{"id":948,"date":"2012-02-06T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T12:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=948"},"modified":"2012-02-06T06:00:43","modified_gmt":"2012-02-06T12:00:43","slug":"the-aesthetic-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=948","title":{"rendered":"The Aesthetic Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cBehind every exquisite thing that ever existed, there was something tragic.\u201d ~\u00a0Oscar Wilde<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am a visual person.\u00a0 When it comes to structure, I like paragraphs that look good on a page.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want them to be too long, or too short.\u00a0 I despise too little dialogue, or too much.\u00a0 I want a delicate balance between action and dialogue, between setting and character.\u00a0 I want my writing to be aesthetically pleasing upon the page.<\/p>\n

I find that big blocky paragraphs are unpleasant to read, and that page upon page of dialogue seems lazy outside of a screenplay.\u00a0 Mixing dialogue with description keeps me showing rather than telling, which is, of course, important in writing.<\/p>\n

If I feel that a page seems too dialogue or description heavy, I will try to fix it during the re-write.\u00a0 Ultimately, though, what works is always more important than how it looks, and if the paragraph works the way I wrote it, then I leave it alone.\u00a0 As with everything in writing, the visual aesthetic is more a guideline than a rule.<\/p>\n

Most of my scenes themselves are set up like a screenplay, which is the first medium of writing I really took seriously.\u00a0 Many times, I join a scene in mid-action, or as close to the conflict of the scene as I possibly can.\u00a0 The rest is written based on feel and instinct.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

When I re-write, I am a little more picky.\u00a0 I ask myself, is it a proactive scene, or a reactive scene?\u00a0 What is the goal of this scene?\u00a0 What about this scene makes things worse for my character?<\/p>\n

I believe writing is about torturing your characters until they do something beautiful.\u00a0 If the character isn\u2019t failing, then he is trying to recover from his previous failure.<\/p>\n

Each scene will have a beginning, middle, and end.\u00a0 While they don\u2019t stand alone each chapter of a novel reads almost like a short story.\u00a0 A goal is pursued, the protagonist fails, but he progresses as a person.<\/p>\n

I try to show my setting using action.\u00a0 Little by little, I will shade in the world around the characters.\u00a0 I am not great at writing setting during the first draft, so a lot of that has to be woven in during editing.\u00a0 I hate paragraphs or sentences that do nothing but describe something, so I heavily re-structure sentences to make description flow with action.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, though, all of that is just the finish.\u00a0 When you are pouring the foundation of a scene, creating concrete on which to build the thing, you are doing it on instinct.\u00a0 You don\u2019t have time to think about all of that stuff.\u00a0 You build as quickly as you can, and hope that when you come back later, the thing is still standing.<\/p>\n

There you find it, beautiful even in its ugliness.\u00a0 The hard work of writing is showing others the beauty you see.\u00a0 That is what scene structure is really about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cBehind every exquisite thing that ever existed, there was something tragic.\u201d ~\u00a0Oscar Wilde I am a visual person.\u00a0 When it comes to structure, I like paragraphs that look good on a page.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want them to be too long, or too short.\u00a0 I despise too little dialogue, or too much.\u00a0 I want a delicate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[44,88,1080,1176],"class_list":["post-948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mechanics","tag-aesthetics","tag-balance","tag-structure","tag-tragedy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}