Melodrama is caused by sins of commission and omission. Sometimes writers create it by trying to milk the scene for more emotion than it has; sometimes they create it by accident from either not knowing how to craft the scene or how to portray character emotion.

The guidelines below are meant to help with both sorts of mistakes.

Make sure that all your major characters enter a scene with a scene goal. Put at least some of their goals in conflict. Don’t bring the ally in to just be punched. Ensure that the ally *wants* something from the scene.

Ensure that every character acts to full capacity. I.e. don’t make a character dumber, less competent, less knowledgable, more pathetic, less capable than it could reasonably be.

Don’t idealise the characters. Give virtues and flaws equal playtime.

Don’t let the character express an emotion until it absolutely must. In other words, wait until the character couldn’t bear *not* expressing the emotion. Emotions delivered late have more impact than early.

Ensure that each emotion she evinces is in reaction to an external stimulus. ‘The phone rang. “What!” she yelled into the mouthpiece’ is reaction to an external event; ‘Maybe her husband was having an affair! She crushed her biscuit to crumbs in one clenched fist’ is reaction to just her own idle thoughts.

In each scene express only one emotion at a time and give a character an emotion just once. Avoid loops. E.g. she can go from surprise to alarm to fear to relief to anger, but don’t make her go from surprise to relief to surprise to anger to relief to… 

Ensure that every line of dialogue contains conflict. If it doesn’t, take it out or narrate it.

Focus on the physical (objects and senses), not the metaphysical (relationships and what things mean). ‘the small dog with the wiry brown coat’ is physical; ‘her darling terrier’ is metaphysical.

Don’t name the emotion; describe the sensations and behaviours; reflect it in dialogue. (This is just ‘show don’t tell’ advice).

You can break any of these principles for good reason, but if you keep them by default then they should keep you a good way from any feeling of melodrama.

Hope this helps.

endymionart

Begin As You Mean To Go On

In my previous post, I expressed concern about certain scenes in my book and several people provoked synaptic activity in my brain with their thoughtful questions. (Prodding with a stick also works.)

Essentially, whether the scene involves sex or abortion, is it necessary to the novel? Does the book fall apart without it?

The answer, for most of the scenes, is no.

The first book could survive without those scenes, which all occur in the storylines of supporting characters.

However, since I’m writing a series, I’m trying to follow the principle of Begin As You Mean To Go On.

Later in the series, my hero and heroine will have several steamy encounters. Later in the series, a character will be brutally and explicitly tortured. Later in the series, there will be war, famine, rape and genocide. Later in the series there are also some foreys into weird literary techniques like second-person scenes. (These are few in number; please don’t run). And philosophy. Not much. Hidden, hopefully. But shoved in there, nonetheless.

Those things are intregal to the plot. It’s also integral to the plot that none of these things happen to the heroine in Book One. Not yet. She’s only fourteen/fifteen, and although in her society that’s quite old enough to marry and have babies, I arranged matters so she waits. Call me squeemish, call me a prude. I didn’t want to go there.

Here’s the thing. I don’t want some hapless reader to coast through a gentle read about an innocent fourteen year old girl who plays with pixies, thiink, “Aw, how sweet,” crack open a sequel and squeal, “WTF…? Where did all this sex, violence and lame-ass philosophy come from?”

Begin as you mean to go on.

With this principle in mind, I deliberately made a pair of secondary characters older and sexier, er, I mean, more mature, so I could show the physical side of their relationship, squeem-free. And also have someone to torture. And fight the hero in ridiculous over-the-top neolithic battles. Also, when my first draft of the book was entirely populated by twelve to fourteen year-olds, it was just annoying. (Ducks missiles propelled by irate YA authors). Wait! Let me finish! It was annoying because beta readers kept asking, “So this is YA, right?” And it’s not.

Now, I still might delete the scenes I was concerned about. But only if I am convinced the tone of the rest of the book convincingly warns readers, “Here Be Monsters.”  (One beta reader, after only reading Chapter One, did call Dindi’s world “brutal”, which was a such a nice thing to say, so maybe.)

I’m interested if anyone else is working on a series and if this is an issue for you.