Euryleia's 1st Level Two Assignment
More General Writing Tips:
I started reading this article and had to blush at the first tip. In the first story I wrote for posting, midway through, I began calling one of the main characters by a different name. You’d think something like that would be obvious but I hadn’t yet cultivated a habit of thoroughly rereading my work or keeping a cheat sheet for each character.
I have found as I write longer and longer pieces that it very helpful to have little yellow stickies up with the biographical data on my characters. The quick reference on eye color, parent’s names or whether she shaves her pubes saves a lot of embarrassment later. It also helps when doing the final read through to check off on a list each time you mention a particular characteristic to avoid overuse of a description.
Dialogue used to be my Waterloo. I nearly failed a playwriting course in college because the professor thought my dialogue was stilted and forced. His assignment for me was to go to food courts and just listen to people talk. Since then, I have kept up the habit of listening as I move through my daily life. These days, eavesdropping is a heck of a lot easier with the proliferation of cell phones. It is amazing the most personal things that folks say (example: “Tell him if he says anything about last night, I’m never sleeping with his girlfriend again” overheard in a parking lot of Kaiser Hospital). I so want to write a story around that.
I found the section on dialect very interesting because I just hate the freakish spellings or other lengths some authors go. I agree that a pattern or a turn of phrase will be better indicators of a person’s accent than any patois.
I keep a notepad with me and am regularly jotting down scenes, ideas, and bits of dialogue. There is also one beside the bed for those 2 am revelations. I transfer the notes to file on my computer called seeds. When I revisit the file, there are plenty of ideas that can be moved into the outlining phase.
On the section about letting your characters lead you, I took a writing class where the moderator had us develop interview questions for our characters. It is amazing what you can learn about them when you ask them. Once I understand the characters a bit better, the story develops more naturally.
How Can I Become a Better Writer:
I think writers have an obligation both to themselves and to their readers to take seriously the editing of their work. Rabbit is quite right that it entails more than just a spelling and grammar check—although that’s vitally important as well. It is hard to go back and take whole sections out that don’t serve any purpose but the story will be better for having them gone. I sometimes have to wait a week or longer before I can go back to edit my work. I find it difficult to be ruthless enough while I’m still in love with the plot or the characters.
These were both helpful articles. I’m glad I read them.
