Sunday, September 30, 2012

Grad School Update #2: Subtext

As you have no doubt inferred by now, grad school is Kicking. My. Butt. Sorry I've been so absent lately (and am about to disappear again).

So far, I've had one major epiphany. It's about subtext.

One book we've read is Heaven, Texas, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips. If you like romance novels and you don't require that they feel believable in the cold light of day (and, frankly, if that's a requirement, you're probably not a romance reader to begin with), I highly recommend it.

The major plot line is about a recently retired NFL quarterback who  falls in love with a homely woman. (No snarking. I TOLD you it was unbelievable.) There's a subplot, though, about the football player's widowed mother, Suzy, and Way Sawyer, the bad boy who attended her high school in Telarosa, Texas years before.

Way is now a successful businessman who just bought the factory that's the last major employer in Telarosa. There's a rumor that Way, who has a grudge against the town, is going to close the factory.

Suzy comes to him to ask that he reconsider. Way, who had a crush on her 30 years earlier, offers to do that if she'll act as his hostess. She somehow interprets that to mean he wants her to become his mistress. And, although he's an attractive man who could clearly get lots of women without coercion, he lets her think that. (Okay, you can snark at those two things if you want to. They're pretty dumb.)

Told you all that to tell you this.

There's a scene where they're about to have sex for the first time and he carries her into the bedroom, "as if she were a virgin going into her bridal bower." (She also pictures him as the devil, so it's not all good.)

I didn't pick up on this the first time I read it, but I did walk away with a clear understanding that they'd eventually fall in love.

As I was combing through the scene for a paper, I saw this phrase and realized it was WHY I knew they'd fall in love. The metaphor created this kind of subliminal message that even though Suzy consciously views the sex as coerced, subconsciously she recognizes that she's being cherished.

And I knew that if I'd written that scene, I would have had her think about Saxon maidens being carried off as a prize of war. And then, later, when I had them fall in love, my readers would have screamed bloody murder, demanding to know how they could wind up together when he raped her.

This may not seem like a big deal, but, as you may have noticed, I tend to be pretty direct in my communication style. Adding the ability to have some subtext in my writing is HUGE.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

Grad School Granny: Update #1

My online class at McDaniel College in Reading the Romance Novel includes 11 other women (you didn't really think there'd be guys taking this class?) of various backgrounds.

A couple already have advanced degrees in English. One is a published author who served on the board of RWA (Romance Writers of America) at the time they were crafting their mission statement. One lives in Japan, one in London, another in the Florida Keys (where she works with dolphins) others in South Dakota, Wisconsin, Boston. Ages seem to range from twenty-somethings to yours truly.

So we have diversity, at least of age and geography.

Right now, I'm feeling overwhelmed and under-educated. My undergraduate degree, in case you didn't know, is in Management Information Systems. Not much literary going on there.

 As of this writing, I'm spending 2 or 3 hours a day on schoolwork and just barely keeping my head above water.

So far, I've read the assigned chapter on paragraphing in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose five times, and I still have no idea what the hell she's talking about.

So, lacking skill or any real aptitude, I'm going to fall back on the same trait I've relied on through most of my life: my complete and total unwillingness to admit that I might have screwed up, persistence.

After all, it's gotten me this far.

(BTW--Prose says using one-line paragraphs for emphasis is a "rhetorical device"--aka a cheap trick. Good to know.)

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