The Thin Line Between Hatred and Lust

There are constant reminders all around that tomorrow is Valentine’s day. A day retailers around the nation have groomed into being a whole day dedicated to being about love and the love of those closest to your heart. Though it’s nothing but a ploy to get you to spend exorbitant amounts of money on stuff all in the name of said love, people jump on the bandwagon like they’ve just said we’re headed west looking for gold and rainbows.

Love is meant to be celebrated every day of the year through gestures that come from the heart and can be enjoyed together no matter what day it is on the calendar. If you truly loved someone, you would show them everyday how much they meant to you.

But let’s not get me started on my soapbox this morning. I just redecorated it, and the black paint is still wet. Not to mention my rhinestone crown isn’t set yet. But the black feather boa looks nice.

Today, even though I wanted to talk about how much I despise V-day, I’m going to take the high road and talk about passion in your writing. Not just for love scenes, I’m talking throughout the entire novel. Packing that emotional punch each paragraph. Each page. Each chapter and ultimately to the HEA ending.

During the course of writing an original, you run into wild emotions. Emotions that you haven’t thought much of before you get to them, emotions that you could bank on when you started out to sea. Sometimes it comes on slowly, building up and letting the reader know just what to expect. And sometimes, well the emotion just seems to blow up. It’s explosive. It’s hot. It’s tantalizing and it’s uninhibited. It’s just the type of emotion that makes your heart thump like a drum. Your blood to heat up like molten lava. Your body lights up like a Christmas tree. You go from fighting to having sex in point zero seconds.

Now that’s what I love about writing.

Writing emotion is much like living it. Our character live through our direction. They act out mini fantasies and move through life with a passion for everything that they do. No matter if they absolutely hate what they are about to do, there’s a certain underlying passion about they way they hate. And that’s all because of the emotional impact you make through your character.

Passion is a very strong emotion. Passion can put you in several different places throughout your life. You can be passionate about something and there could be passion between you and another. Even if you’re arguing, on the border of hating, there’s passion behind every word, behind every emotional pull between the two of you. Between your hero and heroine even what’s lying just below the surface of a fight is passion for one another. Passion for the argument. Passion for the heat between them. Using the fight to pit their will against each other, getting their blood heated, their hearts pounding. It’s all the lead into the desire you’re showing and that the reader is starting to feel.

You have to have passion between your characters to make them work. Otherwise, it’s a weak and boring read that gets sat down 75 pages into the book and only glanced at once a year before they haul it off to the used bookstore for something better. Even if that passion isn’t sexual, passion makes a character stand out. Makes your reader remember your story and come back for more even after the last page is turned.

Passion can make you do stupid thing. And can make you do remarkable things in the heat of the moment. And passion is the reason behind every good love story. Ultimately there is passion in love. And there is passion in hate. Blurring the lines between the two can be a very tricky maneuver.

The easiest way for me to blur the lines is for the fight to be something that happened in the past. Something neither of them has gotten over. Something that needs to be dealt with before they can move on. But they never get that far. There’s always lust bubbling underneath the surface of their fight. It only takes one look for someone to take control and push them against the nearest wall and well… you know what happens next. It doesn’t make the fight go away but the aggression between them hovers back down at the simmering point. You get one thing out of the way and then they can think semi-rationally and have a chance at working it out.

Though, I could argue that love isn’t rational. Neither is lust. Nor is any emotion. But that’s all another blog for another day.

So I suppose my question of the day is: What do you do to amp up the passion between your characters? Any tips? Advice? Picture manuals?

Or if you don’t like that question, how about: What is passion to you?

What Makes the Writer? The Heart or the Content.

I was writing today (and not the massive long soapbox emails I’ve been doing lately, Lis) and it got me to thinking about what motivates me to write. I don’t get many breaks from real life (And I can hear the Capt’n play the world’s smallest fiddle for me). I’m pressed for time from before 6am until about midnight every night and in order for me to get my personal time in, I have to plan for it accordingly. Which really means in lament terms, I have to multi-task.

If you remember last week, I spoke about procrastination. And if you were getting your daily dose of the wenches (which shame on you if you weren’t!) you’ll remember that the Boatswain, Terrio, says that she calls her procrastination the daily multi-tasking. I do so much multi-tasking; I have to multi-task my multi-tasking. I think about writing while I’m in the shower. I think about writing while I’m on my drive both to and from. I think about writing while I’m logging in my daily run. I constantly think about writing. And I think that’s what makes me what kind of writer I am.

I’m a fly by the night, fingers moving like the wind, totally zoned in, type of writer. I don’t plot. I don’t outline. I don’t character build. I don’t do anything ahead of my fingers. I make up a name. I make up a shell of this person in my mind, and I go for it. I’ve heard Capt’n call this the Pantser (okay, which makes me giggle), and it really makes me sound very unprofessional, but I can’t outline. As soon as I outline a story, it’s gone. This might seem silly to you, you little outliner you, but I assure you, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing the written word finally on the screen for the first time. To let your imagination go where it will with no written boundaries. Freedom. This is where I get my freedom. Everyday I’m in the grind, but when I write, I’m finally free. No obligations. No worries. Just me and my brain writing whatever flows out of me. Working out the plot as we go along. Letting the story unfold right in front of my eyes. It’s the best feeling ever.

There are some drawbacks to the way that I write. There is a lot of angst in my stories, and as the Capt’n blogged yesterday, you need that in your story to keep your reader tsking you and turning the page. But I write what I like to read. I like the story to pull at me emotionally. I like to connect on a deeper emotional level to the character and for me to do that as the writer, is to write what I know. For that, it’s my heart in every word. It’s not just the content your reading when you open my pages, you’re reading actually what’s in my heart. It’s not just the content on the pages,

You have to have heart to be a writer. Being a writer is a tough and challenging world. But the content is what the reader bases the book on. Is there a difference to you? I know that you want both (you greedy little wench) but if you could have one or the other, which would you choose…? The emotion of each word, making your heart hurt and feel like you’re right there in the scene. Or do you want the content, an unfailing plot, the best subplot, great character development.

If you’re like me, you know that they come hand in hand. But we’re playing devil’s advocate today. Humor me.