense scene, write it as an evocation of what an environment feels like to character, what a character feels in reaction to events. To do this, feel your way into a story, into a scene, into a moment in a scene. Many writers enter a scene from their head, a conceptualizing of details, what's going to happen next. It's a map of a journey, an outline, if you will, but not the journey itself. For many, once they start down this path of understanding their story by conceptualizing where it's going next, they can't stop drawing that map. To liv...