Verbal constipation

I recently ahd a revelation about Taken, my current WIP-in-Waiting. Like many such moments of elucidation it struck while I was on the loo - Oh Throne of Inspiration! - because I was thinking about writing instead of reading someone else's.

I swear, it's got to the stage the act of reading actually stimulates my digestive system.

I digress.

Or rather, I digest.

This breakthrough concerned the opening of the story, which I was already bothered by. It's poor.

It's poor because when I wrote it I was going through a Fear of Rejection stage and was determined to write a techincally-perfect-opening-for-category. You know - meeting in the first few pages, establishing action, Goal, Motivation and Conflict, identifying the location as outside the US....

What I ended up with was something that was not so much techinically perfect as inexorably mundane. It is stilted, forced, and banal, and gives my beautifully self-sacrificing and gloriously damaged hero no opportunity to shine. It doesn't flow, is heavy and painful, and the real story backs up behind it in distress. In short, it's constipated.

Waaack, Waaack, Ooops.

So what was this senna-sational revelation? It concerned the similarity between thoughts in the POV of a person experiencing obsessive love, and a person experiencing excessive hate.

He ran one slow finger over the photograph, feeling the cracks in the glossy coating, and soft burrs of the dog-eared corners. He traced the fluid line of the girl's hair, where the wind had blown it against her cheek, along her jaw, it's dark lustre highlighting the pallour of her skin. Those fearful eyes - stubborn and proud, yes, but still fearful - stared back at him, and he knew what had put that fear there.

It was him.

Hero or villain? Hmmmm?

So now I know how I can establish the creepy, suspenseful mood of the story, introduce a theme of highlighting those love/hate similarities and set up a retroactive revelation for the hero.

Dang, I'm good.

Now there's just the rest of the book to sort out.

Excuse me, I think I need the loo....