So how do you write?
Sep. 11th, 2002 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2That's a question that is different for every writer. For me, as I pointed out in a reply to a post by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
zorkfox, I'm not a very emotional person as a rule, and I've always assumed that this is a hindrance to my own writing. You know, a great artist is supposed to be very emotional, to experience the world more fully and more intimately, something like that. The whole Romantic ideal, I guess -- I'd make a very poor Romantic, I think.
But since I was very young, my answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "I want to be a creative writer". This answer always impressed adults, but the fact was that I got through High School and part of college without writing very much besides what was required for classwork. I remember when I met Gene, that it first occured to me (duh!) that in order to be a writer, you actually had to write, on a fairly consistent basis. I mean, that seems obvious, but I'd been planning for years to be a writer some day, and yet I rarely spent time writing.
One of the things I discovered when I really did start to write, was that dialogue comes pretty easy to me. I don't have a good ear for voices and accents, but I've always been able to construct realistic dialogue in my head. In fact, it's not that I'm able to do that, it's that I do it, constantly, all the time.
Ever since I can remember, I've held arguments and discussions in my head, between two or more voices. It's not that I'm hearing voices, I'm just imagining scenarios and what the various characters might say. For example, if I had a confrontation with someone, I'd go over the argument later in my head, rehearse how it might have gone or should have gone, or where else it might lead. Maybe I'd pick up on a bit of conversation and run it through my head, and continue the dialogue from there. Or I'd just imagine completely fabricated scenarios, fantasy or whatever, and how the conversations might go between different characters.
And that's another thing. I don't know if anybody else does this, but I have always had conversations with people from the past, in my head. That's one of my favorite things to occupy my mind with -- explaining how modern baseball has changed to a baseball player from 1945, or how the political landscape has changed in the last 20 years to someone from 1980, or how music has changed to someone from the early rock era. If I'm studying blue music, I might be talking to one of the early blues masters who died while they were young, and explaining to them how popular blues is today, how it's changed over the years, how their own music is now widely recognized... it's just a game in my head, a way to study a subject in a historical context, but it's something I've done since as long as I can remember.
And of course, I also held a lot of conversations with people from other worlds. If I read a fantasy book, I'd probably imagine one of the main characters in my world, and I'd explain things to them.
I used to do this a lot while riding the bus to school. For many years, I rode a bus for over an hour each way, to school and back home, and there wasn't much to do but stare out the window and think. All these fantasy scenarios and conversations going on in my head. And while I always knew that I had an active imagination and all these worlds and stories in my head, and that telling stories for a living would be really cool, I didn't realize until much later how the constant conversations in my head would lead to my writing.
So when I write, the first thing that comes to me is dialogue, and usually I write that down first and build the scene from there. Maybe a lot of writers work that way, maybe not. I know some writers feel like the characters are speaking directly to them, telling them what happened, but for me, it's more a process of imagining the situation and the characters involved, and then listening to see what they're likely to say, and where the conversation goes from there.
So the big question is... have I written anything this week?
Yep. Helps that I haven't played EQ since Saturday. ^_^ I know Gene wants me to work on a certain Tai-Pan story, but after watching all that Devil Hunter Yohko, I felt like working on Muyami Academy again. So that's what I'm doing right now.
zorkfox, I'm not a very emotional person as a rule, and I've always assumed that this is a hindrance to my own writing. You know, a great artist is supposed to be very emotional, to experience the world more fully and more intimately, something like that. The whole Romantic ideal, I guess -- I'd make a very poor Romantic, I think.But since I was very young, my answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "I want to be a creative writer". This answer always impressed adults, but the fact was that I got through High School and part of college without writing very much besides what was required for classwork. I remember when I met Gene, that it first occured to me (duh!) that in order to be a writer, you actually had to write, on a fairly consistent basis. I mean, that seems obvious, but I'd been planning for years to be a writer some day, and yet I rarely spent time writing.
One of the things I discovered when I really did start to write, was that dialogue comes pretty easy to me. I don't have a good ear for voices and accents, but I've always been able to construct realistic dialogue in my head. In fact, it's not that I'm able to do that, it's that I do it, constantly, all the time.
Ever since I can remember, I've held arguments and discussions in my head, between two or more voices. It's not that I'm hearing voices, I'm just imagining scenarios and what the various characters might say. For example, if I had a confrontation with someone, I'd go over the argument later in my head, rehearse how it might have gone or should have gone, or where else it might lead. Maybe I'd pick up on a bit of conversation and run it through my head, and continue the dialogue from there. Or I'd just imagine completely fabricated scenarios, fantasy or whatever, and how the conversations might go between different characters.
And that's another thing. I don't know if anybody else does this, but I have always had conversations with people from the past, in my head. That's one of my favorite things to occupy my mind with -- explaining how modern baseball has changed to a baseball player from 1945, or how the political landscape has changed in the last 20 years to someone from 1980, or how music has changed to someone from the early rock era. If I'm studying blue music, I might be talking to one of the early blues masters who died while they were young, and explaining to them how popular blues is today, how it's changed over the years, how their own music is now widely recognized... it's just a game in my head, a way to study a subject in a historical context, but it's something I've done since as long as I can remember.
And of course, I also held a lot of conversations with people from other worlds. If I read a fantasy book, I'd probably imagine one of the main characters in my world, and I'd explain things to them.
I used to do this a lot while riding the bus to school. For many years, I rode a bus for over an hour each way, to school and back home, and there wasn't much to do but stare out the window and think. All these fantasy scenarios and conversations going on in my head. And while I always knew that I had an active imagination and all these worlds and stories in my head, and that telling stories for a living would be really cool, I didn't realize until much later how the constant conversations in my head would lead to my writing.
So when I write, the first thing that comes to me is dialogue, and usually I write that down first and build the scene from there. Maybe a lot of writers work that way, maybe not. I know some writers feel like the characters are speaking directly to them, telling them what happened, but for me, it's more a process of imagining the situation and the characters involved, and then listening to see what they're likely to say, and where the conversation goes from there.
So the big question is... have I written anything this week?
Yep. Helps that I haven't played EQ since Saturday. ^_^ I know Gene wants me to work on a certain Tai-Pan story, but after watching all that Devil Hunter Yohko, I felt like working on Muyami Academy again. So that's what I'm doing right now.
