Writing vs. Language Learning

As a thought on writing today, I will share a recent insight I found into the similarity between writing (particularly writing dialogue) and language learning.  Like learning a new language, writing dialogue requires not only the proper words, meanings, etc., but also the feel of natural speech.  In fact, sometimes the more important element of dialogue (and language learning) is the rhythm, the musicality of the speech.

In language learning, this looks like a practice my father used while learning French.  He would choose a phrase with particular rhythms and phonemes he found difficult, then he would repeat that phrase until he mastered it.  For example:  “Je ne croix pas que ca soix possible.”  In this phrase, you have the difficult French “r”, a complex grammar structure and the unusual French vowel sound of ‘wah’.  By rehearsing this phrase (among others), my father learned to so accurately imitate the proper rhythm and sound of French, that he is now mistaken for a Frenchman when he visits Paris.

Back to writing dialogue.  The fact is, dialogue can be the best or worst part of a novel.  Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald, these guys could write novels made up entirely of dialogue and keep us interested.  Salinger actually did.  Then again, sometimes dialogue can be stilted, flat, every-character-has-the-same-stupid-voice so that I’ve been sent running from some otherwise perfectly decent books.

So, how do we imbue our dialogues with life?  How do we go the way of Salinger instead of most fantasy fiction?  Read. it. out. loud.  If the rhythm is wrong read aloud, then it’s wrong.  If the wording is stilted and unbelievable when read aloud, fix. it.  Also, dig into your characters as you write: who they are, how they move and think and feel, so that each character has a unique voice.  The reader should be able to identify your characters based solely on what they say and how they say it.  If you write a dialogue and there is no distinction between the mannerisms, the figures of speech, or the basic worldviews of the different participants in the dialogue, then it’s not real dialogue.  It’s just you talking to yourself.

I tested this theory on two of my characters today and discovered two things:  One, that one of my characters was simply speaking as I would speak, was really just an extension of myself.  I’ll probably back this character off into being a narrator.  The second character, through her body language, her terseness and her sense of controlling the scene, revealed herself quiet suddenly to be the villain of my story.  Surprise!  I discovered it because I wrote without trying to guide her in any one direction, but simply followed where she naturally wanted to go.

Today:  Success!  I wrote without overthinking or self-editing and made a new discovery in my characters.
Today’s Project:  Keep at it.  Write at least once more and get my characters out of the apartment they’ve been so willing to hide in up till now.  I need to get them into conversation with others to figure out more of who they are.
Today’s Writing Reference:  I read this today and love it:   http://onehundredonebooks.wordpress.com/2011/03/10/jonathan-franzens-10-rules-of-writing/

Follow the Leader

I have been reading and experimenting this week in the area of character development and have come to a startling realization:

Throughout my years of mediocre writing, I have been meeting characters for the first time and then immediately pushing them – with no small amount of bullying and man-handling – down the roads of two-dimensional, poorly thought-out plots.  Naturally, these characters have quickly thrown up their hands and stalked off, leaving me with only the memory of them, like faded polaroids, trying desperately to nurse those remnants into life.

In lieu of this tradition, I have been experimenting all week with the radical new idea (that I totally stole from some legitimate authors) of following my characters instead of leading them.  Practically speaking, this has played out as simply writing without giving thought to my intended story or plot progression at all.  I write as quickly as I can, with as few pauses as possible, writing out dialogue and actions that seem to come most naturally to those characters who are only beginning to take shape.

My discovery has been that these characters often have layers of personality, conflict, history and weird quirks that I’d never dreamed of when I first glimpsed them sitting in the corner of my intended main character’s favorite cafe or spoke with them briefly as they treated my main character’s bum knee.  It truly has been a new experience for me of creation blended with discovery.  Whether this means I am tapping into my subconscious mind more effectively or I am meeting some of the muses of literature, I am not sure and I do not care.  I just want to keep digging deeper.

Thoughts?  Any one else out there experienced this phenomenon?

Today:  Success!
Today’s Project:  continued experimentation in “following the leader” with my characters instead of leading them down the paths of my intended plots.

