Description and Direction
Most of the time I plan out things in a script format. I have stories told by the characters, with conversations between characters explaining the situation. Anyone reading HEHEHEE The Story on the AnacondaSoftware forums should be quite familiar with this writing style, since that's how the story takes place. The rest of the time, when I write out descriptions of things, I write them in a report format, like a paper. I prefer to plan things out visually, but when I don't have the time to focus on planning visual settings I let my thought process drive characters in conversation to explain situations.
Going back to Skewed from the last entry, this explains the problem I have. I started writing Skewed in 2004, almost 3 years ago now. I write it in chunks, one at a time, in a linear fashion. I don't usually plan things out in a linear fashion, I'll jump back and forth working on different ideas for different times, which is why its such a struggle to consistently update Skewed over the years. And, in addition to writing it out, If you read through the story though you will see me struggling with description. I'll resort to direction, not description, to carry forth the story. Conversations between characters, characters thinking to themselves, characters talking to themselves. There are several points that you'll see my attempt at description failing entirely, a few places with monologues. I'm not too pleased with those parts, because my goal for Skewed is to try and be descriptive. I've built a rather unusual world there, one thats not easy to picture without good description. Yet, when I fail to provide good enough description for what I'm directing, I fail to fulfill my duties as the Author.
When I was in high school, I had an English teacher named Mr. Thompson (don't remember his full name right now, but he's a fairly young English teacher at Skyline High School here in Utah). I had him two different years, for two different classes. He didn't particularly use any set material, because it was hard for him to get his classes to focus on things to learn. instead, one year, he decided to rewrite things from scratch, writing an entire curriculum from various English resources on the internet. Most of this class was on improving writing skills and quality, and was a class I enjoyed very much. The first focus of the class were five sentence writing fragments for increasing sentence complexity, tricks which I had used occasionally in my writing, but not often, and didn't even know they had names to be considered tricks. Altogether, the entire class material was in a very large packet of printed materials, which, due to the size of the thing, he ended up having to charge students who lost it to replace to cover the costs of the paper.
Because of my forgetting things from this packet, my prose writing skills are deteriorating, and which is why I'm not happy with the way parts of Skewed have turned out. I might still have this packet. I thought it had been thrown away long ago, much to my dismay, but if I recall correctly, somewhere within the last few months I found it while reorganizing some things. If i find it, I'll go through some of the things from it here.
Date posted: 07 June, 2007 Tags: anecdote linguistic skewed ties_to_infinity writing
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