Anticipation – Part One

I am in a state of anticipation on several levels, right now.

The one most on my mind today deals with the, as it were, secular seasons.  Or, more specifically, the change of seasons.

In reality, each season has its own  . . . variety . . . of things.

Each season has its beauties, certainly.  Each season also has its own potential problems.  There is winter cold and the accompanying heating bills and sometimes precipitates such winter illnesses as flu and colds, summer heat that can cause its own potential health problems including such things as heat prostration and respiratory distress brought on by poor air quality, and Spring has the potential for bringing with it flooding concerns.  Well, at least in my area it does.

The upcoming change of season from Winter to Spring is on my mind just now because of a few things.  First, where I live we have a warming trend over the next few days. 

After a very mild winter this year, we had a snowstorm late last week.  It was only the second actual snowstorm of the season, and started on the last day of a Leap Year February.  It was, however, an extended storm that lasted two full days.

After that storm, the temperatures dropped to the low-to-mid 30s up until the day before yesterday [a Tuesday, after a storm that ran Thursday, Friday, and into the wee hours of Saturday last week.]

Yesterday, however, the milder weather that characterized most of our winter returned for a few days.  It was in the 50s.  Today, it actually got into the 60s, and then it cools again but only to daytime temperatures in the 40s [lows of 30s are forecast, but I anticipate that is overnight temperatures.]

In addition to this warming trend prompting thoughts of Spring, the Springtime clock change to Daylight Savings time is scheduled for this weekend.

And the official first day of Spring is only a week and a half away.

This winter has been mild, and I have been grateful for the savings on heating oil.  It has in many ways been a quite difficult winter for me in other ways, and I’m not sorry to move on to the warmer [and longer] days of Springtime.

And so, I’m anticipating . . . and looking forward to the kind of events and opportunities that Spring may bring about this year.

Certainly, we don’t want to live our lives too much in the past or the future:  there is much to be said for living in the moment as much as we possibly can.

Yet, there is something in a way delightful about a state of anticipation.  This is true in creative writing as well as in life.  And true on the flip side of the writing coin:  a build-up of anticipation in the reader.

There’s a certain highly enjoyable tension involved in reading a book that we can anticipate some element of the outcome without anticipating the details.  In a romance, for example, we generally can rest assured that the hero and heroine will form a lasting, loving relationship.  The book may or may not take us to marriage, but by the end we likely have some sense of a firm commitment between the primary male and female characters.  In an artfully done such book, the anticipation of that basic formula of ‘girl meets boy, they fall in love’ lends a deepening of the enjoyment of the read to the details that we don’t anticipate:  the ‘how’ of the relationship’s realization.  The little surprises.

Indeed, I have noticed some particular trends in Christian romance in recent books, and they often lead to this balancing act between what the reader does and does not anticipate.

But that is a Blog post for another time:  the trends in Christian romance.

What about you?  What are you anticipating at this time?  In your own life, or in your creative writing.  If you are involved in a creative writing project, how are you setting the stage?

If you haven’t thought about that as you work on your fiction, perhaps now would be a good time to consider the element of reader anticipation of your character’s progress in the story you are creating.