Inconsistent, but Persistent

I know, I know, my 30 straight days of writing is turning into 30 every-other-days of writing.  I have nothing I can say in my defense.  There’s no reason for me to be so inconsistent with my efforts to incorporate writing into my everyday life, but I will say that I have written every day this month.  Just not on this blog.

What follows is a dismally short list of my successful and unsuccessful ventures in daily written production.

SUCCESSES:

Morning Pages – As mentioned previously, I have started a project wherein I write three handwritten pages stream of consciousness style each day.  I do not edit and I am not allowed to reread for at least thirty days.  I’ve succeeded in doing this 4 of the last 5 days!

Journaling – I’ve always been a journaler, though I hardly keep a completely chronological timeline of my daily life.  Typically, my journal entries run about one handwritten page and sum up my general frame of mind at the time of writing.  I also often write about the spiritual topics I am exploring in my daily studies at that time.

FAILURES:

Novel – My novel continues to be a weight around my neck, a constant reminder of personal failure, a beacon of my own mediocrity in fiction writing.  I refuse, however, to let yet another story drop by the wayside without at least doing it the honor of finishing it first, no matter how shitty that first draft will turn out to be.

Reading about Writing – I continue to study the books I’ve bought on writing, but only with terrible inconsistency.  I love the books.  I just love television more.

This blog – Obviously, this blog makes the list of failures, since I’ve sputtered to an every-other-day schedule after my over-ambitious and naive beginnings.

 

Today:  A mixed bag of failure and success
Today’s Project:  to explore how those things which come naturally to me (namely, journaling and a daily exercise in stream of consciousness) can be used to aid those ailing elements of my attempt at authorship.  Perhaps my daily stream of consciousness can be forced to focus on the storyline of my novel?  My subconscious groans in response.
(Day before) Yesterday’s Project: As for my goal of repeating the “Reading to Prompt Writing” experiment, I’m sure you can guess that I failed.  I will be try, trying again today!

聊聊可以嘛

Experimentation and Diligence

Well, I did it. I woke up this morning with the intention of trying two new methods in writing and I managed to actually do them:

1. Morning Pages – A friend of mine recommended this to me based on a book she’d read recently. I’ll find out the title and post it asap. Essentially, “Morning Pages” is a ritual in which as soon as you wake up every morning, before even getting out of bed, you handwrite three 8×10, college-ruled pages of whatever comes to mind. You may not reread or edit anything written for at least one month. After that, the pages are for your use, but the primary purposes are simply to a) begin your day with writing, b) explore those things that have been mulling in your subconscious, c) write. I failed to do this immediately upon waking, but managed to remember one hour after I got up and did it anyway. The goal tomorrow morning is to manage NOT to hit the snooze button for one hour.

2. Reading About Writing to Prompt Writing –
As previously mentioned, I am reading two books about the life of writing and today I approached my writing time with the plan to read a chapter in one of these books before commencing. As I anticipated, the author’s wit, encouragement and passion for writing all drove me onward when I opened my laptop to write. I managed to add 10 minutes worth of description and dialogue to the “new” first chapter of my book.
While writing, I was also able to implement the author’s writing tip from the chapter I had read: DO NOT SELF-EDIT WHILE WRITING. I would not allow myself to delete anything written apart from spelling errors, even if a mistakenly typed word took me in a completely different direction than anticipated. Also, I allowed my characters to say the first thing that came to mind, no matter how petty or abstract. Did I turn out a pultizer worthy paragraph? Nope. Did I successfully add to my novel for the first time in two weeks? Yup.

Today: Success
Today’s Project: Repeat my new experimental process of “a) reading from the book about writing and b) pumping out un-edited content for at least ten minutes” twice more before the day is out.

Off to a Terrible Start. Now What?

Well, that certainly didn’t take long.  Just three days into my month of writing every day and already I’m operating at only 66%.  In a classic example of false starts, I had a great first day of writing: I really enjoyed the process and the progress of sitting down to write, I left feeling energized and excited for the month to come.  Then, the next day, I just forgot.  I wasn’t particularly busy, sick or tired; I just didn’t write.  So it is that I reach another obstacle on the road to consistent writing:  false starts.

