Writing Plain
Both of my novels keep eluding me. I think about them all the time and little things catch my interest and excite me. But I leave them there. I don’t put them down yet. There is a fear of doing something badly – like that will ruin the good idea. It’s like giving birth. You feel like after nine months, you have one shot for a healthy baby and if you blow it – well, the baby can’t be fixed. Of course this isn’t true. In this case you can throw the baby out and start over.
I’m reading Jack Grapes book on Method Writing. The plan is to give it a go. There is some resistance here at the start as he advises you to write like you talk with nothing else. I see that as starting every sentence with “I” when talking about myself. If I try it right now – I will try the exercises in the book. Hopefully they’ll help. Who knows what may come out of it.
I am about to start the next novel. I can feel it. The first line feels solid, I just don’t know where to go from there. There’s an outline of sorts. Which I think slowed me down a little as it felt like I did a lot already and could rest. But none of it is really interesting to me after that. Outlines are restrictive to me.
Let’s see what else? The story about the little nun is fading away. I described the whole thing and it feels like it’s written even though it’s not. Am I that much of a pantser? Also Goblin Pieman, the working title of my 1st draft of the middle grade book, really wants to be edited. Again, little things spark my desire, little revelations about how things should go or what needs to be in there to make the whole thing hold together in an exciting way.
And what I’m really doing right now is writing poetry. I think because a lot of the online courses I’m taking have me distilling the work and it turns into a poem. Images get consolidated into essential words. But that’s not how people talk. So I’m still resisting.
I do admit that when I read an old travel journal, I was really taken with a story I wrote about an Italian man fixing my shoes. It was written plainly, just for me, but in rereading it, like 20 years later, it kept me engaged. I wanted to say “rereading it some 20 years later…” But do I talk like that? I don’t know, maybe I do have a false writer voice. It bores me to write like this. Just saying things. When I’m really on role in a conversation, I do find that I automatically structure things in a more what – literary way? In a more eloquent way. Is eloquence the sin? I want to give this method a fair shake – to try to and see where it might take my writing. I don’t know.
It’s funny, the examples from novels that he uses all have an eloquence and style to them. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Is that really the way we talk? Time will tell.
Right now my writing voice is different from my conversational voice. For one, I can’t seem to string a phrase together anymore when I talk. It feels like dementia or something – seriously, my speech comes in scraps. Scraps. That’s accurate. That’s what I’d say, but is that too artistic? Do I think in poetry?