Tuesday, March 29, 2011  What Is the Heart of a Story?  Does
each story have a particular heart?  I've been thinking about
this lately because I've started to re-structure and re-plan an
old novel, as I'm hoping to re-write it almost from scratch. I
have a new vision for it, a fairly different vision, with many
new parts and meanings. And yet it is, in some ways, much the
same story. The same characters, and many of the same events.
So what I have to find is a balance of the old and the new, a
way to combine and mesh them into something that works better
than the original. And in doing that I have to determnine what
it is I want to keep. Or, perhaps, what it is I have to keep.  I
have to find the heart of the story.  I have to find that part,
or those parts, that drive the story, that make it what it is.
What are the elements that make this story? What is it about
this story that first captured my thoughts? What is it that
first compelled me to write it? And that draws me back to it
now, years later?  I thin