‘The Old D/L Blog’ Archives
Online Musings: It’s All Part Of The Process
Sunday, August 30th, 2009
I am tired of waking up to the thick smell of smoke. There, that is out of the way.
I am in one of my favorite phases of every journey: Realizing how much I do not know. That’s where I am with writing right now. I am delighted when I find out which parts come easily to me, but I am also delighted when I stumble onto an aspect or facet of the process that I had never considered. As with any creative process there is a need to naturalize all these facets so that you can do them without thinking, but you can do them with proper technique. So here I am turning them over in my mind, mulling over them, fussing over them, percolating, pondering and plotting. On top of that I meet with my friend once a week and we do story development. One week we work on mine, one week we work on his. The nice thing is that we take the egos out of it with this process, and we always seem to make forward progress on whichever story we’re developing: tightening, condensing, editing where necessary. On my own time, I just work on the actual act of writing which usually consists of blogs by authors, agents, publishers etc. Looking up definitions for writing terms and finding as many as I can. Reading a lot of short stories and novels is part of that too, analyzing someone’s use of language, voice, mannerisms etc. The other thing I have been paying close attention to is dialogue. We speak and hear speech every day, yet it is one of the hardest aspects of writing there is. I believe this is partly due to the fact that most people speak very different from how they write, so when writing dialogue your mind has to constantly dance back and forth between writing and speaking… all on the turn of a dime. On top of that, you are also trying to switch between one character’s speech pattern and another. Add to that the fact that very very few people speak in proper sentences, grammar, or even proper words (“acrossed” is not a word!). What it amounts to is a very complex challenge that takes a lot of work, but in the end needs to flow naturally and seemingly effortlessly. It’s a fun little dance ;)
~D
Online Musings: Verbal vs. Visual
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
Over the course of the last two years I seem to have transitioned from professional artist to aspiring author. Why? I haven’t a clue. When I was younger my mother would tell me that she thought writing was my true calling, not art. Of course I was a young upstart teenager and had put many many hours into drawing, so how could writing possibly be my true calling? Drawing always came so easily to me and I like(d) creating pictures… mostly of scantily-clad women… or women not clad at all, ahem. I was a teenager, cut me a break! Anyway, I liked drawing and painting so much, that I could not really imagine NOT doing those for a living. I had written all of a few little stories and maybe some decent essays. I thought, perhaps, my mom just didn’t want me drawing so many women…
I put aside writing. At the time I did not quite see the connections between everything. I knew I loved storytelling, but I really was only thinking of visual stories. However, after years of focusing solely on visual stories, I realized that it was not enough. There were elements missing. I could not tell a history, though I may be able to make something FEEL like it had history. There were no internal monologues, no witty banter, no real character studies. Sensations such as taste and smell were lacking. So I turned my sights back to writing in my final semester at Art Center. Everything my mom had said clicked right into place and made sense. Now, I cannot say writing is my true calling until I actually publish a book and that book is successful beyond my wildest dreams and movies and videogames and TV shows ensue… cause that’s what happens, right? Right. While I cannot claim it as my true calling as yet, what all of a sudden made sense was the fact that my writing was nearly as good as my drawing and painting after lying dormant for years. After putting thousands of hours into visual storytelling, my writing was still just half a fingernail behind. I realized that it really did come more naturally to me. This was also managed by a fair amount of reading and analyzing stories and verbalizing those analyses to push my communication abilities. And as I write more and more, I also realize that I would much, MUCH rather make a living with the written word. I would prefer that to drawing and painting as far as commercial work goes. When I consider sitting down and reading for an entire day just as productive as drawing for an entire day… something is up and I need to reassess my goals. Or maybe I just need to get a job ;)
~D
La Cañada – Flintridge
Friday, August 28th, 2009
As a Southern California resident, I tend to lose track of how many wildfires are burning at any given time in the summer, where they are, or when they started. Half the time I rely on my mom, who lives in Northern California, to bring fires to my attention. Having no frame of reference for how close together some cities are, she will often ask if the fires are bad, to which my most common response is, “What fire? I didn’t even know there was one.” However, it becomes difficult to ignore or pass over or not notice what looks like a thunderhead a thousand feet high. Especially when that thunderhead is hanging right over your own town in temperatures upwards of 100˚F. The worst part is when the wind changes southerly and all of a sudden it is hot as hell, and there are tendrils of smoke creeping through the city and it becomes difficult to even see down the street. I was watching for a few minutes from the roof of the Borders parking lot in Pasadena and I could see the flames… they were several miles away so I could only imagine how massive they must be up close. Instantly the flames I could see tripled in size. My guess is that a pine tree exploded once the sap boiled. I can’t imagine what else would have caused such a reaction. At any rate, there are certainly some beautiful destructive forces in the world. Thank you iPhone.
~D
Complexities in a walnut
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Hello folks!
I want to apologize for not posting much recently. I got caught up with work, as well as really planning out the rest of Dakota’s story, which has required some rather hefty thinking that, at times, has made my head hurt. In a good way. A good story should be complex because life is not simple. But creating that complexity, whether arbitrarily or through filtering what you know of your character, is a riveting and grueling process. As a story creator you need to learn to pull things out of thin air and combine them with aspects you’ve gleaned from what you already know of the story/characters, often aspects you never even thought to write, but somehow ended up with all the same. It all needs to create a complex web that has not loose ends, but rather has anchor points that are beginnings. If there are loose ends, tie them to other story lines or cut them out, or combine them. This is a back and forth that can take much much longer than you ever intended. I love the process because it forces me to approach everything more geometrically and pushes me to split my mind into many parts to consider all the plots and subplots at once.
The other challenge has been the voice of the story. I have decided to change it somewhat, but I really really believe it is for the better. And since BOOK 1 was only a 30 page short story, I really do not feel the need to base the rest of this expansive narrative on a little intro. I have been toying with the idea of posting the beginning of BOOK 2 here, but it is not ready, yet, and I may still decide not to. I’ll keep you posted. For now, be patient and I will resume posting regularly soon. Thank you!
~D
