On Writing – Page 16

When You’re Sleepless, Madness…er…Magic Happens!

I know I’ve been talking a lot about the Muskoka Novel Marathon lately, but I can’t help it. It’s coming. Like a freight train that sneaks up on ya when you’re walkin’ the tracks and singing old Buddy Holly tunes. Or…yeah! Blancmange! Something something about a train going down a track…

The atmosphere of the marathon is such a magical non-quantifiable thing. You cannot write about it and do it justice. You just can’t. You try to stay up all weekend, you write non-stop…but you also socialize non-stop. You eat non-stop. You listen to music non-stop. Skip the light fandangle, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a high like no other.

As if there isn’t enough going on to warp your mind, you step out of the building on the Saturday night and the streets are turned into a carnival of milk chocolately, caramel stickable gooeyness. Because…don’t close your eyes…you have walked into the strange and magical world of Nuit Blanche North. Art installations and crickety crawling stilt-walking juggling sensations. And what would a Nuit be without a fire-eater.

(Just a side note, I love that most of my words today are being underlined in red squiggly lines.)

When THIS is happening INSIDE at the Novel Marathon, you pray that you will find sanity OUTSIDE! (-:

I always think of that classic line from Bill & Ted when I’m at the marathon. “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K!” That pretty much sums up the marathon. Just when you think you have to get outside to embrace a reality that is NORMAL, you walk out into this:

And this:

But before you run off down the street like a madman, you take a hard look at your surroundings and you realize that things are just as they should be. Writing a novel in a weekend SHOULD be a magical experience. Your heart SHOULD stop every now and again. You need these moments of wonder peppered throughout the weekend. It’s another classic reason for me to haul out that overused saying of mine. “Don’t be afraid to eat the dishes!” You’re gonna have some hard times over a 72-hour writing period. You’ll get cranky. You’ll get tired. You’ll get bloated. You’ll get indigestion out the wazoo! You need to step out of the world and into a carnival.

I’m sure that’s why the city planners threw Nuit Blanche into our weekend. They knew that into every novel marathoner’s life, a little magic must fall.

The tree that you see above ^ is a tree completely wrapped and enshrouded in TIES. Yes, ties. I sat beside that tree for about half an hour before I saw it at last year’s marathon. At first, that scared me. But when I stopped to think about it, it was pretty par for the course. I was, after all, writing. We marathoners took turns writing in the street in downtown Huntsville. We were our own art installation…and we collected a nice sum of money for the cause (the literacy program of the YMCA of Simcoe/Muskoka). If you see us out in the middle of the street this July, BRING MONEY!

I guess the lesson there is DON’T EXPECT TO QUESTION THE EFFICACY OF A TIE TREE WHEN YOU’RE MARATHONING. Or something like that.

Did I say juggling fire-eaters and stilt walkers? I think I meant fire-juggling stilt-walkers.

You’ve heard of the player piano, I’m sure. But did you know that Huntsville had a play-me piano. Right there in the street. Just waitin’ to be played. How frickin’ awesome-sauce is that! My only complaint? I DON’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY A PIANO! I wish I did. That corner of the downtown core would be hoppin’! This year, one of my goals is to get a fellow marathoner punchin’ those keys to an awesome sing-a-long song. Or something like that.

WRITING! It really does happen at these things! I have 5 novels to prove it. This is a shot of my screen during Nuit Blanche. If you want to know the height of exhilaration and dare-devilness, just write a novel in the street while hundreds of people are walking by reading over your shoulder! YIKES. Okay…I know you’re probably thinking that jumping out of an airplane is a whole new plateau of exhilaration that is miles above writing in the street. So what. By it’s very nature, it would have to be at least a mile above a street. There’d be no exhilaration jumping out of an airplane that’s parked on the runway. For a writer, public writing under a microscope pretty much does it for adrenalin rush-hour kicks.

So, am I excited for this year’s Muskoka Novel Marathon? Nah. Nothing good ever happens at these things. Just. BIC (bum-in-chair) writing. Nothing else. Move along. Nothing to see here (or do I mean see-hear-smell-touch-taste?)!

Kicking a Gift Horse in the Mouth

The title says it all. I just spent the last 9 years or so repeatedly kicking a gift horse. In the mouth.

Why would I do such a thing? I can think of a zillion words that describe my writing journey. And knowing that each one somehow belongs to me makes me feel more than a little ashamed of myself. Let’s give it a go, shall we: apathetic, detached, indifferent, remote, withdrawn, lackadaisical. I think you get the picture. BUT…there’s a big but. The actual BIC writing time—I am always serious, always attempting to do my best. I don’t slouch when it comes to the writing. That’s the part that allows me to escape. I have always honoured it as much as I could.

