Writing Fiction

[poliphilo]

I love writing the crisis of a story. I find it just tumbles out onto the page. Fights, chases, emotional confrontations- brilliant!

Writing the build-up to crises is also fun, but more time-consuming.

Description is hard work. Descriptive passages can easily become boring to the reader. You've got to select the details that count. And cut and cut and cut.

I love writing dialogue. At times it's like you're channeling the characters. They run ahead of you and come up with all sorts of things that take you by surprise.

Revision is the worst. I spent hours this morning smoothing out transitions and filling out descriptions in the latest installment of purchas
I could have roughed out an entire action sequence in the time it took me to fettle one short, scene-setting paragraph.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Description is very hard for me. My favorite writing task is dialogue, and for the same reason: one never knows what will be said! It does feel like channeling.

I hate revisions. I can't dredge up any excitement about it. It's just a task, and one in which I must face multiple flaws.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I keep coming back to Chekhov. Some aspiring writer had presented him with pages and pages describing a moonlit evening and Chekhov said, "scrub it all and just tell us how the moon looks when it's reflected in a piece of broken glass."

I find I get hooked up for hours on tiny, insignificant, questions of grammar.

fettle (verb)

[zoe-1418.livejournal.com]

"to cover or line the hearth of (as a reverberatory furnace) with loose material (as sand or gravel)." [At least that's how my Miriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed., defines it.]

Thanks for adding a new word to my vocab!

Re: fettle (verb)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks- I didn't actually know the dictionary meaning of the word. I thought it had to do with some sort of industrial process, but that was all. :)

[red-girl-42.livejournal.com]

Revision is the worst.

Ditto that!

It's probably why I never finish writing anything that hasn't been assigned with a deadline.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't have trouble getting to the end of things, but tidying them up afterwards, pah, then I come over all perfectionist....