Writing Without Looking

This blog is running behind the number of substack articles about writing, so I'm going to fix that.  I'll be posting one a day until we're caught up.

Where writing is concerned, we can easily spend years discussing specific situations, how they might be introduced and managed, the importance they bear regarding a larger narrative, mistakes made, poor judgment, assumptions, writing strategies... and so on. The number of directions we might take in introducing two characters to each other would allow us to write not one article on their meeting, not two, but really as many as we might choose to write. Writing is fractal. Any narrative moment can be woven into a world of intention, technique and consequence. Writing itself is a dynamic and inexhaustible field... limited only by our willingness to look the beast in the eye before flinching.

Let us assume that we've chosen to introduce two characters to one another as a love interest — which I choose specifically because while the film rom-com genre is in its death throes, erotic fiction is surging. It really doesn't matter what traditional writing trope we might begin with: the introduction of an expert, such as the "detective"; the death of a character; the spiral into disconsolation at the end of a romance. Yet I'm going to choose this, because in the previous essay, we brought it up as one way we might start a novel.

Continued:

https://alexis202.substack.com/p/writing-without-looking