But, ACK, the business end. The getting things done end. I’ve been so weak. So nonchalant. Ooh, there’s another good word I must claim. No more, though. I’ve come to a point in my writing life where I feel I have to force myself to connect, to stop detaching. To own my writing and respect it…to see where it will go beyond me. The first couple of novels I wrote…I’d get some kind of extreme pleasure deleting them. It was the writing I longed for, not the result. It took a long time for the result to mean anything. It just felt like I was done, once I got the story out.

With two books published, I’m finding a small bit of confidence I never in a million years imagined I would have. With seven or eight more finished novels on my PC, I have come to a point where I feel I should stop kicking that horse. I need to take this more seriously. I need to edit, revise, respect—those manuscripts can sit there rotting, or I can give them the time they deserve and clean them up and send them along their merry way. What’s the worst that can happen?

A vow to myself. Respect the hours of hard work that I put in…by taking the next step when I have a completed manuscript. See things through. Stop detaching from everything. Writing has been very very good to me. It’s time to take the foot out of the horse’s face and give it a little pet. Horses won’t stand there forever and allow a person to keep kicking them. Sooner or later, the horse is gonna say, “Screw it!” I don’t want it to come to that. I want an amicable relationship with this horse. Time to put my foot down and get down to business!

edwardpoet — My grandson, enjoying my latest published book, Sebastian’s Poet!

Writing Really Good Dialogue

(When I was first asked to write an article on this topic, I was blown away. This meant that somebody out there in the world must think that I write good dialogue. Somebody is asking me for advice on writing ‘really good dialogue’. I was over the moon. Then, as I began to analyze my methods, I realized I didn’t have any methods. I came to the conclusion while writing the article below that I may just be a savant. But, then, I feel that may be giving myself too much credit. Maybe I just get lucky? Maybe it was an accident that I ever wrote good dialogue? Maybe, they just wanted me to feel good? Maybe the author they originally had booked to write the article was crushed in an ugly double-decker bus accident? Maybe…

Writing Really Good Dialogue

(This article originally appeared in the Sept/Oct issue of the WCDR Word Weaver. Past issues can be found here. Most recent issues are available to WCDR members only.)

I was flattered to be asked to address the topic of writing great dialogue. Then I tried to tackle it. How does one write dialogue? It’s the one aspect of writing I feel I’m good at. My confidence level as a writer is low, but I feel confident with the dialogue I create. But to explain how to write great dialogue seemed way too daunting a task!

So I Googled it. None of the online articles had anything to do with my approach. They said, writing good dialogue is hard work; a great read is a hard write; it’s incredibly difficult to write good dialogue; you must know your characters before you can create great dialogue.

Bullsh*t, I say. For me, I must stop thinking before I can write great dialogue. Just write. Thinking gets in the way of dialogue. After I read a few articles and realized I couldn’t relate, I almost gave up. I don’t know my characters. Sometimes I can’t even remember their names after writing an entire novel with them. But I do know this: what I know about my characters I did not find out before I wrote their dialogue. To me, that notion is just ludicrous. I discover my characters as the dialogue comes out of them. The dialogue forms the character, not the other way around. Their words give me a true picture of who they are.

To write great dialogue, you can’t write what you hear on the street. People are staccato in conversation. They prattle on and change topics and say so much that does not pertain to the task at hand. In fiction you can’t do this. Every word must count. Dialogue has to be written MUCH better than real life conversation. It has to focus on the story and stay within its parameters. Great dialogue would probably NOT happen in real life, but done right and the reader will swear it sounds like real-life conversation. Like the rest of the fictional landscape, dialogue has to be larger than life. It’s a conundrum, really. Write dialogue too authentic and you’ve blown it, write it too stilted and unauthentic and you’ve blown it.

A writer needs to create individual personalities through dialogue and keep their characters on task while doing so. Characters will shape themselves and the story through their words. But knowing what they need to say to keep the story moving is only half the work. How they say things is important to the reader’s ear. This is why I read all my dialogue out loud by itself. I remove tags and the surrounding prose and then I have a conversation with myself to listen to HOW my characters are saying what they’re saying. And I speak the dialogue fast, so I can see where contractions would come into it in real life conversation. We’re a lazy bunch, us talkers. The use of contractions alone will go a long way in making your dialogue appear authentic.

As I sat down to write this, I discovered I might be a bit of an automaton when it comes to writing dialogue. Then I realized you NEED to be an automaton, to just write dialogue without thinking about it. Most people these days just open their mouths and speak. I’m not saying this is right, but it is the way it’s done. So when you’re in the grip of story, become your characters. Get inside their heads and spit out the first words that come into their mouths. That’s probably what they would say, and that’s also what would make them each unique. Stop thinking and start speaking.