Online Musings: It’s All Part Of The Process

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 ;)