Writing Short Fiction With Intense Emotions
Margaret Dunlap on writing Bookburners Ep 3: “Fair Weather”
(Minor spoilers for this episode and possibly the first season, if you squint hard. Read at your own risk.)
Coming out of the writer’s retreat in Boston, some of the sixteen episodes of the first season were better defined than others. What I had for episode 3 was: Sal is homesick, introduce [the character who would become Aaron], and “Sal and Liam bang.”
Actually, that may have been one of the more-fleshed out episodes that we had, when I think about it.
Anyway, although it wasn’t like I’d never written fiction before, most of my professional experience has been writing scripts, not prose, and my biggest challenge in this episode was figuring out just how much story fit in a 12,500–15,000 word bucket.
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Mostly, I was in terror of coming up short, and reasoned that it was easier to take a complex plot and make it simple than to take a simple plot and either pad it out, or try to insert twists and turns retroactively. So in my original outline I had a very involved means of solving the problem on the boat. But once I got into the story I found that a) I had more than enough story to fill the episode, and b) none of the technical hurdles I could put the team through were as interesting as what Sal was going through thematically in this episode — coming to terms with how this job is both the same and different than her old job — and so resolving the problem of the “leaking” book became much more straightforward.
That theme of Sal coming to terms with not being a cop anymore actually didn’t emerge until I was writing my first draft, but in retrospect makes a lot of sense when you start with the idea of “Sal is homesick.”
Fun fact: I was in Paris when I was first working on this episode, and even though I speak more French than Sal does Italian, I caught myself putting on MSNBC in my hotel just so that I could have something on that didn’t take so much *effort* to listen to. Happily, I discovered that if you’re up late enough, the take a break from financial news and air a slightly shortened version of Jimmy Fallon.
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Originally published at blog.serialbox.com on September 25, 2015.
