Who am I, what am I doing here?
May. 13th, 2022 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iolosdreamWelcome to my new blog, in which I will indulge myself about the craft of writing as I understand it.
My name is David Watson, friends call me iolo, for reasons that may or may not become apparent. I'm 74 years old, and have been awriting stories for the last 20 years... since my late wife Kathleen died. She wanted to write stories, I was happy to brainstorm ideas with her. It was fun. Then everything went pear-shaped: my sweetie got cancer and died, leaving all her/our stories untold.
After a year or so of grieving, I decided to finish one of her tales... it hadn't advanced more than a few pages; good stuff, but quite unfinished. On realizing I couldn't write in her voice, I re-worked everything my own way: a first- person narrative with lots of quirky asides. It was very enjoyable.
I quickly discovered first-person narrative can be damned difficult unless you're doing a Sam Spade detective tale with One Observer. There's a principle in writing that says Show rather than Tell. Direct action entertains better than second-hand narrative. You want to take your reader along; smell the fear, feal the heat, as sweat trickles down their back..
If the story is told first-person, your character has to witness every important event (show) or get reports second-hand (tell) from other characters, which substantially lessens the impact.
If you write in third-person omniscient, you can show action from multiple viewpoints (I recommend no more than 3 or 4 viewpoint characters, max) So the first thing I had to do was re-write all my first-person narrative in third person. There was a lot of it... took weeks.
I also tried. first person present rather than past... it gave the narrative an immediacy that I really enjoyed that was even harder to sustain. So for neophytes out there, I suggest third person omniscient unless you have a pressing reason to do otherwise.
Another possibility was telling the story in multiple persons as a novel of letters... I gave that up quickly. Sooner or later, all those letters have to collide to carry on the story and things get even more complex. Just don't go there!
Another thing I learned from Kathleen... I believe she got it from Poul Anderson at a Scifi Con. He said most neophytes limit their narrative to sight and hearing, and that can be very limiting. You should try to engage as many of the senses as possible on every page (being aware it simply won't be possible) How does that work? In one of my early stories, I had a party exploring a subterranian passage beneath the City. The passage is musty, even moldy, Our Hero immediately starts getting a headache. The floor is wet, with a fine sandy grit that drags at the feet. Water drips from overhead, plastering our hero's hair to his forehead. The short stair takes the party down to a crumbling wooden door that smells of rot... it crumbles at the touch, soft splinters fall into the water on the lentil...
So you get the idea: pour on the detail. Eventually you'll realize you have overdone it, but for the first draft, try out everything. English, in particular is a very rich language, borrowing from everybody. We are blessed with a huge variety of descriptive terms, each of which carries its own shades of meaning. Writing prose isn't all that different from poetry.. except you don't have to worry so much about rhyme and meter (It still helps to read your stuff aloud, to see if it sounds right. If the narrative doesn't scan well when read aloud, I go back and make changes. Admittedly there are some great writers whose prose doesn't read aloud well, but I'm not one of them.
My name is David Watson, friends call me iolo, for reasons that may or may not become apparent. I'm 74 years old, and have been awriting stories for the last 20 years... since my late wife Kathleen died. She wanted to write stories, I was happy to brainstorm ideas with her. It was fun. Then everything went pear-shaped: my sweetie got cancer and died, leaving all her/our stories untold.
After a year or so of grieving, I decided to finish one of her tales... it hadn't advanced more than a few pages; good stuff, but quite unfinished. On realizing I couldn't write in her voice, I re-worked everything my own way: a first- person narrative with lots of quirky asides. It was very enjoyable.
I quickly discovered first-person narrative can be damned difficult unless you're doing a Sam Spade detective tale with One Observer. There's a principle in writing that says Show rather than Tell. Direct action entertains better than second-hand narrative. You want to take your reader along; smell the fear, feal the heat, as sweat trickles down their back..
If the story is told first-person, your character has to witness every important event (show) or get reports second-hand (tell) from other characters, which substantially lessens the impact.
If you write in third-person omniscient, you can show action from multiple viewpoints (I recommend no more than 3 or 4 viewpoint characters, max) So the first thing I had to do was re-write all my first-person narrative in third person. There was a lot of it... took weeks.
I also tried. first person present rather than past... it gave the narrative an immediacy that I really enjoyed that was even harder to sustain. So for neophytes out there, I suggest third person omniscient unless you have a pressing reason to do otherwise.
Another possibility was telling the story in multiple persons as a novel of letters... I gave that up quickly. Sooner or later, all those letters have to collide to carry on the story and things get even more complex. Just don't go there!
Another thing I learned from Kathleen... I believe she got it from Poul Anderson at a Scifi Con. He said most neophytes limit their narrative to sight and hearing, and that can be very limiting. You should try to engage as many of the senses as possible on every page (being aware it simply won't be possible) How does that work? In one of my early stories, I had a party exploring a subterranian passage beneath the City. The passage is musty, even moldy, Our Hero immediately starts getting a headache. The floor is wet, with a fine sandy grit that drags at the feet. Water drips from overhead, plastering our hero's hair to his forehead. The short stair takes the party down to a crumbling wooden door that smells of rot... it crumbles at the touch, soft splinters fall into the water on the lentil...
So you get the idea: pour on the detail. Eventually you'll realize you have overdone it, but for the first draft, try out everything. English, in particular is a very rich language, borrowing from everybody. We are blessed with a huge variety of descriptive terms, each of which carries its own shades of meaning. Writing prose isn't all that different from poetry.. except you don't have to worry so much about rhyme and meter (It still helps to read your stuff aloud, to see if it sounds right. If the narrative doesn't scan well when read aloud, I go back and make changes. Admittedly there are some great writers whose prose doesn't read aloud well, but I'm not one of them.
