Aug 18, 2019
Plot excites our interest. It pulls us along with its urgent questions, tension, and, we hope, uncertainty about what will happen next. What holds our hearts in suspense, though, is the tension inherent in where self is going next. That excites our emotions. That excitement can be generated by inner need but more precisely by restlessness, resistance, searching, slow surrender, a sense of being alien, or knowing that one is incomplete. The cause can be as specific as a secret or as broad as existential angst. It’s invisible yet palpable.
Donald Maas, “The Emotional Craft of Fiction”
