Monday, January 25, 2010

one voice, two voice

One thing I found out today is that different mediums are useful for different types of storytelling. I find it easier to write dialogue/conversations, if I write freehand, and easier to write descriptive passages on a computer.

With dialogue, for some reason when writing out the words longhand, maybe it's the motor-act of writing out all the words, but it is almost like the characters are conjured up, speaking to one another and not paying attention to me, and I am just transcribing what they are saying. I add in very little description, usually just whether a response happens to be nonverbal or not, and whether or not any time passes. I got through two scenes of dialogue, totaling six handwritten pages, in a little under an hour. When I try to type dialogue, I spend so much time second guessing them that what comes out doesn't really sound like how I think they should sound. Right now I am debating going back and rewriting several dialogue passages, just because I didn't write them out freehand originally. But maybe they don't need it, and it's just me.

On the otherhand, with descriptions, what I am writing is so dependant on the exact word choice, and the arrangement of words and sentences, that I am editing, cut and pasting, and rewriting so much that if I tried to do it freehand, I would just have a large pile of crossed out lines that I could never go back and decipher, and if I just kept starting over to make clear what I wanted, I would just have pages and pages devoted to getting one simple paragraph on paper. It is much easier to just erase everything I don't need as I go.

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