I think, “I’m not doing it well, so I may as well not do it at all.”

Then, I think, “No one is reading the blog anyway.  Who’s to know?  I could delete it and none would be the wiser.”

Then, I think, “There are better ways I could be spending my time.  How narcissistic is it to commit to writing every day for the sake of my own writing?”

So, now what?  I do, of course, have full freedom to stop.  I cannot convince myself that this blog will ever turn into a Julie and Julia story or that the posts will someday be compiled into an award-winning book on writing (penned by the then world-famous author I hope to be).  The reality remains that this blog is primarily for my own purposes, my own benefit, and is driven solely by my own grit.

Therefore, in order to overcome my false start (known heretofore as the first hiccup in my wildly successful venture) I returned to an age-old habit when forcing myself to write:  I read what I’ve written.  This is another method of combating Writer’s Block that I should have mentioned in my previous post:  If you’re stuck, go back and read what you’ve written before.  Reading other people’s words can be helpful, but I have found that approach to be risky.  If I begin to read a work by an author with a very different written voice than my own, that other author’s voice can drown out my own feeble whisper that I am attempting to nurture.  Reading my own work, even the cruddy stuff, reminds me why I write, that I do sometimes have good, original thoughts and perhaps even returns me to that point at which I last left off, inviting me to move forward.

Today’s project:  To reread a bit of my own work (namely, the first couple chapters of my novel) without editing and adding at least a “one inch by one inch” paragraph at the end.

In the Beginning…

Here we are.  Day 1 of 31.

It seems appropriate on my first day of a new month dedicated to the development of my passion for writing that I talk about why I do not write.  My sister, a painter, says that one of her absolute favorite things in this world is a blank canvas.  So open, so virgin, so full of promise.  I, on the other hand, am absolutely paralyzed by a blank page.  Give me a bit of weak prose to work with and I will hit the ground running, but a blank page?  A sense of inertia settles in my gut and my fingers agitate the keyboard while I stare off into the distance.  Eventually, I feel guilty about doing nothing at all and I walk away.

Still, I do have a few tricks I can share that sometimes rescue me from vacant spaces:

1.  Stream of Consciousness:  This is a well-known exercise that we all loved to hate in middle school.  Truth be told, stream of consciousness will not often (or ever) produce great works of literature, but it can and will bridge the gap between Not Writing and Writing.  Simple as it sounds, one of the greatest barriers I must overcome when I sit down to write is my deep loathing of bad writing.  I know what good literature sounds like and ninety percent of what I put out ain’t it.  So what?  Start typing.  (I should stress that according to Anne Lamott and Annie Dillard and – I am sure – many other authors, this approach is NOT a lowering of standards, but a submission to the natural process of writing.  You can edit later.  For now, just write.)

2.  Take a Walk:  A newly discovered trick of mine when I find that I CANNOT write is to not write at all.  A brisk walk, particularly in an area where I can run into other people, has proven a great tool  for ripening and innervating my creative thinking.  Other good writing stimulants are listening to classical music (or soundtracks), dancing, or people-watching at music venues.  Things that do NOT encourage me to write are watching television, reading, or taking a long, hot bath.  Obviously, everyone will be different in this respect, so it’s important to experiment and note those activities which press you to write.  The point is, once you’ve done something else for a few minutes, RETURN TO WRITING to test the results.  Still got nothing?  Try something else, then return.

3.  Intentional Routines: As a new goal this year, I plan to set time limits during which I MUST write.  If I cannot produce anything, then I will try one of my “Writing Stimulants” mentioned above and then return.  Some authors recommend writing at the same time every day, some say only that you should have a place where you always go to write.  This is another area where you have the freedom to experiment and find what you need.  The goal of these writing periods will not be to produce a certain quantity or even to produce great quality, but simply to produce.

I will continue to share suggestions for consistent production as I discover them this month.  I strongly recommend reading those works by your favorite authors where they talk about the process of writing.  Many, many authors publish on this topic and each has a slightly different take on how to approach it.

Thanks for reading and please share your ideas on overcoming Writer’s Paralysis!

Till Next Time,

TrialnErr0r