WriterGirl Thoughts[tm]

If you're not interested in WriterGirl navel-gazing, this entry may be a disappointment. I had another Epiphany[tm] about what some of my flaws are as a writer. Oh, I'm sure I'll have plenty more. Trust me.

I can write other people's characters -- I wrote fanfic for some years as well as turning my hand to original work -- dialogue, setting, what's going on in people's heads, etc. Script format, prose, whatever. Some of the funniest fanfic I ever wrote is all [and I mean all] dialogue. I say wrote because I consider myself retired from the form, or at least semi-retired.

And I love writing that dialogue. I enjoy writing in a script format, it's fun, you can do visual things you maybe can't do elsewhere. It's a different genre. I've taken stories originally written in prose and rewritten them as scripts, and vice versa, for fun, for practice, and just because I thought it might work better that way.

Yet, when I write a completely original story, I have very little dialogue. What, I ask, is up with that?

Obviously there's a connection to my tendency to write solo-character stories, and a marked tendency to do terrible things to them emotionally [clears throat]. Now, there's nothing wrong in doing terrible things to your characters, and it may in fact be vital. I believe it was in an afterword to one of her novels where Lois McMaster Bujold remarked that she liked to come up with the worst possible thing that could happen to her character at that time, and then do it to them. I think that's a fine rule of thumb and plan on remembering it. Heh, heh, heh.

So, where did my dialogue go? I dunno. Unalakleet, perhaps? 'Cause it ain't around here.

What I do know, thinking back, is that I've always done it this way, which means it's high time to change and do something else. I'm not sure what, but I think I may have started something by returning to an out and out romance I outlined sometime a couple years ago. I'm not a big romance buyer -- it's not that I dislike people having relationships, I just have this science fiction/fantasy focus and that's where I go for reading material. But the only romance novel I remember reading several years ago I really liked, so why the hell not? Particularly if being "stuck" writing two people who are falling in love and have to, you know, talk, will get me out of this dialogueless mode and into something broader and new.