Weekly Rants: November 14, 2012

Greeting Fellow Readers! Welcome to another of random ranting. As promised today I will be posting up my 'Thoughts on Writing' from my Facebook page that I wrote over the Spring. If you wish to follow on Facebook just head on over to 'The Written Works of H-M Brown', by clicking on the link on the sidebar of this page. Don't hesitate to share your thoughts and criticisms, especially the criticisms, the harsher the better.

So without any more interruptions here is the first set of my 'Thoughts on Writing'.

[ Writing Style: 

    Let's start here. One of the things I have difficulty with is writing style. Everyone points this out, but I don't know if there is a distinct way of "seeing" it. For me what I read and what my brain processes into imagination is all I really get. I never take into account what a writing style looks like. So when I was told in Fictionaut my writing was all action. I took a long look and realized it was true. I never really thought of that as my writing style since I only wrote what I thought of and visualized in my head.

     It's also something that I use to and cannot break out of. So in a way action prose has become sort of my fingerprint as noted in writing books what writing styles are. Of course one of the drawbacks to my writing, a friend of mine pointed out, was that my writing come off as laundry list. So I try to write sentences that at least give off a poetic feel, or use sentences like "as though a bird had its wings broken" when referencing a situation or character. At least this way I feel I can avoid the laundry list situation.

      Another thing I learned strangely enough in the book "On Writing Well" which deals with writing non-fiction. In Chapter 10 the author discussed the use of contractions. What are good and what are bad. However in my third person narrative prose I found myself getting caught in the stigma of the contractions I used, particularly its, it's, and it's. I also found it overwhelming using contractions in narrative when I have it in dialogue as well. So I made the decision to not use contractions in narrative and let the dialogue carry it.

      I found it a little easier for me at least to throw off the context of what I am writing in third person. However, since first person is one overly long dialogue in narrative form and has the voice of the protagonist, cutting the contractions there are not a wise idea. It gives the narrator character. Which brings me to the next part.

     First Person. A lot of First Person stories do have dialogue from other characters in the parenthesis form. But I found myself not using it to be much easier. To me it felt unusual in writing, to place the parenthesis dialogue separately. Let me put it like this, we I talk to people in person, I don't say; "He was just hear." John said. I say, John told me that he was hear a second ago. That's how we talk to each other and that's what the narrator is doing. He is talking to you the reader about what he say and he experience. That is why I don't use dialogue sentences in my first person stories.

      First person is kind of an intimate experience. Something the narrator has to say to you because it is important for you to know, or else why would the narrator bother talking to you about his problem? I felt I had to treat the first person fiction as such. The narrator is talking, not me. I'm sure it is quite unusual to write that, but it just seems right for me to write that way.

      Well that's all I got to say about my writing style. It may not be spectacular, but it does feel right with me and is in my comfort zone. I look forward to improving this style and make it even more tighter, and more enjoyable then ever before. So Part 2 will be next week. Thanks for joining me. Until next time... see ya. ]

So ends Part 1 one of my Facebook postings on writing. Next week I will post up Part 2, most likely in 2 parts because I wrote 10 posts in there on Show, Don't Tell. Then in Part 3 I did discuss about Foreshadowing, to stack against what I thought of it then with I wrote a month ago. And the final Part 4 was on Writing Experimentation. Basically the different ways I wrote my stories and the approaches I took.

I thank you all for joining me and I look to seeing you all next week.

Until Next Time...

See Ya.