ABSTRACT
One of the simplest openings to create is emotional. If someone is grieving, the natural empathy is readily engaged. Emma Thompson won the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and she did a beautiful job. One of Emma's challenges was that the two main characters, Elinor Dashwood and Edward Ferrars, do not see each other or communicate with each other for the whole middle of the novel. They may have readily accepted in the early 1800s that a woman could love a man and pine for him for years when they had only spent a handful of hours together. Grief is not the only emotion that creates an opening through which one person falls in love with another. Fear can create a crack in the shell. There could not possibly be a more vulnerable time in a woman's life than during childbirth. And great joy is as heart-opening as anything else.
