More than Words on a Page
My brain is having a hard time focusing right now, I can see the keys on the keyboard just fine but the letters on the screen are getting a little blurry. I have to concentrate more to have it come into focus. This is really frustrating because I have this story idea that I want to write down, but it just keeps coming out wrong somehow. The movie in my head looks great on brain film but doesn’t seem to work so well on paper. Well, I bet it works great on paper, I just don’t know how to get there and have it flow and twist into people’s brains the way a good story should.
I think part of the problem is that it is already in my head and I can see it before I write it. With most stories that I read the picture is forming as I read each word and hear the actors deliver the lines and the pauses perfectly. As it is now my story sort of sucks, but I’ve got a great plot and fabulous characters. I really need to work on figuring out how to get the pauses in the story and take out a lot of the details that I have and ad in one that are more meaningful. I haven’t been able to convey the passing of time in ways other than second by second, minute by minute.
If you have a tense, action packed scene but you want to convey the passing of 15 minutes while you wait for the heroine to show up because she was at a different location how do you do that? Or if in real life something takes a few seconds when you want it to take a few minutes how do you convey that?
When I read I often don’t pay as much attention to the writing, once I start trusting the author that is, as I should so I don’t know how to write a good story – the mechanics of it. I get too caught up in what’s going on that I don’t see the individual pieces that make up the art. A good example would be an oil painting; you can see every brush stroke that the artist put onto the canvas, but you usually don’t study it minutely the first few times you see it because you end up missing the story being drawn out. That’s how I read – it’s a movie in my brain. Sometimes I get so caught up with the movie that I forget that there’s an actual book in my hands and I don’t remember actually reading the individual words but I know every scene.
There are a lot of books you can’t really do that with simply because something in the book keeps kicking you out – bad grammar, faulty sentence structure, bad or eye-roll inducing plot turns, shocking language, etc – and those I guess I read like any other person. Then again, I don’t know how everyone else reads – do they see stories in their heads or do they see stories on paper? Or do they see nothing at all…
I want my story to be something that everyone can see in their head – something tangible something they can practically reach out and touch, a tactile experience with words.
I think part of the problem is that it is already in my head and I can see it before I write it. With most stories that I read the picture is forming as I read each word and hear the actors deliver the lines and the pauses perfectly. As it is now my story sort of sucks, but I’ve got a great plot and fabulous characters. I really need to work on figuring out how to get the pauses in the story and take out a lot of the details that I have and ad in one that are more meaningful. I haven’t been able to convey the passing of time in ways other than second by second, minute by minute.
If you have a tense, action packed scene but you want to convey the passing of 15 minutes while you wait for the heroine to show up because she was at a different location how do you do that? Or if in real life something takes a few seconds when you want it to take a few minutes how do you convey that?
When I read I often don’t pay as much attention to the writing, once I start trusting the author that is, as I should so I don’t know how to write a good story – the mechanics of it. I get too caught up in what’s going on that I don’t see the individual pieces that make up the art. A good example would be an oil painting; you can see every brush stroke that the artist put onto the canvas, but you usually don’t study it minutely the first few times you see it because you end up missing the story being drawn out. That’s how I read – it’s a movie in my brain. Sometimes I get so caught up with the movie that I forget that there’s an actual book in my hands and I don’t remember actually reading the individual words but I know every scene.
There are a lot of books you can’t really do that with simply because something in the book keeps kicking you out – bad grammar, faulty sentence structure, bad or eye-roll inducing plot turns, shocking language, etc – and those I guess I read like any other person. Then again, I don’t know how everyone else reads – do they see stories in their heads or do they see stories on paper? Or do they see nothing at all…
I want my story to be something that everyone can see in their head – something tangible something they can practically reach out and touch, a tactile experience with words.
posted by Rebecca at 9:37 PM
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