She Blinded Me, With Science!

That feeling of not being able to put a book or an essay down? That’s tension, that’s a writer generating an invisible but deeply felt sequence underneath their sentences, and it typically goes something like this: tension, escalation, escalation, unpredictable ending.

Funnily enough it doesn’t quite work to escalate tension with every single sentence. It works better to do something approximating this: tension, meander, tension, meander, escalation, meander, escalation, meander, escalation, meander, unpredictable ending. But those meanders are also skillfully used, for character development and/or back story and/or larger context and/or plot.

Teaching this week I used an excerpt from Manjula Martin’s memoir The Last Fire Season where she braided nature writing into her meander as she created and then escalated tension. It’s an intimate story and it’s a treatise on trees and fire. Masterful, in other words. Let’s dive in!